Tag: Season 2

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A real(ity) apology

Besides the general announcement for WIDE VARIETY THEATRE below, I sent out a few personal messages to people who live in the L.A. area. I wrote to Tyson from BATG 2, but he lives about 6 hours north of there. However, he recommended that I write to Wes and Cher since they’re about 20 minutes away from Hollywood. Their response was one of surprise for a verrrrrry good reason: when writing my recaps during Season 2, I did some serious Cher-bitch-slapping. But the bad part isn’t that I did it in the first place—it’s that I should have known better.

This is a topic I railed upon multiple times while I was up on the screen, but I think I only glazed over it once during the show’s second run: what appears on reality TV and what actually happens can be all across the board. That’s one reason why it takes several months to do the editing for shows like this—they have hundreds and hundreds of hours of interviews and camera footage to sift through, trying to create the characters they want.

People can sound smart or stupid; they can perform well or horribly; they can act mature or childish. I know I did all of ‘em at one time or another, though childish had a tendency to dominate my behavior. (Not like you wouldn’t have known by reading everything in here.) But for every episode, the editors decide which character they want each person to be. Episodes 3 and 4, I was a scared little pussy, but when Episode 5 rolled around, I was stunningly heroic and tolerant. Guess what? That was me! All of them! But they were only the little bits and pieces of me that the editors wanted each time.

So like I said, I should have known better for my Season 2 recaps because the same pretense applied. Instead of thinking about the little bits and pieces, I was watching the show like everyone else: sitting in a recliner, eating popcorn and shaving my pubic hair. Okay, maybe that last part was just me, but I wasn’t thinking about the footage that ended up on the cutting room floor, I was thinking about what the producers were showing me on the screen.

During one episode, I’d write, “That person is an asshole!” The next week, “Gosh, that person isn’t so bad after all.” Evil and nice! Still the same person! Every time a “change” like that happened! (Insert sound of slapping myself in the forehead here) Duh… I knew that, but I didn’t put up a disclaimer or anything and I should’ve known better. Thus, to Cher and Chris and everyone else who’s “evil” on reality TV but isn’t in real life:

My bad.

(Good luck editing that out, fuckers!)

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S2, Finale: Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

At the beginning of the episode, they showed everyone in a room by themselves. It’s a big mansion from the outside, but trust me, it gets a lot bigger when you’re running out of housemates.

Out of all the activities everyone liked, Josh surprised me the most. He doesn’t seem like an outdoorsy person, but it looks like he would have had an easy time reeling in the dead fish last season. Joe playing chess, Brittany going ice skating, Cher making sushi… pretty cool stuff, but it pales in comparison to fly fishing.

Hey, Cher! The cute biting-the-tongue act was mine! Copycat!

Yay! Josh finally got into the hot tub and roasted his nuts! There may not have been eight beautiful women around at the time, but dammit, that’s progress!

I have to admit, if you ignore the fact that the final elimination took about half the episode, I liked it more this time. It wasn’t thinking of cold, hard facts about their partners—it was thinking like their partners.

Cher has become a lot more huggy in the last few weeks, hasn’t she? In his final interview, Josh was talking about puking out all his internal organs because the beautiful girls made him so nervous. Just imagine how he (and his stomach) would have reacted two months ago if Cher had been constantly draped over him when he answered questions correctly.

And along those lines, try to imagine him talking about the size of Wes’s penis during the first episode. In his own words, “BLEEEAAARRRRGH!!!!”

Now that I think about it, maybe Josh and I are more alike than I thought. Sure, Karl is on the verge of being my twin brother, but Josh and I grew up around lakes, we like to spend time in the outdoors, we both barfed during the course of the show… we’re almost the same person! I’m taller and heavier, but besides that, we’re the same!

The last commercial break was really obnoxious. “Josh needs this answer to force a tie-breaker… let’s see if he gets it after this.” Hmmm… the clock says there’s ten minutes left in the show—I wonder if he’ll screw up and they’ll show a bunch of flashbacks again…

Here’s an e-tissue for Joe: he was a cool guy and I can’t say I blame him for being so emotional. That’s not to say I would have been that choked up if I’d lost the final elimination, but I understand how he could feel that way. (If you haven’t been sitting in an interview chair for the last time, don’t judge—saying goodbye to the whole experience is a lot more overwhelming than you’d think.)

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S2, Episode 7: Never Eat Shredded Wheat

In case you’re confused about the heading, go around a compass clockwise and the capital letters correspond with the directions. Hey, it seemed just as cool as “The sun rises Early in the East” and “P-A-cific is the order of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans” when I was little.

Fare thee well, Ankur and Jennipher. I’d say “We barely knew thee,” but… come to think of it, we barely knew thee. Given how many weeks you spent in front of all those cameras, you didn’t spend much time on our TV screens. The same goes for everyone else, of course, but since you’re the couple who left this episode, “We barely knew thee.”

After seeing all the ways Ankur has played with his facial hair, I give the Fu-Manchu mustache top honors.

Josh takes a stand: “I’m nobody’s bitch. I’ll go down there when I’m ready. … Okay, I’m ready.”

I thought having everyone making a tape to give their partner a “good-bye gift” was a really cool idea. I remember watching Season 1 on TV and gaining a lot of insight about what happened with everyone else during the course of the show. (The people watching all the camera feeds knew a helluva lot more than I did.) I also thought it was pretty funny how some of the guys were running around, looking for multiple locations to record parts of their goodbyes and make them a more visually appealing production. Geeks…

I’m not sure how many of you have ever looked at the Internet Movie Database, but it’s got credits for about a gajillion movies and TV shows in there. (If you look up Beauty and the Geek, you’ll find me! And if you look up me, you’ll find Beauty and the Geek!) I’m not sure if Season 2 is listed yet, but given his appearances on camera during the challenge, I wonder if Ankur and Jennipher’s driver will get credit as an extra… Gotta give the girl props, though—she didn’t quit. It may have taken many, many, many hours, but they found all the stores and got back home alive.

It looks like Cher is finally softening up. Naturally, this may have started happening much earlier, but that’s the joy of reality TV—the editors can show clips in whatever order they want to make things more interesting. If you don’t think so, go back through all the tapes and compare how people’s clothing changes between interviews versus between episodes. Regardless, she seems to gained some knowledge during the course of the show and that’s what this “social experiment” is all about.

As a final note, I busted out laughing at how Ankur determined what color the diamond was: “The question came up, so it’s not clear… it’s probably a girly, romantic color… pink.”

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Nimble fingers

On January 24th, the Tonight Show featured Leyan Lo and Tyson Mao, two students at Cal Tech who gots mad skillz when solving the Rubik’s Cube. They were both invited onstage, Leno showed the audience a Rubik’s cube, explained that Leyan recently set several world records and then asked why Tyson was there. While he held some records until Leyan broke them, he was attending the show as Leyan’s mentor. Why did he lose his title in those events, you might ask? In Tyson’s words, “I was spending time in a mansion with eight beautiful women.” What a sneaky plug for Beauty and the Geek… As would be expected, Leno wouldn’t pursue that statement (shouldn’t plug another network’s programming if the person isn’t a featured guest), so he paused for a moment, stared at the Rubik’s cube in his hand and said, “Well, I don’t believe you.”

Leyan was handed a mixed-up cube, they started a clock and he solved it in about 18 seconds. It was definitely impressive, but could he put those mad skillz to use in some other practical fashion? Leno decided to find out, so he brought out a line of real hotties (there were five or six—I forgot to count because I was laughing so hard… oh, and last week, a friend of mine was absolutely shocked that a Mensa member would use a word like “hotties,” so I feel obligated to keep saying it from time to time…). Leno asked Leyan if he’d ever unhooked a bra before—Leyan nodded over at Tyson and said, “He’s probably got more experience.” But Tyson stood to the side and watched as his prodigy went to work, getting them all opened up in eight seconds. Solving bra straps faster than a Rubik’s Cube… I guess it’s all a question of motivation.