What if we frame television's influence within the economy of attention (Society of spectacle? Anyone with input here, on Debord?), which necessarily implies a societal richness: we have enough leisure time for attention to become a kind of currency.
If we then frame celebrity as spectacle-incarnate, all of a suddenly the arena of celebrity/fame/status becomes capitalistic - but not in terms of money, seeing as the currency in this arena is attention. The kind of growth that this capitalism orients around is not profit, but trend. Where profit is an increase in monetary/pecuniary revenue, trend is an increase in attention-revenue. Where monetary wealth and celebrity status are static, profit and trend are dynamic. Moving targets.
The more sensational you become, the higher potential you have in the attention market. Attention quantified in likes, other such things.
In this framework, television (in a... classical (?) sense, as in a list of channels vying for your attention) is a marketplace, and arguably a socialist one (a provocative proposition - I would love to hear thoughts on this), seeing as one person's attention is generally worth as much as the next.
Although perhaps not. Perhaps there is a difference among the values of attentions. Maybe this is how the attention market interpenetrates/interdigitates with the monetary market: maybe the more money/influence you have, the more your attention is worth.
Or perhaps the more attention you have, as a measure of status/celebrity, the more your attention is worth. Or perhaps, the more you are trending (the the higher the rate of the increase of your status) the more your attention is worth.