Television: Inventing Stardom

A trio of musical reality series aims to turn the entertainment business into entertainment

Ask Jacob Underwood of the boy band O-Town what has surprised him most about the music business, and he sighs, "How much of it is business and not music." It's an age-old artist's plaint, but you may wonder how much of a surprise it could have been, given how he came to be here: doing a sound check for a Manhattan party for teen magazine YM. Underwood and his crew found fame through ABC's reality series Making the Band, which showed boy-band architect Lou Pearlman holding auditions and casting O-Town from scratch. The team behind MTV's The Real World captured the...

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