Dancin' Fools

I've said this many times before, but as contemptuous as I am of the whole "reality" teevee thing, some aspects in particular are simply confounding, such as the dancing thing. Okay, first, if you have the word "stars" in your title, this should at the very least mean people who, if they were not on your show, would be doing something else. I did see Steve Guttenberg on a Law & Order a couple weeks ago; other than that, not so much. Hell, I've been on game shows and I can't dance either. Do I qualify?

But really it's the idea that watching people who used to be moderately famous try to dance -- and get critiqued by people no one's ever heard of -- would be entertaining for more than five minutes. (No doubt this is in the usual context of reality tropes that I have gleaned second- and third-hand: pregnant pauses, protracted explanations, contrived diversions, anything to stretch ten minutes of actual material into forty, plus commercials.) It sounds like something that the kids find on the YouTube and talk about for a couple weeks, like the fat kid working on his Jedi moves in the garage.

But once the novelty's over, you're watching the guy from Police Academy dance, which must be only slightly more exciting than watching him take a dump. And we're several years into this, um, phenomenon, which says as much about the viewing audience as it does about the laziness of the network programmers. To each their own and all, and I'm certainly not insisting on the elitist rigors of Mawsterpiece Theatre. But I work ten hours a day at a job I tolerate just like everyone else. And when I turn to the nutworks at 9PM and my choices are people dancing, people losing weight, and people doing whatever the fuck it is they do on Big Brother, I start to wonder more and more why it is I pay sixty bucks a month for satellite service when I could just boost my Netflix to the top level and pocket the difference. If it weren't for football and Daily Show/Colbert Report, I'd probably do just that.

Used to be that the minimum requirements for entertainment were that people were doing something that you probably couldn't do yourself -- act, write, tell stories, do stunts, direct, etc. This is like holding something sparkly in front of a mirror and staring at it for several years.