New Realities

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Two of my favorite reality shows have had their debuts this week. The first one is MTVs 'The Real World'. I believe this one qualifies as the very first American reality show ... and it's showing its age. By now the premise is pretty tired, but I still like it enough to take a look.

It all depends on who they put in that house together, but the problem is that any person they choose is already so narcissistic that they think their life should be filmed 24 hours a day. You pretty much always get the seven most self-indulgent twenty-somethings available. But they're all good looking, or mostly good looking. And if there are one or two hot chicks, that's usuallly enough for me.

This time around the men are all meat-heads and the women are all self-centered (but beautiful) dimbulbs, with the exception of a blonde anorexic girl who has clear emotional issues, which is not at all fun to watch.

I'll most likely still half watch most of the episodes just to see if anything interesting happens.

The second of my reality shows is The Surreal Life. The surreal life is when B-list celebrities are put in a house together and they interact. The celebs are also made to do various activities to earn their keep, like performing skits, or as a band, or filming stuff or this or that ... just silly stuff. The Surreal life - to me - always has an undertone of tragedy to it, because the celebs are people whose names were once well known, but now these poor people have to do this, for the money.

The celebrities this time around are Florence Henderson, Sherman Helmsly, some blonde named Amanda who I guess did some nude modeling, Tawny Kitaen, CeCe DeVille, The guy from Smash Mouth, some steroid pumped former wrestler, and transgender famous Arquette sibling Alexis Arquette who somewhat pulls off sort of looking like a woman but just not quite. It's kind of disturbing as I find myself kind of attracted to Alexis, but then getting creeped out by the dudeness. Oh my God, I might be sort of kind of Gay! in a way.

So far Florence is kind of coming out looking like a bit of a prude. Hey, I thought she was a cool old broad. what's up with this? The nude model Amanda seems to feel criticized by Florence for selling herself out and not developing her talent. Or something like that. Tawny Kitaen (still looking pretty good in my book) is very much the damaged ex-beauty queen. She made some comment about how she couldn't do dishes because it reminds her of her poor upbringing. Puh-leeze. If everybody else in that house can do the dishes, she sure can, too.

So, that was the first episode. The previews of upcoming episodes promised a number of significant freak-outs by cast members. Alexis Arquette was shown in about three or four of these. Tawny Kitaen also had a freak-out if I recall correctly. And the nude model had several weepy feeling sorry for herself scenes.

Stay tuned. I'll keep you posted.