Is This for Real?: Hi, do you watch reality TV? I do!

Posted at 8:30 AM Jan 04, 2010

By Merritt Martin

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[Ed. note: welcome to Is This for Real?, your weekly roundup of reality-related WTF's.]

OK, first of all, can I please tell you how relatively not excited I am for the next season of Project Runway? Lifetime has started a full court press of preview trailers, and I just keep thinking, "I'm glad it's back in New York, but it's going to take more than a location reboot, folks." For one, we're going to need the judges to be there every week--unlike last season when guest designers showed up for Michael Kors and Nina Garcia's editorial staff got to fill in for her. If Michael and Nina don't have to show up every week, neither do I...or any other viewer.

As far as what I am looking forward to, this new The Buried Life show coming soon to MTV looks promising. Four dudes knock dreams off their bucket list and with every one, they'll help someone else knock one of theirs off too. I know, it feels very strange that I have such feelings about such a positive feel-good show, but I have a inkling that MTV will tramp it up a little bit. Maybe one of them will want to see a donkey show and I can be disgusted/offended but at the same time discover the lowest point in televised exploitation. It's the anthropologist in me I suppose.

Chris Norris, however, has a different idea of "Hitting Bottom" and it's featured in The New York Times. I, like others I'm sure, am unclear if Norris was looking to really get in some digs on TV's favorite celebrity doc, Dr. Drew Pinsky, or if he was trying to be objective after discovering that in person, he really came to like the famed silver-haired doc. After watching Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew and being completely enthralled with it--especially after reading that the show's editing showed some castmates were in treatment much longer than they really were--I am intrigued by the upcoming teasers for Celebrity Rehab for more reasons than observing successful recovery.

As Norris points out, and you can see in the commercial below, actor Tom Sizemore and former madam Heidi Fleiss will be among the cast. Something about that strikes me as detrimental to either's progress--what with the whole former relationship and domestic violence history. I call set-up and/or schadenfreude, but then, I'm no TV producer. And yet I also see the total appeal and benefit of Dr. Drew as a servant to the future well-being of Hollywood's unhealthy, and by extension, some of his viewers.

But whatever. The big news this week is that The Real World has started again and no one was in the forest to hear it. Wait, I'm confusing my idioms. I meant, TRW Washington D.C. aired its intro episode and no one gave a shit. Yes, that's it! They all fell asleep during Cancun's asinine attempt at television and the alarm didn't ring for D.C. Sure, Andrew was relatively irritaining and there's already been a religion dispute, but last I checked, I was the only one watching it. Unlike Jersey Shore, but that's doesn't need any more attention this week, so moving on...