The community is the setting of the reality-based television show The Real Housewives of Orange County on Bravo.

Over the course of the last week, we've heard a lot of outraged observations by critics of "reality-based" television.

But for two months this summer, Mr. Barbee, now 30, and six other young recruits took part in an unusual training program that might be considered the corporate equivalent of reality-based television.

Popular "reality-based" television shows about emergency workers do not have unhappy endings; the victims are rescued and the rescuers never cry.

His father is an agent for N. S. Bienstock, an agency in Manhattan that specializes in broadcast news, reality-based television and talk radio.

For Mr. Halberstam, reality-based television "is just a con."

Of course, there is no reality in reality-based television.

Reality-Based Fiction But if documentary films can be confused with fictional offerings, reality-based television itself is flirting with fiction.

Is this discussion going to give us a chance to make amusing analogies to reality-based television?