Insert Astronaut Pun Here
This is, after all, a story with many bizarre and salacious threads – most of which are clearly difficult to overlook.
But predictably, the very ingredients that made for a hot storyline have led to a backlash.
And it's happening mere days after the news first broke. CJR Daily charts some of the more memorable complaints.
The Orlando Sentinel's TV critic Hal Boedeker, located in the city where the story is local, can appreciate a headline like "Dark Side of the Loon." But he can also appreciate the fact that some people reported the story seriously and sensitively, citing CNN's Miles O'Brien and Soledad O'Brien.
He said that the media attention lavished on Nowak's story probably had the worst effect at home in Orlando. Nowak "hogged media attention that needed to be focused on last week's tornado devastation, the dead victims, the needy survivors and the government aid," he wrote in another blog post.
And it's not just TV critics who tire of the media circus – CBS's own White House correspondent Mark Knoller, who thought he was safe from news of the "astronut" on his beat, had this to say about it after a reporter raised the topic during the White House briefing: "…in the great scheme of things, it's a sad glitch in the human condition. It's an easy target for clever headlines and jokes. I'm guilty of that myself. But the magnitude of the coverage of the story seems out of proportion."