I will take anything the reality tv community throws at me. I will take Paris and Nicole at summer camp, even though I know that their supporting “counselors” are hired actors. I will take MTV’s brutally agendized portrayal of sorority life, and I will take their starry eyed belief that one day P Diddy will put together a band that people will actually want to listen to. I will take culinary competitions even though you can’t taste food through your tv screen. I will follow the day by day lives of playboy bunnies, little people, professional skateboarders and their oversized best friends; I will root wholeheartedly for people I’ve never met as they follow their dreams of becoming models or fashion designers or pirate masters or backup singers or teenage interns at Seventeen magazine. What I won’t take is any show that makes me want to carve out my ovaries with a rusty spoon (this also applies to the movie Because I Said So, but that’s an issue for another day). I don’t watch reality shows because I need to hate myself for being female, I watch them because I want to see people who have worse lives than I do and feel better about myself as the result of it. I should be able to get that without considering spending the requisite year living as a man before applying to one of the three major sexual reassignment centers in the country.

I feel like this is a subtle, but important distinction—these shows should allow, or even encourage, you to hate specific women. Cami on Laguna Beach, that heinous bitch from the first Apprentice that played the race card at every available opportunity, Janice Dickinson, take your pick. They should not, however, encourage you to hate women en masse. And that’s all that Age of Love does. It picks at the insecurities of women that already have more than enough to go around when it comes to dating, and it turns them into catty, ridiculous, desperate people that you don’t want to meet in a back ally. Show premise here, trying to put it into words is giving me rage. They’re calling the women in their 40s “cougars” and the ones in their 20s “kittens.” That should be enough to get you on my side.

Now’s probably a bad time to make a joke about hot flashes, eh?

Aside from the fact that this preys on every single insecurity that women have, and that they’re relying on an Aussie to decide, ONCE AND FOR ALL, what men really want (without giving him the option of Anonymous Sex, SportsCenter, and Reheated Pasta, so I don’t have a chance to prove the theory I’ve been carefully crafting since freshman year), my main issue with this is the basic helplessness of half the contestants. *If* tectonic plates shift and the planets align and birds start flying backwards and he picks a 40 year old, the women in their 20s can console themselves by saying that they will, someday, be 40, so it’s just a matter of time before they have what men want. But if the sun rises tomorrow and Saturday follows Friday and death and taxes persist and he picks a 20 year old, what do the 40 year olds get to tell themselves? That The Men of the universe have spoken?

We keep our 20 year olds in boxes- they stay fresher that way.

I was wary when Ashton Kutcher coined the reality show term “social experiment,” but he went on to give me Beauty & The Geek and I forgave him. I don’t forgive you, NBC, for this social experiment that can bring no good into the world. Please return me to a steady diet of The Biggest Loser (Puns! The 10 o’clock show is completely different from the 8 o’clock one!) and 30 Rock.

Love,
CRISTIN

As I mentioned earlier today, Creature Comforts got cancelled and it makes me very sad. It seems like they only aired two episodes before it got the can. However, what I saw of the show was delightful and now I’m trying to figure out how to get a copy of the British DVDs (it’s an American version of a British series).

The concept of the show is simple: you take interviews with real people and animate them with clay animals. The result is a sweet and often hilarious series that you can totally watch with your nieces and nephews (or kids — if you’ve taken that leap) and neither one of you will be bored.

Here’s a bit of the first episode. As you watch, you’ll definitely develop your favorite recurring characters (mine include the kid snails, the bird on the horse’s head and the WASPy cats). The rest is available at the CBS Web site and around YouTube.[kml_flashembed movie="/NWsX6DfEtIM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Who knows? Maybe it’ll get picked up by someone on cable.

Home of the unironic Journey sing-along.

• That show NBC cancelled way at the beginning of the season, Kidnapped, is going to see its remaining episodes air.
• Here are some details on what The Office: Season 3 DVDs are going to look like.
• Pirate Master will move its booty to Tuesdays.
• Big Brother 8 will be ‘more interactive.’
• NBC cancelled Creature Comforts, just as I discovered how wonderful it was. I urge you to watch the old episodes on the CBS Web site.
• TV Guide rates summer programming.
• Treat Williams? Everwood? Anybody?
• Aaron Sorkin wrote a play about TV’s inventor and it’s going to Broadway.
• Bon Jovi on MTV: Unplugged.  You know it.