Will the sad, sordid story of Ryan Jenkins and Jasmine Fiore force a change in the type of programming that foisted him on the public in the first place? "I think it'll definitely impact the genre," says Cornwell. "Everybody who works for the network is gonna hear, 'Make sure they're 150 percent clean.'"

"I think that the vetting process will tighten up," says Josh Gamson, a professor at University of San Francisco and the author of Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America and Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity. "Producers probably don't want this to happen."

"It's not surprising in an industry that's more or less unregulated," Gamson adds. "They want people who don't just want to be on TV but who make good TV. People whose records are clean or are stable don't make good TV."

Much of the VH1's reality programming seems taken up with just such unstable people—be they the contestant on Flavor of Love 2 who relieved herself on the floor in 2006 (search for it if you must) or the thugs of Tool Academy beating their waxed chests at one another in the new season of the show that started Sunday night. Acknowledging just how much the network's slate centers around these shocking, sleazy moments, VH1 has aggregated these scenes into a show bluntly titled 20 Greatest Reality TV Fights.

Cornwell says he sometimes employs doctors or psychologists to help vet contestants and make sure they're not too antisocial or dangerous. "It helps us piece together the parts of multiperson cast. They'll also tell you if the person can't handle the pressure of being on a reality show."

But who, ultimately, will take responsibility for elevating Jenkins from a troubled man who hurt a female companion—and may have killed another one—to the level of reality-TV star?

"Everyone's passing the buck," says Gamson. "No one wants to be responsible."

Just last week, Jenkins' father, Calgary architect Dan Jenkins, suggested to the Los Angeles Times that his son ("a wonderful young man, a thoughtful man") had been corrupted by the Hollywood lifestyle. In a statement, the senior Jenkins insisted on his son's innocence: "I totally believe that my son was innocent of this crime and believe that the last three days of his life were spent alone in a hotel room watching the media report that he was the brutal killer of his own wife. On television it was as if he had been tried and convicted. I think in his loneliness and despair he simply gave up."

Maybe so. Investigators continue to look into the case—and TMZ.com continues to track it with ticktock precision—but by the late Jenkins' eagerness to appear on Megan Wants a Millionaire and I Love Money and participate in the outlandish and humiliating stunts producers dreamed up, he (with the help of VH1) made himself a star, albeit a very minor one. It suits VH1 and 51 Minds to portray Jenkins as one very bad apple, but can it be that his truly horrific (and brief) postproduction life frames him as less an anomaly than an apotheosis of a television genre so degraded even its fans must admit it's now a parody—if not an outright tragedy?

"It reveals the routines of the genre," Gamson says of Jenkins' move from D-list celebrity to A1 murder suspect and suicide. "To have a person who is messy or messed up be a cast member is not the far end: It's the center. It's the way the process works, what makes entertaining reality TV.

"People don't want to say that," he insists. "They want to say it's a mistake."