I didn't know who she was, nor even of her existence and wish that she had stayed unknown.
Several hundred years ago, people in England used to visit Bedlam ( a "hospital" for the insane ), as people used to visit zoos...but worse. Now they stay home and watch these crazies on T.V. "reality shows".
I have been telling Mrs. C for quite some time that the purpose of most of these types of shows is twofold, to titillate the sense of enjoying someone else's scandal, and to make oneself feel normal by comparison.
Your analogy is interesting, and I would take it a step further. More "dramatic" oriented reality shows, mostly having to deal with LEOs (The First 48, Live PD, and the Pac-Man era example, COPS), are the contemporary equivalent of Londoners in the 1700s going to the gallows with their picnic lunches on a Sunday afternoon to see the hangings or pickpocketers, all the while having not-yet-hung pickpocketers "working" the crowd. And the reason for the crime was the same, in terms of the era's technology: in the 1700s it was gin, while today it's meth, crack, and horse.