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entertaining u newspaper: your weekly guide to entertainment
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By Jon Bosworth and
Cassie LaRue
EU takes great pride in providing the most comprehensive local entertainment coverage in town. We do more movie reviews, more in-depth interviews with local and traveling musicians, and the most television writing than any other weekly paper. The one gap in our elaborate coverage is the reality programming that is harbored on small cable networks. Now that the big networks have finally gotten off of the reality TV horse and moved on to strange game shows, basic cable owns reality television.
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If “reality bites,” than reality TV eats it whole. There is everything from the Celebreality programs on VH1, which includes the always hysterical Flavor of Love and This Surreal Life, to the home and fashion makeover shows on TLC, to the real-life crime drama of Court TV and A&E. There is no end to the voyeurism we are capable of. Ever since The Osbournes found such success on MTV, every quasi-celebrity hopes to extend their careers through the magic of a camera crew in-house.
Even fictional television has grabbed onto the phenomenon of reality. The Office presents its sitcom under the auspices of being a reality television program about life in the average cubicle environment. Curb Your Enthusiasm, in the vein of Larry David’s last faux-reality show, Seinfeld, maintains the concept of being about Larry David’s real life in Hollywood, but most of the characters are just actors, or actors “playing themselves” like Ted Danson and Richard Lewis.
This show is about midgets…Wait, midgets isn’t the right word. The Daddy midget on the show calls the disorder dwarfism, but the proper nomenclature is “little people,” which I find to be a little more demeaning than “midget,” but then again, I’m not nearly as little. This family of six owns a farm in Portland that wasn’t exactly successful until this show started to air. Of the four children, only one is a “little person,” although both of the parents are little people.
There is certainly an educational element to this show, because I don’t really know anything about midgets…little people. You see little people is a misnomer for me, because it could mean anything from elves to children, but when I say midgets, you know exactly what I’m saying. So political correctness be damned, I’m calling them midgets. They aren’t bad, although they are sometimes scary in Fellini or Gilliam films, this family of midgets is hard-working, understanding, and loaded with drama. From mystery illnesses that root in their dwarfism to the son that accidentally injured himself with their pumpkin catapult, there is always some sort of educational, compelling, and cathartic drama to pass your evening on the couch.
No one really thought they cared about Hollywood Hulk Hogan until he had his own show. Although we love watching people we don’t really care about deal with predicaments that aren’t at all real to us, The Hogans is taking it a step too far. Much like the show about Kiss’ Gene Simmons, this show is a sick tromp through a decadent American life that makes terrorists far away hate us. The only drama in this show revolves around the daughter throwing a party or wrecking her new sports car. It is even more drab than The Osbournes, because at least that show allowed us the humorous relief of a totally disoriented Ozzy mumbling curse words and popping pills. The Hogans is dyed blonde and a total waste of time.
This show isn’t on the air right now, but I am waiting with baited breath to see this spoiled-rotten and amoral family bring me back into their no-longer-the-gangsters-we-used-to-be mentality. It appears, throughout the drama of the show, that they think of themselves as the real-life Sopranos. If that is the case, I hope a new season will play back-to-back with A&E’s syndicated showings of the original HBO series the Sopranos so that we can laugh at those squirrelly brats when we realize just how NOT gangster they are.
TLC has a number of shows that spotlight catty gay men berating average Americans about their fashion choices. From What Not to Wear to Ten Years Younger, the benefactors of these programs are usually less than excited and caught totally unawares. When the hosts first speak to the “victim” and then throughout the duration of the show, nothing is encouraging or hopeful. Even when they are sent to New York with $5,000 to spend on any clothes they want, they are haunted by the jibes that echo in their head about the rules of fashion that they were inundated with before leaving. Similarly, in Ten Years Younger, they are forced to stand in a soundproof, transparent cube as passerbys in a haughty Los Angeles shopping district are called on to judge their appearance both before and after their makeover.
For showtimes of any of these shows, just Google the show’s name and the network will provide you with the various times the show is scheduled to air. This topic is so full of fodder all over the television that you can count on this column appearing once a month for the rest of the year. There is no end to reality, and no end to bad television on basic cable, so when the two are mixed, they create an oddly entertaining combo: this column.
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