Because with a stooge, where is the limit?
So it's a slippery slope then? Usually the thing that makes the slippery slope fallacious is that there is no comparative data to show that the dire predictions will come to pass, or if the precedent is already set then the predictions have failed to come to pass despite a great amount of time and opportunity for it to happen. It's not that these conceptions are impossible, just improbable enough to be a Douglas Adams joke.
Furthermore, the slippery slope in this case breaks down because such a prolific career of stoogery (if that wasn't a word, it is now for the sake of the discussion) invokes an old truism: Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. This is also the fundamental flaw in most conspiracy theories. Take the moon landing for example. Think of how big an undertaking the Apollo Project was. You had not only Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Alan Shepard to keep quiet, but also the thousands of scientists and engineers at NASA who were credited in the project. And assuming it was filmed in a sound stage, you had the director, cinematographer, carpenters, set designers, prop designers, lighting techs and a host of other individuals who would need to be kept quiet. Our modern politicians can't even keep their mistresses a secret. The possibility that in the 1960's the government would be able to orchestrate a conspiracy so massive in scope and under such intense public scrutiny and keep everyone involved quiet long enough for every single one of them to die is laughably infinitesimal.
So if we had a magician who built his entire career on stooging, he would have to have
the most kickass NDAs in the history of law. Think of the sheer number of people who would need to be kept quiet for decades on end. And mind you, this is also in the era of social media where Michael Phelps got sold out by a buddy who snapped a picture of him hitting a bong at a party and Gawker was willing to
****ing pay crack dealers for a video of a Toronto mayor smoking crack just so they could say they broke the story first.
I will concede however that part of your prediction has already come to pass, the idea of the guy who's low on sleight of hand but high on acting. We call it Uri Geller. What do you think most psychics are? They're magicians who never break character and only do one or two things. They have a couple of different methods for it, but fundamentally it's still the same stuff.
But what you describe, NSA-style clairvoyance and vehicular pyrotechnics, wouldn't make for a tenable career anyway due to the fact that this is what we refer to as spectacle creep. The bigger the explosion the first time, the bigger the next one has to be. This is what sinks many movie and game franchises and is also one of the problems afflicting the sci-fi/fantasy genre. There's a rant for another time in there, but I'm going to try and stay on point. Where I'm going with this is that such a magician would last a couple of years at best before completely burning out.
This is why Copperfield had to space out his truly massive illusions like vanishing the Statue of Liberty or walking through the Great Wall of China. If he did them in too quick a succession after one another, he would have to keep topping them year after year until finally he just plain ran out. By spacing them out, he was able to avoid that sense of spectacle creep, that desire to be bigger, faster, more visceral in order to retain people's attention. David Blaine does the same thing.
On the opposite side of the coin, Criss Angel in having his own episodic series inflicted the spectacle creep problem on himself while simultaneously burning out his best material in the first couple of seasons. He ended up becoming a parody of himself because he didn't pause long enough to let the excitement die down enough that he could keep the spectacle on an even keel.
All of these problems compound one another to a point where only the most foolhardy narcissists would ever attempt anything like this, and indeed they do. But they come and go so quickly most of us never notice that they were even there in the first place.
Now in regards to executive interference, I believe Brian has already touched on most of the relevant points. TV is a notoriously conservative medium, especially now that it's hegemony is being challenged by streaming video and DVR. Large networks are so monolithic and unwieldy that the decisions that come down from the top are pretty far divorced from the attitudes among the general viewing public.
For a quick history lesson, the first reality show as we think of them today was COPS. This was created by hte same producer who gave David Blaine the greenlight. He moonlighted as a manager at a McDonald's to get a feel for what the street-level sentiments were about TV shows at that time. When the writers' strike hit, he came up with the idea of COPS as a way to get some cheap, emergency programming on the air until the strike was settled. It could be shot, chopped, scored and aired in comparatively little time, all the drama was built right in, and it was a novelty that hooked people because these cops weren't idealized sleeping giants like John McLane. They were ordinary working schlubs just trying to keep the peace among the kind of lowlifes that we've all had as neighbors at some point. For the time, it was pretty groundbreaking. It was a documentary-style TV show unlike anything else.
What happened next is a bit debatable, and I can't weigh in for certain as there are gaps in my knowledge base on this one, but my hypothesis is that MTV saw the success of COPS and decided they wanted a slice of that pie. In creating The Real World, they arguably codified many of the conventions and practices of modern reality TV. Think about it for a second. No one on The Real World could be described even charitably as a stable, functioning human being. They picked the people they believed would be the most likely to incite drama amongst themselves. It was televised schadenfreude. It made the show a hit, and it was also dirt cheap to produce. That's how reality TV still persists. Ratings are still down because of streaming and torrents, but it's so cheap to produce that it can be counted on to reliably turn in a profit.
And here's where it comes back to executive meddling. Thanks to shows like The Real World, reality TV is anything but. The level of executive interference in these shows is downright Satanic. They lie to the cast in order to stage "comical" "misunderstandings," they deliberately orchestrate bizarre happenstances, edit the crap out of the sequence of events to manufacture drama where none exists, and perhaps most frightening of all will
psychologically abuse cast members in order to engineer emotional meltdowns while the camera is rolling. There's obviously more lying and obfuscation, but those are some of the big points.
Dan White's a nice guy and everything, but he hasn't directly made any network executives enough money to buy their own spaceship powered by cocaine and prostitutes like David Blaine has. David, as Malcolm Gladwell would explain, was an outlier who happened on the right idea in the right place at the right time. He got in before the crap I just described became par for the course in the glut of reality TV and since he has made so many people so much money, he has now become a linchpin. They will let David do what he wants, though they will try to sneak some shady bull**** past him whenever possible, because they know he can be counted on to make them money. Dan does not come with that guarantee.
Will Draven posted a thread a couple weeks back about awful cliches he's had to deal with from clients up to and including having them suggest last-minute changes to the act under the delusion that they know better than you how to script, block, rehearse and perform a show. I can vouch that this goes all the way down to the bottom tiers where you're lucky to get $100 for a full performance. When you've got 7 or 8 figures of investment on the line, you better believe that they are going to **** with you believing they know better than you how to get a return on investment and what their audiences want.