Welcome to a new season.

This season begins with the phrase behind the scenes.

When I hear that phrase, I think of certain TV shows I grew up with, like Access Hollywood

and Entertainment Tonight, which gave their viewers, including me, a child, the illusion

of an exclusive glimpse into how movies were really made and what stars and certain celebrity

filmmakers were really like.

When I was 8, 9, 10 years old and watching these shows every night, I didn't know that I

was actually being fed, for the most part, extremely packaged and highly vetted publicity

materials.

Almost without exception, anything that promises to take us behind the scenes is really showing

us another scene.

One designed to give the impression that something is being revealed, while usually the new

scene is just as contrived as the scene it's meant to deconstruct.

This may seem obvious today when most of us are pretty media savvy, but it wasn't clear

in the 80s, when the producers of a show like Entertainment Tonight could count on their

audiences being somewhat naive.

This was before the internet turned us all into detectives and scholars, and made so much

of media history available for free, at the click of a button.

Most viewers would not have spent much time thinking about the construction of behind

the scenes content.

Of course, most people didn't know that the very idea of going behind the scenes was historically

always a kind of slight of hand, and also a euphemism for illicit activity.

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