If reality TV is a poor man’s scripted television, then game shows are a poor man’s reality TV. And with no writers to speak of, NBC is going to put out some poor television.
This January, NBC will add three more hours of reality TV to its lineup. The network will shelve Chuck and replace it with American Gladiators. (Full disclosure: One half of the Jossip team thinks American Gladiators is the greatest testament to physical prowess of American athletes since the 1984 Olympics. The other half thinks American Gladiators is greatest testament to American stupidity since "duck and cover.")
Quiz show 1 vs. 100, The Biggest Loser, Couples Edition, and Celebrity Apprentice will all start in January. NBC's reality chief Craig Plestis claims, "We're kicking off the New Year with a bang.”
Well, if he didn’t believe that, who would?
God, MTV.
First we hear that The Hills is fake, and now Tila Tequila is straight. What’s next, the Real World isn’t real?
A source close to the Shot At Love production claims Tila is not bi-sexual at all. In fact, she’s got a BF, and is just using her sexuality to springboard her career [Ed: since when is looking slutty on a social networking site a career?]. Get out!
Reports Page Six:
Tila has and has had a boyfriend for over a year, and she's not really bi. She's made out with some girls in her past, as all girls have, but she is not bi at all … This is a massive scam . . . That's why they are not continuing with the show [for a second season], because she won't dump him.
We know, we know. This looks bad. But if the source at Page Six thinks all girls have made out with other girls, Tila Tequila might still be a bit bi-curious.
From Queerty: "MTV-owned Logo announced they’ll air a series called Transamerican Love Story, which stars trans actress, Calpernia Addams."
With luck, this will go far more smoothly than the similarly premised Britain show, There’s Something About Miriam, where producers neglected to, as our gay younger brother put it, "tell contestants of Miriam’s 'something.'"
So it’s the eleventh day of the strike. After reporting on the new reality TV programming and predicting the rest of the seasons of the shows affected by the strike, we’re all out of angles. So Conan’s in reruns, blah blah blah.
Fortunately, the good people at Pepperdine University conducted a survey about the strike. Thanks for making the story fresh again! CONTINUED »
Have you heard? South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have exec-produced a new series for Comedy Central called Kenny vs. Spencer. The result, as far as we can tell, is a comedy-slash-reality show dedicated to fostering unnecessary competition between friends as part of an effort to score cheap laughs/ratings. (Just like they do on The Hills!)
No more votes, no more deadlines, no more contracts, no more writers.
The Writers Guild of America is set to strike, maybe as early as Monday. The WGA negotiation board made a unanimous recommendation to stop writing in response to failed contract negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
The fight was over residuals on DVD residuals; currently writers receive less than a nickel for each disc sold, and want to double that rate for any DVD with more than $1 million in wholesale revenue. CONTINUED »
• Turns out Cindy Adams was having another one of her senior moments. That whole thing about Nicole Richie chain-smoking wildly despite toting around a giant, protruding unborn baby? Never happened.
• The Arcade Fire to Sasha Frere-Jones: We steal shit from black people all the time!
• Check out the 20 most frightfully anti-gay Halloween costumes. Then imagine a calm, peaceful existence where rampant homophobia only exists but once a year.
• Coolio gets turned down by MTV; inks deal for upcoming reality show with Oxygen network instead.
• As it turns out, there are times when a Sam Adams isn't always a good decision.
• When your daughter is Kim Kardashian and your son is Brody Jenner, it's kinda hard to pick just one "black sheep" of the family.
• In honor of Dumbledore's coming out (or, more likely, just because) someone with even more free time than us has compiled a highlight reel of Jon Stewart's best same-sex shoutouts.
• Our little sister Stereohyped likes Pina Coladas and getting caught in the rain. Especially while waiting to interview Ciara on the red carpet of her fifth (yep, fifth) "official" birthday soirée.
• Bambi places in the top 25 horror films since, as it turns out, the only thing worse than a cannibalistic Hannibal Lector and a chainsaw rearing Mike Meyers or a psychotic clown is the shooting of a cartoon doe.
When it's unexpected chilly outside and we're feeling frigid and unmotivated, there's nothing that gets us pumped up in the morning quite like reading a crotchety lament on the pitfalls of celebrity culture sponsored by the always-curmudgeonly New York Times. Like this one, from the Sunday paper.
How can Tila Tequila have become enormously famous having done little of note beyond appearing as Playboy’s Cyber Girl of the Week? When exactly in the Warholian arc of fame did we arrive at a point where we create celebrities of people so little accomplished that they make Paris Hilton look like Marie Curie?
And while we're guessing the aforementioned questions are rhetorical ones, we're just glad to see Gray Lady turn her venerable powers of authority, influence and unparalleled senior angst to yet another worthy cause: Hurting Tila Tequila's feelings.
The guy who LC dated on this week's episode of The Hills (in a transparent attempt to make Brody jealous!) speaks up and continues to throw our world in disarray by shattering what little conviction remained that the crappy—but inexplicably addictive—MTV melodrama is totally real and not even a little bit scripted.
• Ryan Seacrest will produce Tales From the Hoff, a new E! scripted sitcom featuring David Hasselhoff that we'll all be sure to miss.
• NBC plans to launch a game show called "My Dad is Better Than Your Dad," pitting fathers and children against other families in the spirit of friendly competition. Because there's nothing healthier than telling a small child, "Your dad kinda sucks."
• Three men are charged in connection with the Jan. 9 murder of PC World editor Rex Farrance. Nope, nothing funny about that.
• Apparently we're not the only ones who think MSNBC producer Dan Abrams is too pretty to stay off-camera.
• If you think Bill O'Reilly's comment about the difference between black restaurants and white restaurants was stupid, wait until you hear Sherri Shepherd's reaction.
• Breaking: Reality television inspires romance that doesn't last.
If it seems as though practically everyone has their own reality show these days, it's probably because they do. Nowadays, reality show contestants are from all walks of life, from the snotty over-privileged walking rhinoplasties on The Hills, to the bisexual MySpace phenomenon Tila Tequila to the morbidly obese Queen of Mean (and Whiz Of Microsoft Paint!) Perez Hilton, seemingly interconnected only by means of their below-average intelligence quotient and above-average interest in becoming reality trainwrecks.
Which is why we're annoyed, but not exactly surprised, to hear that Chris Crocker (a.k.a. the screaming, crying, guyliner-wearing, self-appointed defender of Britney) has already inked a development deal with 44 Blue Prods.
"Chris first got on our radar a year ago," said 44 Blue prexy/co-founder Rasha Drachkovitch, who said he wants to develop a show that plays to Crocker's strengths.
And by "strengths" Drachkovitch presumably means "spontaneously weeping, stunted emotional development and overabundance of mascara."
Have you heard about the concept for MTV's latest reality show? It's an 8-episode look at what goes on behind the scenes of something interesting a high school newspaper!*
"Paper," set at Cypress Bay High School in Weston, Fla., will go behind the scenes at the highly regarded Circuit, spotlighting students early in their journalism careers," chirps the Hollywood Reporter.
Which means it will be amazing in a voyeuristic "see nerdy overachiever types placed in predictable high-stress situations" sort of way!
Fox pulls the plug on Anchorwoman after just one episode, citing disastrous ratings and what appears to be preemptive backlash. An angry network spokesperson struggling to make sense of it all screamed, "I just don't get it! We took an incredibly offensive concept, turned it into an unabashedly sexist reality show based around a former bikini model, marketed the hell out of it then totally exploited her on national tv. Jeez, what more do you people want?!"
[B&C]
Surprisingly, it appears that a couple of real life anchorwomen have some prudish objection to Fox's misogynistic reality trainwreck, Anchorwoman.
(And here, we thought legitimate female journalists would be all over the idea of a busty bikini model anchoring an actual news broadcast, despite having zero qualifications or experience!)
On the plus side, at least they bothered to watch.
The producers of CBS' upcoming reality trainwreck Kid Nation (which features "40 children living on their own in the New Mexico desert") were reportedly "warned by the state attorney general's office while the show was being taped last spring that they might be violating the state's child-labor laws."
Not surprisingly, it appears that CBS ignored both the repeated warnings of state officials and the standards of good taste by continuing to exploit film their semi-willing participants and document their ongoing struggle with premature independence, incompetent absentee parents and, of course, intense sweatshop labor.
[NYT]
Sometimes, you sit around and wonder how in the hell MTV's The Real World still exists. Could it be, we wondered, that everyone we know is secretly watching it but is just too ashamed to admit it? Perhaps!
So we decided to give it one more shot and checked out the season-opener and discovered (a) everyone on the show is clearly an Abercrombie & Fitch model, and (b) it's inadvertently hilarious.
Take, for instance this astute observation by Whatshisface (the good looking preppy from Mississippi).
"Cohutta, Isaac and me knew from day one that all the drama in this house was going to be centered around vaginal insecurity."
Um, that's, like, the best line to come out of The Real World since Fake-Boobies Tanya said, "Call me a whore, call me slut, just don't call me a liar."
And they said this show was no longer socially relevant.
Last week, we watched, transfixed, as Paula Abdul burst into tears after getting fired from a D-list movie production,* (presumably, for being a mentally unstable has-been) and then screamed "You guys, please! I'm trying to tell a GODDAMNED STORY!" during an otherwise boring episode of her reality television show, Hey Paula. At the time, a misty-eyed Paula wanted to know if God was even listening—you know, cause everything in her life was kind of going down the crapper?
Anyways, just when you thought Paula had hit rock bottom (seriously, with this one, how do you really know for sure?) comes a crazy full-frontal haiku assault instigated by none other than Rosie O'Donnell—the ex-View co-host and professional celebrity feuder—who attacks Paula the only way she knows how: through pseudo-intellectual free verse.
And now it's time for…Paula Abdul sobbing uncontrollably for no particular reason. Okay, fine, there's ostensibly a reason (something about getting fired or demoted or something?) but we don't really get it because Paula's about as coherent here as she is after three of those trademark "painkiller martinis."
Either way, it hardly matters. One hardly needs context to appreciate this moving footage of a tear-stricken Paula throwing a temper tantrum, and angrily questioning her belief in God.
Crazy? Yes. Repetitive? Yes. But it's worth sticking through until the bitter end, when Paula's obligatory annoying friends try to console her, only to be interrupted by a hysterical Paula, who yells, "You guys, please! I'm trying to tell a GODDAMN STORY!"
[via INO]
* Although maybe we should start!
If you're anything like us, you spent yesterday evening enjoying the semi-tolerable weather, meeting a friend for a much-needed after work drink, and spending the bulk of your rent money on overpriced yoga pants because your friends swore up and down that they make your ass look skinny. [Spoiler: They lied.]
Also, assuming you're anything like us, you arrived back home at around 9:30 or so, too exhausted to put your ridiculously expensive, but (allegedly!) ass-slimming yoga pants to any practical use, and too late to catch the televised trainwreck otherwise known as the Victoria Beckham reality special.
Fortunately, however, it looks as though we didn't miss very much.
