Sunday, October 28, 2007

I'm finally sick of reality TV

Ah, reality television. You've taken so many relatively ordinary people, thrown them into ridiculous situations, and used editing tricks to turn them into heroes and villains for my amusement. But I come here not to praise reality TV, but to bury it.

Take, for instance, The Pick-Up Artist. Men who have a general strategy for getting women to sleep with them make me uneasy. When that strategy involves subtly tearing down womens' self-esteem and simultaneously self-aggrandizing, I get sick to my stomach. This is a sleazy show for sleazy people and I don't know how you can watch it without needing a shower afterwards.

And then there's Phenomenon. Is this supposed to be a talent show for magicians, or a search for people with supernatural powers? If the latter, what is magician Criss Angel doing here? And if the former, what is Uri Gellar doing here? In fact, what the hell is Uri Gellar doing on television in the first place? It's been over thirty years since James Randi and Johnny Carson proved he was a fraud with one lousy illusion. If you think that Gellar, or anyone else for that matter, has magical abilities far beyond those of ordinary men, you deserve to be punched in the face.

Can it get worse? Yes, yes it can. Rumor has it that we may be subjected to a "Baby Mind Reader." Not a baby who reads minds, mind you, but a Scottish bastard who suckers the gullible into believing he can use telepathy to contact infants. If you need further evidence that this is a bad idea, why not watch him ever-so-sensitively discuss the topic of domestic violence?

With the prospect of a writers' strike looming on the horizon, we may see even more hideous reality television coming our way. Brace yourselves.

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