the state of reality

So last night I watched three straight hours of real world related content. First I caught the last hour of the Pedro movie, followed by the Real World Brooklyn Finale, followed by the Real World Brooklyn Reunion. After, watching the Pedro movie and remembering Real World of Yore, you know, back when Real World had issues, and slightly overweight people, watching the real world Finale was quite disappointing.

I had high hopes for this season. It seemed like people actually had issues and backstories. But, aside from the wonders of Chet, and yes, there are many colorful wonders to Chet, this season proved to be a snooze. An entirety of three episodes were devoted to pranks.(I guess this is what happened when they take away the hook-ups.)

So the last episode, revolved around the girls getting back at the boys, for a season's worth of pranks, by throwing some dog-food in the breakfast cereal, Chet then becomes angered at Jay-T, thinking he was resposible for said prank. Jay-T swears on his mothers life that he didn't do it. The girls sit in silence as he is persecuted for this most heinous of crimes, by Chet and Ryan, who feel hurt by this most ultimate of betrayals: destruction of breakfast cereal.

When it is revealed that the girls, had been the perpetrators of this crime against humanity, Ryan goes off on Sarah saying she is nothing. Taya, or whatever her name is, says Ryan is just all scared about going back to Iraq and therefore does not like his food tampered with. This makes him angrier, apparently he's really just mad because the girls are the most horrible people in the world to let Jay-T be accused of a prank or something. No. That's really what it is.

After watching Pedro's story, breakfast cereal, and pranks don't seem like life or death. Which makes me wonder if the real world school of reality TV is perhaps nearing it's demise and we are entering another era of reality programming. Perhaps, reality is boring after all. There's nothing too controversial to talk about these day. Perhaps, reality needs a little more ACTION.

And then I saw a commercial for this...



So apparently the new trend in reality show is to create a B-list action movie with reality contestants as the stars, putting them in danger and paralyzing them with fear, so Fear Factor but with plot lines.

This new method of Movie/Reality programming has been working very effectively over at the reality show channel with their show Solitary, it's the highest rated show on the channel. In it, they put people into solitary confinement and then have them complete various tasks. Contestants give up, get eliminated or go slightly nuts.



So basically the new trend, seems to be an augmented reality, compromised of bad b-list movies plot, except now the scaring and torturing happens to real people. Why do I feel like Saw the reality show is next.