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Fox TV described There’s Something About Miriam as “6 eligible men, 1 beautiful model named Miriam, and an enormous secret reveal you never saw coming!”

Well, actually the reveal is pretty obvious from the web site. It’s your basic reality TV dating show, where a bunch of loser guys compete for the attention of a woman–but this time, the object of their affections is, unknown to them, a pre-op male-to-female transsexual.

The show was made in 2003 and shown in the UK in 2004. It’s currently finishing up its US run on the Fox Reality Channel; the final 2 episodes are next weekend. Because of the delay before the show aired here, the offscreen drama has already played out.

As you might have guessed, the male contestants were not very happy about the show, and felt they had been ridiculed. They launched a lawsuit claiming everything from defamation, thru psychological damage, all the way up to “conspiracy to commit sexual assault”. (Don’t flatter yourselves, boys.) Eventually the production company behind the show settled out of court.

Another “lie to the contestants” TV show soon followed. Space Cadets sent a group of ordinary mouth-breathing reality TV show contestants on a 5 day mission in earth orbit. That’s what they were told, anyway; in reality they were stuck in a fake spacecraft built on a disused military base in Suffolk. Apparently they didn’t catch on, and a cash payout at the end prevented legal unpleasantness. Viewing figures were disappointing, though, with many people refusing to believe that anyone could be stupid enough to fall for the hoax, and concluding that the whole thing was in fact a fake reality show made using actors.

The scenario reminds me of an SF short story, 50s I think, about a group of astronauts who are similarly sent on a faked mission–but who go insane after the accidentally get to see the far side of the moon, which is just a painted wooden mockup. (Perhaps someone remembers the author and title? I’m thinking Heinlein.)  Of course, in this case the astronauts were selected because they were borderline insane to start with.

TV as lie is hardly new. The bigger mystery for me is the content of some of the reality TV shows that are totally honest with the participants. Like A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila, aka some slutty bisexual woman with a MySpace page. The shock revelation in this case is delivered right at the start: there are contestants of both genders competing to win the chance to take home a Playboy model to meet mom and have her lap dance for grandmother. (No, really.)
Tila is cute, but she’s not that great of a catch. There are any number of good looking Asian women who are a lot less trashy, and won’t ask you to eat raw bulls’ testicles and crawl through mud for the chance to date them. So basically, the whole dating aspect is a farce, and it’s a show where people compete to over-act hysterically and perform degrading stunts in order to appear on TV.

(And in case you’re wondering, no, I don’t sit and watch any of this crap. I just watch the highlights (or lowlights) that are mocked on The Soup.)

It makes me wonder: in another few decades, will people look back on reality TV shows the way we now look back at 1970s variety shows, Vaudeville, and circus freaks? Will people wonder why they were so popular? Or will reality TV continue indefinitely, like game shows, albeit becoming less popular with time?

I’d like to think that eventually, the mystique of TV will disappear, as anyone can put their own video on the Internet for the world to see. You don’t need to eat eyeballs on camera in order to appear on screen. I suspect that what will actually happen is that reality TV will evolve to attract only the most desperate attention whores as participants. But in that case, will anyone else want to watch?

The controversy over à la carte cable and satellite programming keeps resurfacing. The basic problem is that cable prices keep rising, to the point where the basic level of digital cable is over $50 a month in many places. Prices have risen 40% in the last decade.

(As an aside, I’m amazed at the whiners in the UK who complain about paying £126.50 a year for a TV license that gets them the best premium programming from the US, as well as UK TV. I pay $588 a year to get a similar selection.)

Viewers find it galling to pay for a hundred channels when there are only a handful they watch on a regular basis. Hence there has been a campaign to get the FCC to rule that cable and satellite providers must offer the option of à la carte programming, where you can choose to subscribe to only the channels you actually want.

The cable and satellite companies don’t want to see that happen, as it would eat into their fat profits. Since the same companies own a lot of the mainstream media outlets, I’m constantly seeing astroturf coverage explaining why à la carte programming is impossible, would make your cable bills skyrocket, is tantamount to Communism, and so on.

This is my attempt to cut through a lot of the common bullshit spouted on the subject.

Continue reading »

We finally got to watching A.i.: Artificial Intelligence. We’re probably the last people alive who haven’t seen it, so I trust you will allow me the indulgence of a few spoilers in the course of my criticism.

Let’s start with the big issue: the movie has the most egregious deus ex machina ending I have seen in years of movie-watching. It’s so hideous that it could be used as the canonical example when educating future generations of movie makers in what not to do. Apparently the ending was part of the Kubrick script for the movie, but Spielberg gave it that final saccharine twist. I’d like to think that Kubrick would have seen sense and removed the whole thing, like he did the original pie fight ending to Dr Strangelove.

A.i. is supposedly some kind of tribute or homage to Kubrick…but of course, the problem is it’s hard to pick two directors whose styles are as dissimilar as Kubrick and Spielberg, unless you start talking about (say) Errol Morris and John Waters.

Visually, there’s really nothing Kubrick to see. The fight with the bike gangs is a frenetic MTV cut-up, rather than a sequence of smooth menacing tracking shots. Even when David finds rows of boxed Davids, and Spielberg finally tries to use a Kubrick-style tracking shot for effect, he keeps the camera too high and the result is merely tedious. In fact, it brought to mind the groundbreaking camera work of Ed Wood, as lovingly recreated by Tim Burton.

Perhaps the worst thing, though, is that Spielberg just can’t seem to avoid the temptation to try and make every single story into a kid-friendly movie. Thus a male robot prostitute suddenly takes David to visit the cartoon head of Albert Einstein, voiced by Robin Williams, which we’re told is conveniently situated in the middle of the biggest red light district on earth. No, that’s not the noise of Stanley Kubrick spinning in his grave, it’s just the whirling pulleys as my suspended disbelief comes crashing to the ground.

In the original script, the mother’s an alcoholic, and the robot kid inadvertently feeds her problem when he keeps making her Bloody Marys just the way she likes them, in a futile attempt to get her to love him. Yeah, that would have worked. What doesn’t work is making mom a nice mug of coffee. Not even if you whirl the coffee containers around in an inexplicable fashion in the middle of the shot. But problem drinking is an Adult Situation, so we can’t have that in a Spielberg movie.

Yes, it’s a fairy tale, but I’m old enough to remember that fairy tales used to have wicked witches and evil monsters in. C’mon, Mr Spielberg, I know you can do better.

If you watch Comedy Central, chances are you’ve seen a strange and irritating message scrolling across the screen recently. It says something about Dish Network subscribers losing access to the channels they have paid for. It’s actually a complete lie; here’s the real story:

Viacom own CBS, MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and a bunch of other channels. Their contract with Dish Network was coming to an end. Their terms for the new contract were: (1) You pay us an extra 7%, and (2) You carry all of our channels as part of your basic lineup whether the customer wants them or not.

Dish Network balked at this. They know that customers are sick of having one humongous expensive package that contains dozens of channels they never watch. So, Dish said that they would drop the Viacom channels from their basic package—but that anybody who wanted them could pay the extra cost and get them.

Viacom threw a hissy fit, and said that if Dish didn’t force all their customers to pay for every Viacom channel whether they wanted them all or not, they wouldn’t be allowed to carry any Viacom channels—not even CBS, available over the airwaves for free to anyone with a wire loop antenna.

Dish still refused to back down, so Viacom started putting the scrolling messages on all their channels. In spite of the fact that it’s Viacom threatening to take the channels away from Dish Network subscribers, Viacom are lying that it’s Dish Network’s fault, and telling people to call Dish Network and complain. Dish’s response has been to file a lawsuit to try and prevent Viacom from using its media power to force people to buy its channels. Dish has also been covering up the lies with black rectangles.

Obviously I’m siding with Dish Network on this one. To get the handful of channels we watch, we have to pay for over 50 channels we never watch. I’d like to ditch those channels and use the money to pay for HBO instead, but it’s not going to happen unless someone stands up to companies like Viacom and Disney and forces them to let it happen. Disney pulls the same tricks—it forces the cable companies to make expensive Disney channels like ESPN part of the basic lineup, or else they’re not allowed to carry ABC.

Ironically, the Viacom channels are amongst those I’d pay to receive if I had the choice.

So, please spread the word, contact the FTC, whatever.

A young man in Australia decided to imitate MTV’s Jackass, and carry a lit firecracker between his butt cheeks. Then, he fell backwards. You can probably guess the rest of the story.

MTV have apologized to two teenage girls who were showered with feces during the taping of an MTV show titled “Dude, This Sucks”.

A spokesman for MTV said that the network never intended to spray its viewers with feces, and is usually content merely to expose them to it.