I would live blog my vacation, but you would just fall asleep
9 August 2007I had big plans for today. I was going to GO TO THE LIBRARY. I’ve been inside my neighborhood public library exactly once since I moved over 3 years ago, and it was in order to get the library card that I switched my license to NY for and subsequently never used (sure did enjoy being called to jury duty, though, borough of manhattan). I have a lot of emailing and writing and organizing that I want to get done and none of it was getting done in my apartment, as MTV was airing back to back episodes of True Life. So I packed up my laptop and hauled myself to 96th street, and was shocked to discover that the library takes summer hours and doesn’t open until noon on Thursdays. I’m sorry, what? I’m supposed to stifle my love of learning until the AFTERNOON? So now I am back home, watching all of the bad dating shows I DVRed.
Sometimes when I know I’m going to be doing nothing for a day (don’t look at me like that, I am a pathologically busy person and it doesn’t happen that frequently but when it does, it’s epic) I go through all of the late night TV options and tape things I’ve never seen before just so I have something to watch that isn’t The Daily Show or a documentary on gastric bypass surgery. I try to pick things I would never in a million years watch normally. So last night, I guess part of me thought it would be cool to watch a dating show on BET.
The show is “Hell Date,” and the producers set it up so that some poor sap thinks he’s going on a normal (nationally televised) blind date, not knowing that his companion has been coached to act like his worst nightmare. This gives us a good 15 minutes of steady horror as the “date” gets worse and worse. Then, just when you can’t take it anymore, a little person in a devil costume jumps out from behind the scenes and yells “You’re on HELL DATE!” and booty dances. I am not making this up even a little.
I also taped MTV’s “X Factor,” which is such a well plotted mindfuck I’m convinced that some psychology student is earning his or her PhD based on it. So you have a couple that used to date, but is now dating other people (that makes 4 people total). They tell all 4 that they’re going away for the weekend together (why, why, why would you do this?) then when they arrive, they send the new partners home, and have the exes shack up together. BUT the new partners aren’t going home, they’re getting driven in a circle and then returned to the resort to spy on their boyfriend and girlfriend. BUT they don’t just get to full on watch their loved ones go at it with a former flame, they have tricky tools of deception. Like the exes have been told that they have to wear wrist bands in order to charge things to the room, but really the wrist bands send off signals whenever the Exes touch. And their current partners can watch a tally of how frequently their names get mentioned, read a list of everything charged to the Ex suite, and monitor the touch senors. Throughout their captivity, the current partners are given a series of ridiculous choices: You can have audio, or visual, on tonight’s Ex dinner, but you can’t have both. You get to pick the activity they do together tomorrow– if you pick the not at all sexy basketball, you don’t get to watch them, but if you pick the super sexy massage lessons, you can watch everything they do. I didn’t watch the end because I was too creeped out, but I’m going to assume that everyone goes home and googles convents and monasteries.
The problem with these dating shows is that they are way too obvious. If I were on Hell Date, I would walk within 5 minutes. The trick, I would think, is to give people a reason to stay. I think there should be a show called either Dealbreaker or Fatal Flaw, where the producers work with the friends and family of the dater to come up with a complete profile of their ideal mate. Then the dater is set up with someone who has been coached to act exactly to those specifications, except with one major problem. For example, the dreamboat guy would spend the whole date talking about how he’s a social worker and how he wants to coach his kids’ little league teams when he’s older, and then in passing he would throw in just one truly severe racial or ethnic slur. Then you get to watch and see if that’s enough of a negative for his date to kick him to the curb, despite all of his (fake) wonderful qualities. THAT I would watch.
2 Responses to “I would live blog my vacation, but you would just fall asleep”
August 16th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Hell Date sounds AMAZING. I will pray every night that it is sydnicated in Australia in the near future.
August 16th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Also, your Dealbreaker/Fatal Flaw idea is a little too awesome — you should have pitched it to a network before blogging about it.
I’m dead serious.