Reality Television bores me now, but what really angers me is when television shows pretend to be honest contests when they’re really all a pre-determined setup from the get-go, just as we have indelibly learned this week with Bristol Palin’s horrible — but she’s staying! — routine on Dancing with the Stars; as well as Nicki Minaj’s fake meltdown with Mariah Carey on American Idol… which hasn’t even officially aired yet!
Websites like Vote for the Worst tend to take credit for contestants like Bristol Palin beating the odds and staying when it is really all about contractual agreements set in stone before the first dance begins:
They said it was impossible… She’s by far the worst dancer; She’s has the personality of a rock; She’s as likeable as the plague. But it doesn’t matter as VFTW and The Tea Party have done it once again as not only was Bristol safe, she wasn’t even in jeopardy! Meanwhile, VFTW and Bristol knocked off Joey Fatone, who even as the worst dancer in N’Sync can dance circles around Bristol.
Bristol Palin knows she is a public pariah — just like her misbegotten mother — and she would never agree to return to Dancing with the Stars without some sort of financial guarantee, and promise of lasting weekly exposure, that she will be well paid for her time served getting hit over and over again in the public eye.
There are lots of internet rumors that Bristol was guaranteed a three-to-five week stay on the show — to avoid the humiliation of immediately being sent back home to Alaska as she deserves — and that makes a lot of business sense even though it betrays any particle of reality that Dancing with the Stars is an honest competition based on actual dancing.
If Bristol learned one thing from her mother, it is to “know your worth” and Bristol Palin is worth a lot of money to ABC because people love to hate her, and the longer she stays around, the more people will tune in to hope to watch her final, humiliating, demise. Postponing the inevitable for a few weeks only makes the cathartic release of her slapdown even more refreshing. ABC and the Palins are in on the gag — and we owe it to ourselves to realize Bristol Palin isn’t on a dancing show, she is the Sideshow.
Speaking of Sideshows, don’t be fooled into thinking the Nicki Minaj/Mariah Carey “fight” was real. It was all a setup, too. Faked just for you! The producers want heat and fire to save their flailing franchise and they will falsify reality in order to get the end result they want: You panting for a bitch slap catfight on American Idol!
You know the whole fight was a fake because it was recorded on video! Nobody in that American Idol studio would ever be allowed to shoot their stars without explicit preapproval and detailed planning. It just doesn’t happen. So if we have the “insider” footage of the fight — obediently distributed through TMZ — we know it was planned, and the joke is back on us for being so gullible to believe American Idol producers would ever allow the release of such a video if there was any chance of embarrassing their newly minted “stars.”
Billboard lets the catfight out of the bag — as much as they can — based on their promotional role in the music industry:
Is it a publicity stunt or the sort of bitter animosity that could derail America’s most-watched show? With the arrival of on-set video showing “American Idol” judges Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey practically at each others’ throats, the show’s fans are mulling that very question and further wondering: Did Fox make a huge mistake with its flagship program by seating two divas at the same table?
To the contrary, a high-ranking Idol insider tells The Hollywood Reporter it’s all for show. “The Mariah-Nicki diva battle is exactly what Fox executives wanted all along,” says the source, who insists the two singers are in on the joke. “No one’s really worried. They know the parts they’re supposed to play.”
The only way we can defeat these false reality shows is to stop watching them. I’ve officially given up on The Voice and X-Factor this year. I will not watch American Idol after this stunt. I’m done with Big Brother. I decided I would watch one last season of Dancing with the Stars because I like a lot of the past winners — they won the prize when the show was much more real and genuine and improvement week-to-week actually meant something — but I almost gave up on watching this season when I learned of Bristol’s return, because I knew the fix was in for her to hang around much too long, but my appreciation for Emmitt Smith and Gilles Marini is too strong for even the Palins to overcome.