Aside from my unrequited love letter to co-finalist Matt Locke, I haven’t really talked about this season of Design Star. Suffice to say, it’s been enjoyable enough to keep me coming back week after week. However, that may just be because of aforementioned beefcake.

The series is down to two finalists: Matt and the bubbly bottle blond Jennifer. Jennifer is an immensely likable gal who likes to paint leaves on walls. Her whole backstory is that she auditioned with her husband, also a designer, but only she made it. She is friendly and cute but, of course, I cannot support her instead of you-know-who.

Last night’s penultimate episode featured the two designers designing homes for New Orleans families whose homes are still devastated by Katrina. They received the help of a crew of carpenters as well as eliminated contestants Trish and porn Mikey. Both families received their new homes with reactions of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition proportions.

If you’re so inclined, you can vote for the winner here. Last year’s choice was pretty clear — there was pleasant and easygoing Kim versus loud, shirtless surfer Todd. This year — it’s anybody’s guess.

Dear Matt from HGTV’s Design Star,

Please, for both our sakes, stop calling me.

If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times — these things never work out. You’re a star of the modest HGTV reality show Design Star; I’m the scribe of a moderately-known, occasionally-read blog about television. We’re just from different worlds. Bloggers and reality folk are natural enemies — like cats and dogs, cops and robbers, fire and water, ninjas and robots.

Listen, I know all about you. How you’re a Colorado-born artist-cum-designer with a smile as broad as your dome is bald. How you’re the nice guy amongst a throng of interior designers who can be both catty and vicious. But our innate animal attraction doesn’t mean we can disrupt the natural order — bloggers and reality folks are the Capulets and Montagues of the twenty-first century. Believe me, if we keep heading down this road you’re going to be poisoned, I’m going to have a dagger in my chest and Vondie Curtis-Hall is going to eulogize us.

No one needs that, Matt. No amount of adorable eye-twinkles will change the facts.

Furthermore, it doesn’t help matters when you call me, three sheets to the wind on whiskey sours, talking about the house you can design for us in the Rockies. About how we can decorate the home ourselves and then raise alpacas on our expanse of land. Or maybe make and bottle our own line of jams and jellies.

And, yes, I’m sure that after you win the current season of Design Star you’ll be able to have enough basic cable clout to get us guest spots on Barefoot Contessa. You keep saying how you can build good old Ina a new kitchen table while I keep her company as she methodically purees vegetables for our gazpacho.

By the way, I hope I didn’t lead you on that time you caught a look at my laptop and the desktop was tiled with your headshot. I mean, I knew you were going to look at it. I was just playing a joke.

I just hope we’re on the same page because I don’t want anyone’s feelings to get hurt. Okay?

Sincerely,

DAN

PS - I love you.

Every time I think I’ve become a genuine fanatic about something, there’s always someone who can outdo me.  I guess it’s the nature of the internet where the most fervent, psychotic devotees will shout the loudest and get heard.

What I’m leading up to is that even though I am a self-professed sucker reality TV, there are many people out there who have the fever way worse than I do. Case in point, the people who compiled this (pretty amazing) video.

It’s a total cliche for reality TV participants to say, when called on their bullshit, that they’re “not here to make friends.” If they are really up a creek, they’ll throw in the “I came here to win.” And now, the good folks at Four Four have driven home just how big of a cliche it is.

Watch in disbelief.

Among the shows I feel like I could watch (if only the network it aired on — FX — was in any part of my consciousness) is Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days.

Spurlock is the guy who nearly killed himself by eating McDonald’s every day in “Super Size Me” and is known for both his gregarious personality and unfortunate choices in facial hair. He’s pretty charming, though, and the concept behind 30 Days is pretty cool.

Essentially, it’s a classy version of Wife Swap — without the wives. A person who is very ingrained in one lifestyle experiences 30 Days living in a completely foreign and challenging environment. So far this season, participants have included a former football player who must spend a month in a wheelchair, a hunter who has to work for PETA and Spurlock himself who goes to work in a coal mine.

The episode that airs tonight is intriguing to me for the obvious gay angle. A homophobe goes to live with a pair of gay dads.

To give you an idea of what it’ll turn out like, here’s a quote from one of the dads taken from an Advocate article:

I think Kati was truly hurt when I told her I couldn’t be her friend. But she told us she was going back to California to work against gay marriage. Ultimately, it’s not a “live and let live” or “agree to disagree” situation. We’re not passing judgment on how she lives her life, but her views and actions threaten the existence our family. Michigan just had a marriage amendment updated by the courts that eradicated domestic-partner health care benefits for state employees. Now Tom’s not covered by my health insurance.

The episode airs on FX at ten p.m.

Desperate times call for desperate television choices. As such, here’s a preview for Shear Genius — Project Runway for hairstylists. It debuts June 25.

It should be noted that, in all likelihood, this will be entirely watchable. The question is — do we really want to make this kind of investment?

Maggie noted (way back when) how these fifth generation Project Runway clones are like the clones in the Michael Keaton farce Multiplicity. By the fifth time he copies himself, the clones are functionally useless and stupid — wearing pots on their heads and such.

However, sometimes I wonder if there were other variations of Runway that failed before that show debuted. Now, in the event of Runway’s success, those failed shows are being trotted out even though they never quite worked. It’s like that fourth Alien sequel — the one with Winona Ryder as the spunky pixie robot — where Sigourney Weaver finds all of the failed clones of Ripley before the one that actually worked. They were all mutated and preserved in brine — some of them were just clumps of teeth and hair.

Shear Genius is probably somewhere between a clump of teeth and hair and Sloth from The Goonies. If you follow my drift.

It’s been a while since the reality TV behemoth shoved its jiggling belly right in the middle of the network primetime TV schedule. TV execs like the fact that it’s a cheap way to create new shows during the summer and, hell, during the regular season as well.

But now everyone can pretty much see that the well is running dry for new ideas. Bravo is continually cranking out the sausage of competitive flower arranging (or whatever) and there’s always something brewing within the romantic-series-with-a-secret formula (Joe Millionaire, Boy Meets Boy) or the fish-out-of-water subgenre (Amish in the City, The Simple Life).

As such, the creator of Big Brother (the reality show/downfall of Western Civilization) has created a Web site for you to pitch your own program. If your pitch gets made into a real life show, you’ll get endless cash prizes and your own island nation off the coast of Madagascar.

However, I’ve come up with a foolproof plan for creating endless reality show ideas. Below, find three categories: people, activities and locations. Pick one from each category, squish them together and then you have the premise for your show. Expand and extrapolate, add competitive aspects. The world is your oyster.

See the examples and categories below…

Participants: Amateur rodeo competitors, midgets, soccer moms, lesbians, frat boys, scientists, librarians, bloggers, Russian immigrants, hipsters, truck drivers.

Activity: Live in a school bus, compete in a scavenger hunt, race cross-country, work in a Dairy Queen, perform stand-up comedy, learn to perform Shakespeare, teach kindergarten.

Location: A sunny Puerto Rican beach, a fabulous New York City loft, a retirement village in Florida, a trailer park in West Virginia, a Radio Shack in Indiana, a police department in Minnesota, an Indian reservation in Wyoming, a fishing town in Maine, a religious bookstore in Texas, a casino in Mississippi.

Show #1

The basis: Russian immigrants perform stand-up comedy in a trailer park in West Virginia.

The program title: “Give me that microphone, Sergei!”

The show: A dozen fresh-off-the-boat Russian immigrants compete for citizenship by performing stand-up comedy for a group of drunken West Virginia trailer folks. Each week, the residents take out their lawn chairs and the contestants try to spout off one-liners about not having to wait in line for days to get a Big Mac. Yakov Smirnoff hosts.

Show #2

The basis: Lesbians compete in a scavenger hunt in a Florida retirement village.

The program title: “You look like a nice young man…”

The show: Members of a Broward County lesbian political organization must compete in a scavenger hunt in a senior citizens home. The trick? They aren’t looking for things, they’re looking for bits of information from the residents. Therefore, they have to coax the names of first grade teachers from the senior citizens while enduring the failing memories of the old folks and inevitable stories that come along with it.

Show #3

The basis: Hipsters teach kindergarten in a religious bookstore in Texas.

The program title: Jesus, Mary and Joe Strummer

The show: Ten Williamsburg hipsters, outfitted in leather jackets and skinny jeans, must travel to Abilene, Texas to teach drawling kindergarten students. While they try to expand the kids’ minds by playing the Velvet Underground, the impressionable tots instead choose to draw pictures of horses and feel uneasy about reading adapted Kerouac over comparatively clear-cut Bible stories.

The other night I watched the season premiere of The Mole, which wasn’t really a season premiere as it was a relaunch. The first couple seasons aired long enough go that then-host Anderson Cooper hadn’t yet made a name for himself as a sexy news anchor.
Despite that it is a network reality show, I really think The Mole is worth your time. Or maybe I’m unreliable in this case since elimination-style reality shows are my critical Achilles Heel. However, the interactive nature of the show — having to guess who the mole is along with the contestants — makes it a fun watch. More so, certainly, than the guess-which-aspiring-handbag-designer-will-have-a-short-lived-engagement-to-a-chiseled-
but-vapid-eligible-bachelor-style reality show.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, here’s the premise: the show has twelve contestants, one of whom is The Mole. As the players go through “tests” (in the first episode it involved grabbing bags of money while jumping off a waterfall) they accrue money that goes into a pot. The Mole will try to sabotage the players and prevent money from going into the pot. Every episode, the players take a quiz to test their knowledge on who The Mole is. The lowest-scoring player is “executed” (their word, not mine — that part has always given me the creeps).

This season, obviously, doesn’t feature Anderson Cooper as the emcee anymore (Mama’s gone big-time! CNN! 360!). Instead, they’ve gotten this guy named Jon Kelley from the celebratainment show Extra who seems nice enough. He does, weirdly, resemble a black Anderson Cooper — they’ve both got the grey-ish bird-like thing going on. Does anyone see this but me? Can we at least say they have a similar je ne sais quoi?

Generally speaking, the cast for The Mole is a little swifter than that of your average Big Brother or Farmer Wants a Wife (yes, that is a show). There are neuroscientists, doctors, attorneys, etc. Let’s meet some of them…

Nicole, seen at the right, is a beautiful doctor. She’s also annoying as all hell and unanimously hated by the cast, having been voted as the biggest whiner in the show’s second test. She’s far too strong a personality to be The Mole.

There’s also Paul, the requisite blue collar utility worker who, if he wins, they can say was a triumph of “street smarts” over “book smarts.” In any case, he seems to enjoy being smug and yelling a lot based on the previews for the next episode.

There’s also the “old lady,” the jolly/roly poly graphic designer no one can get mad at, the gay guy (who can’t seem to run), the model, and the second-place-is-first-loser-style high school teacher/soccer coach.

The Mole is quite enjoyable, I find — especially the sadistic elimination ceremony. As long as you don’t put too much stock in who you think The Mole is (you’ll always be wrong), watching everyone scramble to create hair-brained schemes to figure it out can be fun to watch.

However, given the fact that the premiere netted some paltry numbers, I wouldn’t be surprised if the show gets prematurely dumped.

There must be some pretty desperate folks over at VH1.

That is, it must be kind of sad when the glory days of the network were The Surreal Life and Celebrity Fit Club. I have no tangible proof of the fact that the whole Celebreality schtick is fading, but it seems to be safely “over.” My Fair Brady and the like have faded into embarrassing memories.

But did you know that the network has a brand new series that you probably didn’t know was going on?  Or, at least, I didn’t know it was going on and so I think that no one knew it was going on.

So, before we play the “which c-list celebrity is actually on this show” game, let’s play “what exactly is this game show.”

The game is: Celebrecadabra! (celebrities do magic), Celeb P.I. (celebrities solve fake mysteries), Celeb Commando (celebrities go to boot camp and the firing range)

Faded eighties actor: Judge Reinhold, C. Thomas Howell, Leif Garrett

Former Talk Soup host: Aisha Tyler, Hal Sparks, John Henson

Rapper: Kid from Kid ‘n’ Play, Hammer, Biz Markie

Celebrity Fit Club veteran: Kimberly Locke, Carnie Wilson, the Snapple Lady

Female comic: Lisa Lampenelli, Rita Rudner, Lisa Ann Walter

Girly singer: A Cheetah Girl, a Danity Kane member, a Pussycat Doll

Last Comic Standing: Ant, Dat Phan, Todd Glass

I would devour a toddler if it would mean Bob would be my boyfriend.

The Biggest Loser concluded last night. Obviously, don’t read any further if you don’t want to be spoiled.

Again, I can’t really justify my watching of this show. I carry around a lot of shame on a daily basis, but even I have a problem sitting down and watching it while maintaining some semblance of self-respect. What can I say? There’s something weirdly satisfying about the concept of competitive weight loss. You catch yourself saying things to yourself like “well, he pulled in a big number last week — let’s see if he can do it again or if his body needed to rest.”

For what it’s worth though, I managed to watch the two-hour finale in about twenty to twenty-five minutes.

It was a pretty good season, however. I grew attached to the mother/son duo of Jackie and Dan (and whatever inference you might make of me empathizing with a sarcastic mama’s boy would be… uh… entirely accurate) although they were eliminated in advance of the finale.

The final twist of the series was that viewers had to decide which of the final “bottom two” contestants would be eliminated. I was hoping it would be drawling, faded football star Roger, but viewers instead chose to give Mark (the emotionally frayed Bostonite) the boot. The reason I wanted Roger to go was because he (I thought) had the better chance of winning and, in my fit of I-am-woman-hear-me-roar-ness, I bought into the hype of getting the first female Biggest Loser.

So, in the end, it was Roger versus Kelly verus Ali. Ali had lost enough weight that losing any more would be scary and unhealthy (which is, frankly, my own fitness goal).

And… in the end she won! Yay! Two steps forward for feminism and all lady-kind. Almost as good as having a female president (and, at this point, much more plausible).

I can’t believe I forgot to talk up The Paper, MTV’s newest reality show. It premiered last night, and unlike most MTV reality shows, this one appears to be about actual teenagers doing things teenagers actually do — in this case, rip each other to shreds and put out a school paper. It is phenomenal.

Sure, it has that crazy editing thing that MTV likes to do, where they treat us all like kitties that will get distracted and wander away if there aren’t a thousand things going on at all times. Also, MTV, I do not need to know what crappy song is playing every second of the show. Besides, you only play about ten seconds of a song before quick cutting to something else, so it’s not like I get a good sense of what the song is like. <end old lady rant>

The students they’re following — ambitious Amanda, nice guy Alex, basket case Adam, and insecure wench Gianna — are worth putting up with the editing nightmare. These kids have passions. They’re mean. They’re reasonably intelligent. They’re hard-working. They are clearly going to go nuts dealing with each other, and sooner rather than later.

In the first episode, they compete to see who will be the next editor in chief. You’ll have to watch for yourself for the full effect, but just as a teaser: The competition has some parallels to the current presidential campaign.

Gianna, right, will crush your happiness for your own good.

I like this show. Teenagers are awkward and emotional and backstabby. They also work really hard at things they enjoy. This feels true to my experience in a way that most shows — especially on MTV — do not. Watch it! And if you did, tell me what you think! First question: Did you hate Gianna and Trevor as much as I did?