Apocalypse Soon (Brains Of Darkness)

So I have seen the signs of the coming apocalypse and it is not pretty. You may think it is the recent glut of disasters like the hurricanes, earthquakes, forest fires, floods and the like. But you would be wrong. No, to see the real signs of the end of the world just stay up late at night and watch VH1. I'm talking about these insane "celebrity reality" shows.

Have you seen these thing? I stayed up late one night and started flipping through the channels and came across them at about 1:00am or so, and I can't believe the idiocy. First off, let's deal with the term "reality". From Survivor to whatever the name of the show that Paris Hilton is on, there is nothing real or unscripted about these shows. But that's the media term for them, so you know what I mean when I refer to them, it is by no means my endorsement of their "reality".

The first one I saw that night is called My Fair Brady, and as you might expect it features a former cast member of the 2nd crappiest show ever (the first being Gilligan's Island - We get it already, you'd be off the island by now if you would just murder Gilligan and he would stop ruining the escape plane/boat/bike/surfboard/pod), The Brady Bunch. Specifically the guy that played Peter. Now the premise of the show is his relationship with some bimbo he met while living in the Surreal Life house last year. Now if there was any show of this genre that I thought had promise, it would be the Surreal Life. Put together a bunch of washed up actors or other 15 minutes of fame people and watch the self respect go flying out the window. Any show that can have Tammy Faye Baker and 70s porn star Ron Jeremy living in the same house must have potential. So I guess Peter Brady was on one of the incarnations of the show, and he ended up getting jiggy with some woman who was on another reality show called America's Top Whorebag or some shit like that. I don't know if she was the winner or not, but she seems like the perfect model, as she has an IQ that barely registers on the scale.

So I watch some of this and I just can't believe what I'm seeing. She moves in with him in LA and they have all these little self-created dramas (she should get her own place, she should get a car, he should propose, blah blah blah), and they show them going out on the town getting fucked up and doing stupid shit that rich people with too much time on their hands do. Like him trying to French-kiss Jane Wiedlin of Go-Gos and PETA fame at her birthday party. Seriously.

And to top off the evening I saw this show, he invites Mom Brady to come over and meet his girlfriend and to give them relationship advice. Turns out that Mrs. Brady is a licensed therapist! I'm not, but it seemed to me she should have been talking to Peter about his Oedipal Complex. Creepy.

But what is really the creepy thing is what the show basically is. A pathetic middle-aged guy, whose life/career peaked over 30 years ago, trying desperately to hang on to the remaining shreds of fame hooking up with someone about 25 years his junior who is trying desperately to cling on to his remaining fame to get some for herself. And neither person seems to care how pathetic they look. Apparently, pathetic and famous is better than not being famous at all. Fame for the sake of being famous. And that's all this girl wants obviously. And him too, why else would he have gone on the Surreal Life show to begin with? Used to be that a person with no brains or talent who wanted to be famous would just go into porn, but now they have reality television. I wish they would just stick to the porn, like the guy who played the kid in the Richard Pryor movie The Toy. But I would imagine he's probably already working on a deal for his triumphant return to pseudo-credibility on Surreal Life 7: Flick's Revenge.

And then after the Brady nonsense comes Breaking Bonaduce. There's not enough space in my blog to talk about this show about the ex-Partridge going to marriage counseling, you just have to see it for yourself. What a shocker though, that two people who got married on their first date would end up in counseling. Just when you didn't think Danny Partridge's life couldn't sink any lower than his boxing match with Donny Osmond a few years back, you get this train wreck of a show. The best (worst?) part had to be when he went on his radio show (how does this guy have a radio gig anyway?) and told the world that he cheated on his wife. Classy.

I suppose that just like blue is the new black, Loser seems to be the new Winner. Thanks a lot Beck. Though I trace a lot of the blame back to Kato Kaelin. The idea that brainless, talentless twits could become big stars had to come from some TV producer seeing Kato become a household word.

Sad and pathetic really. Like, oh I don't know, starting a blog even though you're not really a writer. But who would do that?