New year, same old crap on tv…

But really, what else are we going to watch?! If anything, reality TV has been the most successful ongoing experiment to test just how desperate we, the people, are for televised entertainment. Sure, we’ve also had Jerry “You Ain’t My Baby Daddy” Springer and Ron “Why use just an ordinary fork when you can use the Amazing Fork-o-Matic 5000?!” Popeil and even Monday Night “I’m not athletic enough to do it myself, but I can still drink beer and idolize other guys doing it on TV in a totally heterosexual manner…” Football, but in the end, nothing has pushed the boundaries of desperate viewers near and far quite like reality television…

Of course, I bring this up, not because I’ve already failed on too many of my New Years resolutions to mention, but more so because this week one of the first reality TV shows that I ever watched, The Real World, celebrated the premiere of its 21st season. You know the one – where seven strangers are picked to live in a house to find out just how zany people get when they’re surrounded by hot members of the opposite sex who have nothing but free time because they don’t actually have to work and pay rent on said ridiculously lavish house that they’d otherwise never be invited into for the purposes of fixing the cable, much less spending the next six months of their lives? Good times.

Actually, I’m not sure if I should admit this, but growing up I honestly really enjoyed The Real World, as much as a prepubescent young boy can enjoy watching sexy twenty-somethings lounge around doing cool stuff like playing pool and hanging out in the Jacuzzi and gettin’ crazy just off camera, but close enough that we could guess what was going on. It was a show that had everything that I was looking for – hot, feisty chicks, buckets of controversy, and a timeslot right after Saved by the Bell – what more could a kid without a social life want?!

And sadly, as I eventually transcended into adulthood, things didn’t get much, at least with regards to my social life, and thus Survivor came onto the horizon, where we replaced the house with an island, the trendy clothes with bikinis and skirts made out of palm fronds, and even added the little bonus of a million bucks prize money to spice things up a bit and ensure that everyone would stay at each others’ throats over the next 39 days. I lost a good portion of my mid-twenties to Survivor, eventually jumping ship around season 187 (editor’s note: actually 10) when unbelievably, I found myself finally bored of watching women who haven’t showered in three weeks duke it out in their bikinis…

Of course, the whole eating rats thing didn’t help, either.

I think even those among us who find themselves even more engrossed in reality TV than me (i.e. you’ve never seen sunlight in the last 15 years) will sheepishly admit that our beloved reality television is definitely one of the guiltiest of pleasures of our time. Case in point – the one I’m watching right now takes a mansion full of women who’ve posed in Playboy (or at least will after their appearance on the show) and coerced them into all swooning over three eligible bachelors, all of whom would be more than happy to date a woman who’s showed her ha-has in Playboy, except for that one teensy, little detail that their Mom’s are also living in the house and are all too eager to share their opinions about who’s too hussy or fussy for their favorite sons. Hell hath no fury like a Mom who doesn’t want her son dating a porn slut…

What’s that, you’ve been watching Mama’s Boy (on NBC), too?!

Can you believe what happened the other week with Megan’s breakdown?! I know!!!

But the funny thing is that even though each of us no doubt have our own guilty pleasure reality favorites, we also are quite clear to maintain a list of other shows that we wouldn’t be caught dead watching, too. So whereas I used to enjoy me some Survivor and I’ll still watch The Apprentice, I couldn’t care less about Big Brother and will readily admit that The Amazing Race is simply way to amazingly boring for me. I’m sure you’re the same way, dreaming at night about being the next big contestant on American Idol or Dancing with Screech from Saved by the Bell: The College Years, but turn on a rerun of Fear Factor where they’re eating baby alligator eggs and then swimming with the mothers and the line is firmly drawn! And yet that’s the beauty of reality TV shows, in that they’re so cheap to put on the air, you can crank out eight or nine different hits about fire breathers and midgets and fire breathing midgets, and people who want to date fire breathing midgets, and if by some odd twist of fate nobody ends up watching it, you can still just keep on trucking next season with your groundbreaking new series about nine hermaphroditic sheep herders picked to live on a mountain to find out what happens when people stop being polite and the sheep start biting back.

Now that I’ve given the folks at FOX another three seasons worth of material, it’s time for me to bid you ado so that I can grab some popcorn before The Littlest Ninja comes on. You know the one, where they pick 127 highly-skilled ninjas and place them in a cafeteria filled with traffic cops and silly putty, then … well, I don’t want to spoil it for you, but let me just tell you, when those ninjas get mad – wow! Parking tickets and silly putty everywhere! I’ll bet you that was a game of Twister that those traffic cops won’t soon forget…

With reality like this, who needs the real thing?!