Reality TV - Seriously, WTF?

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Subsailor

Subsailor

Life is Tough, Stupid makes it Tougher
Joined
Jun 17, 2011
Messages
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Location
Prescott Valley
I was surfing the channels last night, the wife wasn't feeling good so I figured I'd watch a little TV, rarely done in the Summer here.
I hit a commercial for something called "here comes honey boo-boo" and they are offering scratch and sniff cards so that you can follow the season opener and sniff what they are doing in the show. The commercial showed them exhaling into each others faces and farting and I'm thinking to myself, WTF?!?!?!? People are really supporting this show? How long has this been going on?

Don't even get me started on all of the Alaska "Reality" shows out there.
 
This is one of the reasons why I dropped cable. I was tired of paying $100 a month for this kind of "entertainment".
 
I had the same reaction when I saw the honey boo boo show. It's vile.

I have been enjoying the shows on history channel though. Swamp people, mountain men. I understand that they're far from truth and most is embellished if not scripted and staged. I still find it entertaining though.
 
Subsailor said:
I was surfing the channels last night, the wife wasn't feeling good so I figured I'd watch a little TV, rarely done in the Summer here.
I hit a commercial for something called "here comes honey boo-boo" and they are offering scratch and sniff cards so that you can follow the season opener and sniff what they are doing in the show. The commercial showed them exhaling into each others faces and farting and I'm thinking to myself, WTF?!?!?!? People are really supporting this show? How long has this been going on?

Don't even get me started on all of the Alaska "Reality" shows out there.
Click to expand...

Smell-o-vision is back!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-O-Vision
 
jbaysurfer said:
Then how do you watch your Sharks games?

PS, I can tell from the screename you're an OG Sharks fan. Me too. Cow Palace days! :mug:
Click to expand...

Center Ice Live on the Roku or Xbox. I go to my brothers house for the blacked out games, which was a lot more than I thought there would be. All playoff games are blacked out, too, which means I won't pay for that service again.
 
Subsailor said:
...Don't even get me started on all of the Alaska "Reality" shows out there.
Click to expand...
Wait a minute are you saying that these shows aren't real? lol I got sucked into Deadliest Catch. That spawned the enumerable job based reality shows and the Alaska / Arctic thing to boot.

Hang on to your Mukluks there is more. New for this season:

“Wild Alaska”: A special airing on Animal Planet documenting Alaska wildlife, including polar bears on the state’s north coast and animals in Denali National Park and Preserve.

“Alaska Bush Family”: A new series following Billy and Ami Brown and their seven children, living in the Copper River Basin in the tradition of Alaska homesteaders.

“Alaska Women Looking for Love”: Thankfully, this is just a working title for a series that plays into the old adage about Alaska’s off-kilter ratio of men and women -- “the odds are good, but the goods are odd.” Five women are taken from Alaska to what TLC is referring to as “distant shores” -- in reality just Miami, Florida.

“Great Bear Stakeout”: Another one-off wildlife documentary that follows a number of Alaska bears over the course of several months.

“Alaska: The Last Frontier”: Another show about an “off-the-grid” Alaska family, this time the Kilchers, based near Homer. Despite taking place on the relatively populated Kenai Peninsula, “they must hunt, gather, garden and raise livestock in order to provide enough food to ensure their family’s survival,” according to press material.

“Ultimate Survival Alaska”: In which several Alaska “survivalists” are dropped in remote locations with a goal of getting to a destination alive. Among the cast? 2012 Iditarod winner Dallas Seavey and his brother Tyrell. This is a serial program that is set to begin airing in May on the National Geographic Channel.

“Wild West Alaska”: A continuing series about Wild West Guns, based in Anchorage, which features custom firearm builds and a cast of “colorful characters.”

And that’s without even mentioning Arctic-themed shows like “Ice Cold Gold” set in Greenland, or “Polar Bear Crossing” set in Churchill, Canada, or other shows about resource extraction, like “Gold Rush,”...

You can read the original article here. if you want to mouth vomit some more.
 
We tried watching Swamp People a couple of Winters ago but after about the 12th "Choot Elizabeth, Chooot" we couldn't take it anymore. Duck Dynasty, it was more interesting to read how the dad, Phil, turned his life around.
 
Game Center Live on the Roku or Xbox. I go to my brothers house for the blacked out games, which was a lot more than I thought there would be. All playoff games are blacked out, too, which means I won't pay for that service again.
 
I think there are some good reality TV shows out there, but there's also a lot of tripe. "Intervention" has won multiple Emmys and is a very compelling show. Also, everything I know about US law, I learned from watching "COPS". :)

I also really enjoy shows like "How Its Made" and "Megafactories," which take you inside factories and show how products are produced.

Those aside, I do also have a few vices that I like watching either for shameless entertainment or outright shadenfreude, such as Masterchef, Hell's Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares, Survivor, Celebrity Apprentice, America's Got Talent, Till Debt Do Us Part, and more law-enforcement-themed shows like COPS (Bait Car, Vegas Strip, Border Patrol, that sort of stuff).
 
I have my own theory on reality TV. The only reason most of these shows exist is so that people can watch people who are stupider than them and feel superior, but because the shows are rotting peoples' brains and making the viewers stupider and stupider, the shows themselves have to keep spiraling down. It's a vicious cycle - watch a show to feel superior to stupid people, show makes you stupider, so you need to watch dumber and dumber and dumber people just to get your fix. It's like a drug addict that goes from crushing up a couple Oxycontins to shooting up $500 of heroin a day. I'm terrified of what comes after "Honey Boo Boo Smells Of Poo" or whatever that ****ing thing is.
 
Magic8Ball said:
Wait a minute are you saying that these shows aren't real? lol I got sucked into Deadliest Catch. That spawned the enumerable job based reality shows and the Alaska / Arctic thing to boot.

Hang on to your Mukluks there is more. New for this season:

“Wild Alaska”: A special airing on Animal Planet documenting Alaska wildlife, including polar bears on the state’s north coast and animals in Denali National Park and Preserve.

“Alaska Bush Family”: A new series following Billy and Ami Brown and their seven children, living in the Copper River Basin in the tradition of Alaska homesteaders.

“Alaska Women Looking for Love”: Thankfully, this is just a working title for a series that plays into the old adage about Alaska’s off-kilter ratio of men and women -- “the odds are good, but the goods are odd.” Five women are taken from Alaska to what TLC is referring to as “distant shores” -- in reality just Miami, Florida.

“Great Bear Stakeout”: Another one-off wildlife documentary that follows a number of Alaska bears over the course of several months.

“Alaska: The Last Frontier”: Another show about an “off-the-grid” Alaska family, this time the Kilchers, based near Homer. Despite taking place on the relatively populated Kenai Peninsula, “they must hunt, gather, garden and raise livestock in order to provide enough food to ensure their family’s survival,” according to press material.

“Ultimate Survival Alaska”: In which several Alaska “survivalists” are dropped in remote locations with a goal of getting to a destination alive. Among the cast? 2012 Iditarod winner Dallas Seavey and his brother Tyrell. This is a serial program that is set to begin airing in May on the National Geographic Channel.

“Wild West Alaska”: A continuing series about Wild West Guns, based in Anchorage, which features custom firearm builds and a cast of “colorful characters.”

And that’s without even mentioning Arctic-themed shows like “Ice Cold Gold” set in Greenland, or “Polar Bear Crossing” set in Churchill, Canada, or other shows about resource extraction, like “Gold Rush,”...

You can read the original article here. if you want to mouth vomit some more.
Click to expand...

Yes, I have to admit I did enjoy the first season of Dealiest Catch.

there is also "Life below Zero". [NatGeo; As deep winter sets in, four Alaskans living in the remote bush must gather and manage scarce resources to ensure their survival.]

Mounted in Alaska, History Channel, about Knight's Taxidermy in Anchorage.

Ice Road Truckers, History Channel, this one got watched a bit more at my house because my oldest son had thing for driver Lisa Kelly.
 
I loved Deadliest Catch, well beyond the first season. Watching everything going on when Phil Harris died.... incredibly riveting.

But, I haven't watched the show since - not intentionally, I just can't quite muster up the enthusiasm for it.

I do think there's a problem with the "reality TV" terminology - there's a world of difference between shows like that, or something like "Alaska State Troopers" (which I enjoy), or Intervention (which is almost always unwatchable tragic), or "The First 48"... and friggin' Honey Boo Boo.
 
that leads us to the whole genre of "Survival" shows; Naked and Afraid, Man Woman Wild with Mike hawk and his wife, Dual Survival with Cody Lundin and Dave Canteberry, Bear Grylls, and others.

I learned a lot of what they teach growing up kind of wild and out on a farm but it seems to me that there is a lot of dramatic setup and wasn't there some controversy on the authenticity for a couple of these folks?

I must admit I have read Cody Lundin's books and actually kind of enjoyed the writing style.
 
cfonnes said:
Naked and Afraid is pretty good.
Click to expand...
A camera crew surrounding you while being naked with a naked stranger is, well, strange. How did we get there from the (original of its kind?) series "Survivorman". Remember Les Straud alone, toting his own cameras around, trying to survive some God forsaken location. Actually the thought of him having to always go back for his cameras became tiring.

+1 to Kombat for outright schadenfreude comment. I am guilty.

I just started watching "Hillbilly Blood: A Hardscrabble Life." Seems there is no hope for me. In my defence at least its not Honey BooBOO.
 
Subsailor said:
I was surfing the channels last night, the wife wasn't feeling good so I figured I'd watch a little TV, rarely done in the Summer here.
I hit a commercial for something called "here comes honey boo-boo" and they are offering scratch and sniff cards so that you can follow the season opener and sniff what they are doing in the show. The commercial showed them exhaling into each others faces and farting and I'm thinking to myself, WTF?!?!?!? People are really supporting this show? How long has this been going on?

Don't even get me started on all of the Alaska "Reality" shows out there.
Click to expand...

Ah, the hillbilly girl & her family behaving badly. You know that little $hit, I mean girl, gets paid $70,000.00 per episode? Some "reality" show aren't bad, like Deadliest Catch or similar shows. But the so-called "reality" shows like Big Brother, Honey Boo-Boo, Survivor, Etc, Etc..
Have nothing to do with reality. You want reality? Watch the news.

Now all that being said, I also have to say this: I don't watch the TV show, but Ariel Tweto (Flying Wild) is one hot little number; skinny thing that she is. Now if she could just gain about 30 lbs (in the right places) & keep her mouth shut...
http://nwidodgy.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/ariel-tweto.jpg?w=880
Regards, GF.
 
There are better reality shows and really bad ones. I really like the outdoors ones where the people are speaking English, but still need subtitles! Animal Cops Huston is on right now.
 
orangehero said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ilMx7k7mso
Click to expand...

Luckily I had put my coffee down before I got too far into this video so I avoided doing a spit-take. :rockin: The truth hits me that way sometimes.

My solution to the whole "YOU WILL PURCHASE WHAT WE OFFER AND YOU WILL LIKE IT!!!" problem was to drop my satellite service, get what passes for high-speed internet around here and rely on my Roku and a home media server. Programs like Sickbeard and CouchPotato get me my weekly shows. I've ripped my DVD collection (700+ and counting). Plex Media Server (freeware) sends everything through my Roku to my TV.

I've not missed a single episode of any of my weekly shows (Castle, CSI, Big Bang Theory, etc). For anything else I've got Netflix and Hulu+. The only thing I don't see anymore are commercials.
 
jcoxen said:
Luckily I had put my coffee down before I got too far into this video so I avoided doing a spit-take. :rockin: The truth hits me that way sometimes.

My solution to the whole "YOU WILL PURCHASE WHAT WE OFFER AND YOU WILL LIKE IT!!!" problem was to drop my satellite service, get what passes for high-speed internet around here and rely on my Roku and a home media server. Programs like Sickbeard and CouchPotato get me my weekly shows. I've ripped my DVD collection (700+ and counting). Plex Media Server (freeware) sends everything through my Roku to my TV.

I've not missed a single episode of any of my weekly shows (Castle, CSI, Big Bang Theory, etc). For anything else I've got Netflix and Hulu+. The only thing I don't see anymore are commercials.
Click to expand...

I started down that road too. It became way too much work. My wife and child do not understand in order for you to watch show X you need to use Apple TV on input 3, this is on netflix, this is on ... it became my job to change the channel! And that brought me back to my childhood when we had a tv without a remote... well I was my Dads remote. So I have AT&T "U" verse now. :drunk:
 
Magic8Ball said:
“Alaska: The Last Frontier”: Another show about an “off-the-grid” Alaska family, this time the Kilchers, based near Homer. Despite taking place on the relatively populated Kenai Peninsula, “they must hunt, gather, garden and raise livestock in order to provide enough food to ensure their family’s survival,” according to press material.
Click to expand...



What I love about this show is that they say its to "ensure their family's survival". I think they will survive just fine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_(singer)
 

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