What can be more real than daytime talk shows that discuss such relevant topics such as “My Dad Won’t Stop Hitting on My Dates,” “Makeovers for Former Convicts,” or “My Girlfriend is a Crack Hoe and So is Her Mother!”
Ricky Lake had a host of couples with commitment problems (it should be noted that it was always the males that were slow to propose).
My personal favorite couple was Shamieka and Conquest (don’t you just love imagining the wedding invitations). Conquest cited attitude conflicts as the reason they’d been living together for 7 years without a wedding.
My personal favorite excuse was along the lines of “Honey, I love you, but I can’t marry you until I divorce my current wife.”
Of course, thanks to the camera-filled world of reality television, we are then treated to the pleasure of having the current wife make a surprise appearance waving some papers calling, “I have some divorce papers I want you to sign”
And the crowd goes wild!
Follow this with a notary public to officialize the divorce and top it off with a marriage proposal and you have some quality entertainment!
Cameras in the courtroom also make for entertaining reality television (you may notice my standards of “entertainment” have lowered in this rant, but bear with me a bit farther).
I love the Judge Judy court cases that last 2 minutes or less. This are the disputes where the solution to the situation is totally clear cut to everyone in the courtroom but the idiot (or idiots) that often cling to a ridiculous excuse.
The shortest case I recall lasted about 30 seconds and ended when the defendant refused to remove his hat while in the courtroom. After being asked repeatedly to take off his hat, he said, “Let me explain why I’m not taking of my hat…”
This was promptly followed by Judge Judy’s dismissive “Goodbye!”
It’s priceless TV moments like this why Judge Judy’s contract was renewed for another 5 years to a tune of over $20 million.
In an environment cluttered with shows like The Amazing Race, Frontier House, and the like, it’s easy to miss of the longest airing reality shows ever: the nightly news.
I’ve found that these are the shows that present the hardest-to-believe realities.
Tonight, there was a person that was charged with impersonating a funeral home director for reasons currently unknown. The same man has already been convicted for impersonating an EMT, Police Officer, and a Fire Fighter.
Leonardo DiCaprio would be proud.
It was further reported that he’d committed this fraud while still on parole for the Police Officer impersonation.
What a constructive use of his time.
All this is on the same night that COPS is airing the “Top 15 Moments of all time” culled from the past 450 episodes. Also tonight it the premiere of “The Surreal Life,” a thinly veiled copy of MTV’s Real World life-in-front-of-the-video-camera format being reproduced with 7 B- (or more accurately C-) list “stars” (don’t blame me for the set of quotation marks. Even TV printed “starts” that way when describing the series). No offense meant to this classy show, but I only recognized 4 out of the 7 names (MC Hammer, known from “Can’t Touch This” fame; Emanuel Lewis, Webster; Corey Feldman, The Goonies, The Burbs, various drug charges; and Jerri, a one-time Survivor-survivor).
When these are the headliners, you feel sorry for poor fools with second billing (and don’t get me started about the “celebrities” of Celebrity Mole: Hawaii).
If you would have told me of the unholy terror that the original reality show like “Survivor” or “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” would eventually spawn, I wouldn’t have believed it.
Now that I’ve seen it, in this age of Joe Millionaires, Bachelorettes, Star Searches, and other contrived American Idols, I realize not having much time to watch TV in college isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
