The Worst Reality Shows of America (#10-6)

“Seriously, how else could you imagine someone whose name ends with three consonants becoming famous?”

~Jeff Probst

There are two things that America looks for in entertainment- we want to see people who are so horrible they make the viewer look like a good person in comparison, and we don’t want to strain their brains by having to “think.” That’s why it should go as no surprise that once America got over their weird (but brief) fixation with game shows in the late 1990s, they righted the ship by going the complete opposite intellectual direction by developing an obsession with Reality TV Shows.

And honestly, Reality TV is a blessing for American TV Producers.  You don’t have to pay “writers” and people will assume that what they’re watching is real and organic, and is in no way practically just as scripted as any sitcom or drama.

And while America spends its time giving Emmy’s to The Amazing Race, we here at AFFotD honestly don’t give a shit about “popular” and “successful” and “critically acclaimed” reality television programs.  We’re just here to poke fun at…

America’s 10 Worst Reality TV Shows

“A Shot at Love with- an alien bi-sexual.”

10.  More to Love (FOX)

The American mindset is complicated and we don’t ask that you always understand our reasoning behind various cultural preferences, we just ask that you allow us to have them.  So while America loves being fat, we don’t want to see fat people on our TV screen.  Seriously, ever since 1994, every network is only allowed to have one fat person as a regular cast member at a time.  The only reason that CBS gets away with Mike and Molly is that they bought the fat-person slot from ABC after The Drew Carey Show went off the air.

What we’re trying to say is, most Americans watch reality dating shows in the same way that sexually frustrated suburban housewives read Romance novels- imagining people who are more attractive than you boning is a nice escape from the normal day-in-day-out drudgery that is your fourth heart attack this calendar year.  Which is why Fox’s 2009 flop (spoiler alert, Fox is absolutely going to dominate this list) More to Love was such an unmitigated failure.  “More to love” is something middle-aged truckers say to the college girl they’re hitting on after she disgustingly says, “But you’re old and fat.”  It is not, however, an way to get people excited for your dating show that centers around the premise of having a bunch of “plus sized” women trying to win the heart of a “330 pound 26 year old” while being contractually restricted from using the word “fat.”

The show started with the “star,” Luke Conley, promising not to judge any of the women contestants by their size under the well established law of “the pot calling the kettle black.”  So not only did this show remove all the parts of The Bachelor that people actually liked (read as- hot people) it also was apparently quite terrible in its own right.

On the plus side (get it?), the last episode of the show to air did start with some lingering shots of cows grazing in a field, probably because the producers realized they were about to be fired, so they might as well get some fun out of it before that happened.

Oh, and one final note to the Art Director who was in charge of coming up with the show’s logo.  Out of professional courtesy, we just want to remind you that, if you’re trying to make a logo for a fat-person-dating-show, try not to have the two O’s overlapping into each other in a way to remind you of what two fat bellies would look like smooshing together during sex.  Once you see it you can’t unsee it.

9.  Paris Hilton’s My New BFF (MTV)

This show lasted two years in America before America decided to finally start ignoring Hilton in 2009.  Unfortunately, when the “special skills” portion on your resume consists of “night vision blowjobs” and “loose vaginal walls,” you’re going to be really limited in your future job search, which apparently is why she had to keep things going with Paris Hilton’s British Best Friend and Paris Hilton’s Dubai BFF.

“Oh, AFFotD, you jokesters,” you just chuckled at the TV screen.  “A TV show about Paris Hilton trying to find her best friend in Dubai?  That’s the kind of biting cultural commentary that keeps me coming to your website day in and day out.”  Yeah, uh…about that…

Yeah, it’s fucking real.

Full disclosure, we decided not to screen the TV show that centered around “Paris Hilton has a series of young women do competitions to determine who will be her new best friend” as a concept because we read somewhere that every person who ever watched this TV show fell into a coma brought on by a severe and sudden case of spider syphilis.

8.  Mr. Personality (FOX)

What do you get when you combine an attractive young woman, a trove of men wearing masks so creepy they were probably rejected from the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut, and a woman who helped tarnish the top office of America through her ability to suppress her gag reflex?  The only thing capable of giving Rupert Murdoch an erection, obviously.  You also have Mr. Personality, a short-lived 2003 reality matchmaking show that was randomly hosted by Monica Lewinsky.

Hayley Arp, whose only other imdb credit was as “Herself-Audience Member” in an episode of American Idol, had to choose a husband among a group of Magneto’s Henchmen men wearing masks.  The masks were to ensure that Hayley didn’t choose her mate based on looks, and instead on his personality (also the shape of his chin, and his race/ethnicity.  Sorry Mexican guy immediately to the right of Monica Lewinsky!) and she ended up marrying some real-estate developer/millionaire.  Which is totally cheating, but actually pretty damn American.  “Fine, I can’t tell if he’s hot or not?  I’ll marry the rich one, then.”

And while the casting of Monica Lewinsky as the show’s host was heralded by 1997 stand-up comics (“I smell a comeback!  Time to get out my cigar-joke thesaurus!”) we at AFFotD have to question if “knowing what Bill Clinton’s junk tastes like” (salty?) really qualifies her as an expert to help a woman choose a man based on his “personality.”  Unless the only advice she gave out was, “Ask if he’s the president” in which case, hey, good job, casting director of Mr. Personality!

7.  Who’s Your Daddy? (FOX)

From 2000-2005, Fox had to have someone on staff whose only job was to come up with cringe-worthy puns to turn into Reality TV Show titles, right?  In this clever ploy to trick foreigners in thinking Americans have no soul, an adult who was placed for adoption as an infant is put in a room with 25 men, and has to guess which one is her biological father in order to win a large cash sum!  If she guesses incorrectly, than the non-biological father she picked gets the $100,000 instead.  So it’s basically like To Tell the Truth, only horrible.

It only aired for one episode (where the contestant won the money by correctly identifying her father) thus proving that Americans don’t need to see people dealing with the most emotionally raw event of their adult life on camera, since we already have Jerry Springer for that.  The creator of this show also plugged it with two additional Reality TV ideas, but thankfully Fox decided to pass on Show Me On The Doll Where The Bad Man Touched You and Who Wants to Euthanize a Grandparent.

6.  Married By America (FOX)

You know when you see someone who seems so normal that they probably have a terrible dark secret that keeps them up at night?  We’re not talking about “Once cheated on a test” or “has fidelity issues,” we mean “That tall guy in the blue shirt on the right side of that picture dresses up like a homeless person and occasionally stabs people coming out of 4AM bars for the cheap thrill of it” or “That Brunette with her arms crossed is actually 32.”

We, America, had nothing to do with setting up these eventual Dexter/Julia Stiles serial killing couples, despite the insistence of this 2003 Reality TV Show.  In it, five single people agreed to marry, sight unseen, strangers chosen “by America.”  The strangers even got to have their bodies donated to science in the event that one of the contestants should “Come home to find a grizzly ‘accident’ had occurred.”  Wink wink.  Congratulations, America, their blood is on your hands!

Don’t worry, we’re just kidding about the serial killer stuff.  But people were pretty pissed off at the idea of using phone-in voting to determine someone’s future spouse.  Plus, the guy who has his hand to his chin in a ‘thinker’ pose?  He totally was a serial killer.  That’s real, you can tell.  Look into those hollow eyes.

And on that unsettling note, we leave you to wait in anticipation to see the five worst American reality TV shows.  We promise there will be less Paris Hilton.