2003-10-05 10:11 p.m.
Trash Is My Paradise
Here's how low having a TiVo can bring you: A year ago, I watched very little TV. I mostly had cable so that I could watch the A's blow their lead in the playoffs (sadly, something they're on the verge of doing for the fourth year running). There were a few shows I'd catch when I remembered they were on, and I almost never remembered, because keeping track of a TV schedule in my head was harrrrd, and I needed that brain space for old '80s song lyrics and Tim Hudson's win-loss record when pitching in a dome and the pledge number for KQED.
But now... now I'm missing Paradise Hotel like an amputated limb, y'all.
It was the Platonic ideal of a reality show, so bad it was good. Eleven "sexy singles" were locked up in a big house in Acapulco, plied with a bottomless supply of beer and margaritas and instructed to have at it. Sometime during the week, they'd have a party or a pointless contest or one contestant would get to invite a couple of the others on an excursion. They'd have a "Pandora's Box" session, where everyone would write questions for other contestants that were supposed to be answered truthfully, and which quickly degenerated into a method of getting in anonymous digs at the other contestants. At the end of each week, they'd choose roommates, and the odd man or woman out would be sent home... for.ev.er, to be replaced with an audience member of the opposite sex. Lather, rinse in Corona, repeat.
It was an unselfconsciously trashy hour of schadenfreude. It claimed to be a "game" but the rules changed every week, because the producers were lazy and because "Paradise is full of surprises." Even the initial rule, "hook up or go home" (or as one TWoP poster called it, "put out or get out") was changed to "pair up or go home" when they found that precious little hooking up was going on. The audience member idea? Ditched about halfway through, when they started bringing in "audience members" who'd already been rejected. "The game?" First there was no game, then there was a game with "the ultimate prize," but no one knew how or when the game would end or what "the ultimate prize" might be.
And the contestants? The whoriest famewhores who ever whored. (One of them was even recycled from another reality show -- the bug-eyed, "29-year old" Toni of Love Cruise infamy. Can it get any more attention-seeking than that?) 2/3 of them were dumb as a box of rocks and had a high school mob mentality. The other 1/3 had at least enough self-awareness to wonder what kind of Lord of the Flies tropical hell they'd landed themselves in.
What was even better was when the exiled contestants started coming back (yeah, that for.ev.er rule got changed, too) and pretended to make up for their earlier shitty behavior. They'd continue to talk trash behind each other's back and quibble over the breakfast table over whom America loved more, then act nice during the contests and ceremonies where they knew what they said would get on air.
Now that Paradise Hotel is over, wherever will I get my schadenfreude fix? Whose dysfunctional relationship will I mock -- and when half of that relationship gets chucked off the show, who will write earnest songs celebrating their love? Will reality TV ever be this sleazy and this dumb and this good ever again?