Reality TV seems to get more outrageous with every new show.
And Fox–the network that brought us “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire” and “Joe Millionaire”–is ever ready with new and old fare to feed America’s obsession with train wreck TV.
How low can reality TV go?
You merely had to watch Fox’s premiere last night of its latest reality show/practical joke, “My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance,” or hear CBS chief Leslie Moonves tout UPN’s series “Amish in the City” to find out.
Not to mention the third season premiere of Fox’s hit “American Idol” to see footage of what Fox deemed “hilariously bad auditions.” (An estimated 80,000 wannabe stars applied to test their talents on the show.)
That’s a lot of excruciating music to sit through. And viewers get to see the worst of the worst before the real contest begins. “Idol” is sure to be a hit. More than 38 million people watched Ruben Studdard beat Clay Aiken in the May finale, a bigger audience than the Academy Awards.
“Obnoxious Fiance” is more of a gamble. Basically, the lucky bride-to-be, Randi, a 23-year-old grade school teacher from Scottsdale, Ariz., wins a half-million bucks if she can put a huge joke over on her parents. If she can get “Steve,” a beefy guy with worse manners than a frat-house party chairman, to the altar, she wins.
Glamor-girl conniving and overwrought soap opera emotions have absolutely nothing to do with this one. It’s strictly the appeal of a slob grating on an unsuspecting middle-American mom and dad.
But the gag gets more complicated, because Randi herself is being scammed by Fox. She thinks Steve is a real “reality” contestant putting the same prank over on his parents. But in real-real-“reality,” obnoxious “Steve” is an actor, and so are all his equally obnoxious family and friends.
So what comes next? If successful, “Obnoxious Fiance” would seem to offer rich soil for other long-form prank shows.
“The bar keeps getting raised in terms of the twist these shows require. Ultimately, the genre will have to change significantly,” said John Rash, director of broadcast negotiations for Campbell Mithun advertising.
Enter UPN, which tentatively scheduled a summer launch for a new reality series with the working title “Amish in the City.”
It’s based on the Amish community’s coming-of-age experience known as rumspringa (the word means “running wild”), in which Amish teens intentionally subject themselves to temptation to test their religious convictions, before deciding whether to join the Amish church.
Asked by one stunned critic why on earth they would allow television producers to manipulate and massage a ceremony that will literally alter the course of these kids’ lives, CBS’s Moonves, who also oversees UPN, joked, “Well, we couldn’t do ‘The Beverly Hillbillies.’ “
“The Amish don’t have as good a lobbying group,” he quipped. He was referring to the backlash that erupted when word got out a year and a half ago that CBS was developing a reality series based on the 1960s sitcom “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Most unamused was the Center for Rural Strategies, which protested the show’s premise vigorously.
