In this day and age, the television lineups are saturated with reality TV. And while most people agree that it is anything but reality, almost everyone I know is hooked on at least one show. For me, Survivor and The Amazing Race have been long time staples in my television viewing diet. I have certain principles that I maintain when viewing any of these shows. I avoid the ones that require high drama, i.e. The Bachelor or pretty much any of the celeb reality shows on cable. I won’t watch F.O.L. That’s just a train wreck that won’t stop happening. The first car jumped off the track and it was ugly. But shortly after the 1,543 car in the train jumped off too, I felt the originality of it had completely left the planet.
But this post is not about watching reality television. It’s about not watching reality television. “Supposedly” there are still people out there that do not watch any reality shows at all. This is a problem. I find it increasingly difficult to talk to these people when I don’t know their stance on Rob and Amber. That’s a defining line as far as I’m concerned and I need to be able to properly sort people out when I meet them so I can figure out how to conduct myself in their presence.
The Shuck N Jive strives to find new and creative ways to get people to do things they either don’t want to do, or probably shouldn’t be doing in the first place. It’s that simple philosophy that led to the “Shirts worn as pants” movement of 2005. The entire population of Antarctica joined in on that one, so you know we’ve got some serious juice over here. Let us also take a moment to remember the great brine shrimp army we convinced the entire state of Nebraska to create back in March of 2006. The A.O.S.M. (Army of Sea Monkeys, pronounced “awesome.”) force surely would have dominated South Dakota were it not for that one crucial flaw in our attack plan. (who knew the monkeys had to stay in water??) My point is, we have an amazing track record with this sort of thing.
Our research team spent nearly twenty minutes (a new team record, beating out the previous record of 11 minutes 13 seconds) concocting a fool proof plan to get anyone that isn’t currently watching reality TV in on all the misery. To test their new plan, I subjected myself to it in order to measure its level of efficacy. Many objections were raised by my peers stating things like, “He already watches reality TV, this doesn’t make any sense!” and, “This is like walking up to a kid eating candy and wearing a sign that says, ‘I love candy and will eat any candy that someone gives to me’ and then asking the kid if he would like to try some candy. Sorry, that’s a lame analogy, but it’s the best I could come up with on such short notice.” Well, to them I said, “When I was in high school, my teacher told me that I couldn’t read and that I didn’t belong in school. Well you know what? I showed them all and I ran outside to the basketball courts, jumped up and touched the rim and said, ‘how do you like me now?!?!!’” I think outside the box. Some people have gone so far as to suggested that I don’t even know what the box is. I accept their high praise.
The test show for this experiment was American Idol. Previously, I had dismissed this reality show as over hyped, not good and crapid (one of my least popular made up words). I thought this was a good subject to test out the plan on because I’m usually unnecessarily stubborn about not watching shows that I feel are over hyped. To give you an example, I haven’t really been able to watch The Office. I saw a few episodes in the beginning, but then it debuted as the number one show at my friend's house. (seriously, it’s held the number one spot for a record 4 years now. That’s amazing considering the show hasn’t even been on the air that long.) And they seriously will not shut up about how great it is. Yes, I have seen a couple of episodes, and it completely eludes me how that can be the number one show in the universe, and Arrested Development gets tossed aside like a used toothbrush that may or may not have fallen in the toilet. Plus, I have AD4LIFE tattooed on my left cheek, so it’s pretty obvious where I stand. (And before you ask, it’s the left cheek on my face.)
American Idol is in season six now. I have not really watched any of the shows up to this point. There was that one time when I started to watch it, but thinking quickly, I grabbed a nearby bottle of Everclear and started chugging it. I passed out before any real damage was done.
I was pretty sure there was no way in heaven I was going to get into this show, thus I chose it to test out the plan. In an epiphantic moment rivaling that of Newton’s apple and Spelling’s 90210, the research team developed a simple strategy to hook virtually any human being on virtually any reality TV show: Gambling. All I was required to do was join a simple office pool wherein I would pay for the opportunity to select one male contestant and one female contestant of the final 24. The only variable in the equation is how much money does it take to get a person interested. It cost me $5 for my two AI wannabes. I have been riveted ever since.
Score another one for the research team.
*****SPOILER ALERT*****
For those that are interested, I have Blake, the beat boxin’ animal, and I had Alaina, the “not-so-good” attractive one, but not the “really-bad” attractive one. I am pleased with my guy, but my girl is now gone. Can’t say that I’m surprised either. She was a big time crier, that kind of emotion can either be really good, or really bad. America voted, and they said she cries too much.
Make no mistake about it though, I’m in it for the $55.00. But for scientific purposes, I’ll submit my results of this experiment at the end of the season when another Idol is crowned. The early findings suggest that my level of interest may vary with how long my 2 contestants stick around.
