Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [58]
I knew I was in big trouble. I needed to be deprogrammed, pronto, or I’d end up on a Dr. Drew special. I glanced nervously around my living room for the Intervention cameras. What was the antidote for overindulgence in romantic fantasy? One bolus of truth serum, stat!
That night during my post-date interview in the mirror, I got all Barbara Walters on my ass and decided to ask the really tough question: Why did I love to hate this show so much? Was it the way women were pitted against one another, or the sleazy players they picked for the bachelors, or the ridiculous premise? But I already knew the answer: What I hated the most was the fact that the women’s happiness appears to be wholly dependent on whether or not they’re chosen by a man. And this got me thinking: How much of my life had been spent trying to appear as desirable as possible so that I would finally be claimed by that special someone?
The answer was a tough one. I loved to hate this show, because these women were me.
The next day, I threw The Bachelor DVDs in the trash. This reminded me of how I used to throw out binge food only to retrieve it later—but hey, it’s about progress, not perfection. I bought myself a mixed bouquet of flowers, and arranged them, one by one, in a beautiful blue vase. After the last flower was in place, I pulled out the single red rose, walked over to the mirror, and popped the all-important question.
“Wendy, will you accept this rose?”
After considering my reflection, I tossed the rose on top of the rejected DVDs, smiled, leaned forward, and answered:
“Make that a forget-me-not, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”
16
GYM, TAN, LAUNDRY
Mark Lisanti
ON DECEMBER 2, 2009, I did something that I never thought I’d do again: I turned on MTV. I’d abandoned the channel so long ago I can’t even pinpoint the length of my viewership hiatus, but I have a vague recollection of a dating show in which a dim-seeming college guy standing in front of a garishly shrink-wrapped tour bus had the ability to swap an undesirable female partner for a new chance at love by pulling a chain that would then dump the entire pledge class of a second-tier sorority on top of him. At some point during the process of watching the smothered dude try to connect on a personal level with these lucky ladies while digging himself out from beneath their wriggling pile of supple, Michelob-Ultra-fed flesh so that they all could ride the bus to some all-expenses-paid date at the Olive Garden, my cable box coughed up an on-screen alert: “Aren’t you a little too old for this crap, Grandpa?”
Indeed, I was. I must’ve been, like, thirty or something, and far more age-appropriate crap awaited on broadcast television. And so I clicked away from MTV, swearing never to return again.
But then a show called Jersey Shore changed all that.
And what is this Jersey Shore I speak of? In the most reductive terms, it’s merely an ethnicized Real World, a spin-off on the “seven strangers picked to live in a house until they all fuck/ kill each other” formula that replaces the wildly successful Many Colorful Types of Asshole model (the Gay One, the Hick One, the African American One, the Mentally Unstable Tramp Who Will Cut You One, and so on) pioneered by MTV with a Just One Type of Asshole format. And that One Type, in the case of Jersey Shore, is the self-identified Guido—a subset of East Coast Italian American culture that is united in its love for summering on the beaches of New Jersey, wearing T-shirts with sparkly dragons on them, and pushing the boundaries of hair-product technology to new and exciting places. The rest of the show’s concept—right down to the quirkily decorated house equipped with a fornication-ready hot tub and the constant, drunken fisticuffs with locals enraged by the sight of TV cameras—is identical to The Real World. But diverging from the old formula and opting for that Just One Type scheme not only helped breathe new life into a moribund form but also allowed the show’s producers to cast deeper into the available talent pool,