Maybe I should have been a bit more to the point with the title of this thread but I was venting about
bad reality shows. I know that there are a handful of enjoyable ones out there.
Here is another example of a bad reality show:
HGTV's "Design Star" Yes, this is yet another show that mrs. trapeze tortures me with every year. The formula is simple and thoroughly obnoxious. They take about a dozen yahoos who may or may not have any experience with interior design and make them hang out together and compete viciously against one another for an opportunity to have their own HGTV design television show.
The producers go out of their way to find competitors with extreme personalities. There is almost always two or three black people who are just itching to play the race card. There is always one homo...sometimes two or three. There is always some white guy who seems reasonably normal who isn't an interior decorator but is instead a carpenter or general contractor or something like that. There is always a crazy white woman who will irritate everyone and be eliminated in the first round because she is, after all, a certifiable nut. There are always two serious interior decorators (who are already moderately successful in this business) who have over the top type A personalities and attempt to dominate every situation they find themselves in.
They make these people live together during the competition but the audience is (thankfully) spared from seeing that part of the ordeal. Nevertheless, you can imagine what goes on between these idiots when they are not on camera.
Each episode of the show involves some sort of "design" competition with nearly impossible goals to be met. I say impossible because the contestants are never given anything like a reasonable amount of time or anything approaching a realistic budget to accomplish whatever the objective is. On top of that, in the early rounds, they bunch them up in teams of three or four with zero technical support. That means that there is no carpenter to perform woodworking tasks, no plumber or electrician for those tasks, no painter, etc. The contestants, though, act is if these parts of the job are no big deal and basically fake them with predictable results.
Typically, the contestants will be thrown at some poor family's home and told to "do a makeover" with each team assigned different parts of the home. The homeowners go away for a three day weekend and then return to the horror show that the "designers" make of their home. It's pretty obvious that the producers screen the victims of this abuse for gun ownership because if my home was destroyed (as frequently is the case in this part of the competition) I'd be heading for the gun cabinet within the first five minutes of witnessing the damage. I remember seeing one episode where one of the female prima donna "designers" thought that the dining room needed to be a tropical oasis and literally trucked in several thousand pounds of sand to make the room look like it was on a beach or something.
I would have killed them all. But that's me. The suckers in this case went into complete "emperor has no clothes" mode and acted semi-delighted with the fiasco. Supposedly the show brings in professionals after the fact to fix the mess made by their idiot contestants.
Of course, this type of nonsense is exactly what the producers are trying to have happen. They want the contestants to fight amongst themselves. Almost always a total ass will emerge...someone that everyone just loathes, including the audience...and the producers see that this person isn't eliminated until it gets down to the final three or four participants.
The judging is patently unfair. At the end of every episode a group of "experts" critique and judge the work before voting on who will be eliminated from the competition. If this segment of the show was fair the judges would have no idea whose work they were looking at, a blind inspection. But that's not how it happens. They know exactly whose work they are looking at and regardless of how good or bad the work is the judges bring their biases into the picture. They will usually have a "guest" judge to mix things up a bit but it's pretty obvious that the house judges lean very hard on the guest in an attempt to influence the vote. There is always a
homo interior decorator judge (in fact, there is now a
second fag judge 'cause more better, right?) who will reliably defend the work of any homo contestant unless the work is undeniably atrocious. The verdicts frequently make no sense with what appears to be good and competent work (despite the ridiculous conditions of the competition) losing for no apparent reason.
So it comes down to a couple of contestants surviving several weeks (probably just a week or two in actual production days) of pure misery having been alternately praised and browbeaten by the smug and self important judges. There is a finale where the last two compete head to head. They usually bring back a couple of the popular losers to help them (yeah, that's who I'd want help from, a loser) and then the winner is revealed at the end of the hour.
The truly stupid thing is that the suckers don't even win a real show anymore. Instead they get to be the host of a web show. Whoopee. That's like being told you are going to be the star of your own public access cable channel show like "Wayne's World" broadcast from your mom's basement. HGTV has all the shows it needs and can't be bothered putting one of these mental cases in a prime time slot.
So everyone is cheated. The contestants and the audience. A true suckfest.
I hate this show.
I would much rather see the contestants square off with chainsaws in a cage. Or fed to alligators. Anything but have to kowtow to an effeminate interior decorator, sucking up to a Liberace wannabe...asking for his advice, etc. One of these days the burly carpenter character contestant is going to kill that clod and maybe that will make up for the previous years of banal crap. But probably not. It would be like one of those awful cooking shows with the over the top abusive chef guy berating the hapless chef wannabes and then someone snaps and dumps five gallons of fryer oil on him. Almost certainly not going to happen. But you hope it does.
