I walked into Bill’s office yesterday and was all, “Hey, man, we only have one show left for the GRTFL, I was thinking about doing this thing where …” when he interrupted, “Don’t worry, I have been saving reality TV e-mails from readers for this very moment, I’ll send them to you … problem solved.” Seconds later, I had a dozen hilarious reality TV e-mails in my inbox ready for evaluation. This chain of events only has two possible explanations: (1) Bill is an extremely considerate manager with incredible foresight, looking to help those out around him at all times, or (2) Bill is a Rain Man-y psychopath who meticulously combs through his e-mails to categorize them, and everyone who works at Grantland should be concerned for their safety. I am not going to tell you which one I think is closer to the truth, but I am going to tell you that I just changed the hiding place of the spare set of keys to my house.
So, without further ado, these are either actual e-mails from actual readers or completely fabricated e-mails that Bill sent himself from dummy accounts. Who cares, anyway?
On the heels of a grueling finale on MTV’s The Challenge, it felt like time to put the Johnny Bananas bat signal up for a podcast. Always a fantastic guest, here are some takeaways from my half-hour with Bananas:
The final challenge is harder than you think it is;
Filming the show is more boring than you think it is;
Robin is crazier than you think she is;
He parties just as much as you think he does.
As if that weren’t enough, at the end of the pod he passed the mic to fellow Challenge legend CT. Enjoy.
Reality TV is in trouble. The Situation is in rehab, America’s alcoholism mascot Snooki is pregnant, and there are only two shows left on the air worthy of inclusion in the GRTFL. With this in mind, I’ve decided to change it up this week and take you with me on my deep dive into the creepy/scary triple-digit section of your channel guide in search of new shows to celebrate in future columns. I spent the whole week sifting through endless hours of hoarding, cooking, rehabbing, building, destroying, partying, arguing, driving, swamping, dancing, parenting, storing, eating, puking, and RuPauling in an attempt at finding a digital nugget of reality TV gold. To be honest, I enjoyed the shit out of it. It was so exhilarating/depressing, I decided that every week I will go in on at least one new show and share with you my thoughts on it.
(Okay, fine, I probably won’t do this every week because I’m lazy and will forget that I even wrote this. I apologize in advance.)
Courtney The Bill Belichick of Bachelorettes’s reign as HBIC on The Bachelor has come to end. The way she captivated all that have been exposed to her particular brand of bitchy genius makes her exit feel much more like an intermission than the final curtain. On the flip side, watching the tanned and tatted crew from Joisey pack up their Shore Store shirts and scatter to their native tri-state enclaves had a feeling of finality. I'm sure that MTV will trot out the Seaside Seven for one more go 'round — but America’s feelings about this show pretty much mirror the cast’s feelings about the roof-deck hot tub. Both were super-exciting novelty items at first. Now, the novelty has worn off and they feel like neglected relics of parties past that pose a serious health risk and should be avoided at all costs. I have watched my last episode of Jersey Shore.
Nothing happened on Jersey Shore this week. Nothing. I can honestly look you right in the eye and tell you that we've established a stupid scoring system that rewards reality TV cast members for drinking, fighting, and coitus-denying — yet the entire cast of Jersey Shore scored a mere five points. Five points. You probably scored more than five GRTFL points at Thursday happy hour yesterday. I couldn’t be more disappointed by a show that just a year ago was a frenzy of fisticuffs and freakiness. Thank god for The Bachelor. The Bachelor is like a Justin Timberlake song; I don’t want to like it, I pretend I don’t like it, but I can’t get it out of my head. The Bachelor is so dumb, so wrong, and so damn American I want to print every frame of it on paper so I can eat it and have it sit in my tummy. If you aren’t watching The Bachelor, start immediately: It is like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea — it’s about nothing and everything all at the same time.
Hold on to your hair weaves: the Basketball Wives are back. Basketball Wives is supposed to be a reality show that gives a glimpse into the world of the women in the lives of professional basketball players. It isn’t. It's really a series of lunches in which well-dressed, attractive, and gossipy young women get together to insult whomever in their circle happens to not be presently at the table. Oh yeah, occasionally a drink is thrown, a weave is tugged, and murder is attempted. Naturally, it’s a perfect fit for the GRTFL, so we made up some rules and drafted teams:
Less than 24 hours after The Suspiciously Real Fake Bachelor Wedding that rocked the TV world, Bill Simmons and Reality Czar David Jacoby discuss the inevitability of Fantasy Suite relations, whether a winery or a sports bar is a better status symbol for a bachelor-on-the-make, and when is the optimal time for a bachelorette to reveal her baggage. Also discussed: Survivor, The Challenge and Jacoby's secret stash of reality TV shame-porn. (Yes, the Kardashians are involved.)
I've been thinking about it a lot and I have decided that we're going to have to see other shows. It’s not me. It’s you. You see, Survivor, in the GRTFL you're only as good as your last start — and you sucked last season. Really sucked. I respect that you're trying to rope me back in with a format change, Jeff Probst ghost-riding a helicopter, and a super-hot country gal who scoops up chickens like Ozzie Smith scoops ground balls. But it's too little, too late. You are spending this GRTFL season in the GRTFL Development League. (I refuse to make the easy Jeremy Lin joke here; I have to save my easy-joke energy for the rest of the column.)
Happy Challengoliday! America’s fifth major sport, MTV’s The Challenge, returns to your television this evening, and we’ve decided to roll out a special GRTFL post just to get you prepared for this glorious event. I urge you to right now get a Challenge fantasy league together with your friends and hold a draft before this evening's premiere. There is little more enjoyable in life than yelling, “C'mon, TJ, give her a, 'You killed it!' TJ. GIVE HER A 'YOU KILLED IT!'” at your television. OK, there are actually a gabillion things more enjoyable in life than yelling at your TV about a reality show, but it's pretty far up the list, so email your buddies, set the stakes and divvy up the alcopsychoholics. You won’t regret it.
Welcome to the first annual GRTFLies Awardsies. I couldn’t think of a good title, so I just added the syllable “eez” to the end of the nouns — that’s how all award shows do it, right? Anyway, since the inception of this enjoyable filter through which we view the deplorable programming known as Reality Television, there have been a slew of people, events, and sexual encounters that deserve special recognition. That last part’s actually not true. Let me rephrase: There have been a slew of people, events, and sexual encounters that would be fun to point and laugh at one more time before clicking and dragging them to the trash can on your mental desktop.
This week we said goodbye to The Challenge and Celebrity Rehab and selected the new shows we'll be adding to the Grantland Reality Television Fantasy League this fall. There was a lot of talk around the office about adding ones that were “smarter” and “less trashy,” but after extensive research we concluded that those shows don’t exist. So we will soon be drafting cast members from Basketball Wives LA, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Survivor: South Pacific, and Real World: San Diego. At least that's what we’re going with until Bravo announces a new series about astrophysicists tracking distant galaxy clusters.
Let’s have a look at who scored points while we lost brain cells.
