Enjoy this sneak peek at the upcoming reality trash of the summer: the show chronicling the maternal crusades of Lindsay Lohan's bleached, tanned mother.

A clip reel from the current debut season of MTV's "The Paper."

Docu-reality series are everywhere these days, but good ones — not just fun to gawk at, but dramatic on their own — are depressingly hard to come by. Most often, the characters are either unreal from the start, or far too real. They mug for the camera like so many ‘‘real housewives.’’ They angle to make the most of mild celebrity, like those too-many Kardashians. Or they’re so dull as to be hardly worth the screen time: Even ‘‘Jon & Kate Plus 8,’’ the should-be-fascinating Discovery Health/TLC series about a family with twins and sextuplets, gets bogged down in the details of shelf-hanging and carpet replacement.

Capturing life in high school, you’d think, would be the hardest task of all: How can reality in the homogenized suburbs live up to the angst and pathos of snarky screenplays or overwrought teen TV dramas? Perhaps by happy accident, MTV has figured it out.

A sneak peek at tonight's return of Britney Spears to the sitcom "How I Met Your Mother," from CBS.

Three times might be the charm for Britney Spears and ‘‘How I Met Your Mother.’’

With Spears making her second guest appearance on the popular CBS comedy, the show’s co-creator Craig Thomas says tonight's episode was written to leave the door open for the pop singer to make a return appearance next season.