December 12, 2007 - Reality Can Be Cruel, And So Can Reality TV

Don't blame the month-long Writers Guild of America strike, and the growing scarcity of scripted programming, for tonight's premiere of CW's Crowned: The Mother of All Pageants. That mother-daughter competition was in the works long before the strike. As to what's around the corner, you ain't seen nothing yet.

My advice, on the whole, is to keep it that way.

You might think, given tonight's season finales of CW's America's Next Top Model, Fox's Kitchen Nightmares and CBS's Kid Nation, that unscripted shows might be vanishing almost as much as scripted ones. No such luck. I'd tell you what's around the corner in January, but it's too depressing. Suffice it to say that even before the New Year gets here, ABC gives us a week-long game show named Duel, while NBC gives us a new singing-competition series called Clash of the Choirs.

And then there's Crowned.

Eleven mother-daughter pairs are asked, in tonight's inaugural episode (at 9 ET), to adopt a name for their team, and select suitable costumes. One team, 50 percent short on ego, calls itself "Hot and Not." Another team, insulting itself accidentally, adopts the name "Skin Deep." Yet another, intending to invoke stealth tactics but instead evoking something else entirely, goes by the name "Silent but Deadly."

That paragraph, I fear, makes Crowned sound more entertaining than it is. So does any description of the "de-sashing" ceremony at the program's climax. The truth about Crowned, though, is that it's 80 percent mean-spirited, at least 90 percent derivative, and a 100 percent waste of time.

Reality shows, these days, are assembled like prime-time Mad Libs. Swap a noun here, insert a slight variation there, and presto: another show. No matter how many of them are cranked out, they seem to come in only two basic flavors: inspirational or exploitive. Instructive or mean.

The Amazing Race, which has won the Emmy every year a reality competition series has been eligible for one, is one of the good guys. No less so than when watching My Name Is Earl, viewers of Race witness the consequences of good and bad karma. Beauty and the Geek is instructive, too, and so are Survivor, The Apprentice, Project Runway, even Kitchen Nightmares.

Most of the rest, though, including Crowned, are designed more to amuse viewers by encouraging laughter, shock or pity at the expense of the subjects. They're easy to concoct, cheap to make, and as simple to discard as disposable diapers if they don't catch on. Many times, the smell is similar.

At the end of the 1950s, so many Westerns filled prime time (the astonishing high point was 31 different weekly shows in 1959) that the genre collapsed under its own overpopulated weight. As the strike of 2007 continues, and reality TV spreads like kudzu, that's about all viewers can hope for in terms of relief.

That, or the modern equivalent of another Darwinistic course-correction from the '50s, the quiz-show scandal. But this generation's reality shows have had their scandals already (two words: Darva Conger), and not even that could stop the avalanche of reality TV.

Today, TV fans purchase and treasure DVD sets of The Honeymooners and Lost, enjoying scripted shows old and new. Twenty years from now, whatever the format, will viewers be collecting and enjoying discs, downloads or holographs of I Love New York 2, Shot at Love with Tila Tequila or Party Mamas? (All of which, by the way, are reality shows televised tonight, on VH1, MTV and WE, respectively.)

I don't think so. When was the last time you watched an episode of Queen for a Day? That was a 1950s show awash in contestant humiliation - add a few daughters to the mix, and you're not far away from Crowned.

But take my advice: you should be.