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?

I don’t normally blog about The Biggest Loser. Even though I’ve been regrettably faithful to the show this season, I feel like regularly updating you on what’s going on with hottie trainer Bob and scary trainer Jillian and their gang of tortured contestants would diminish the value of TiFaux.

That said, I’ve got to bring something up.

There has been a faction of men this season who have started using the word “pride” over and over. Presumably, this just means what it means on face value — pride in one’s self and one’s family. In fact, on one episode the fellas made the lamentable (and completely non-alcohol influenced) decision to all get pride tattoos while on a reward trip to Las Vegas.

But they have no idea, right? About gay pride, that is. The fact that people usually just refer to it as “Pride” — as in, “Are you going to Pride this year?”

They’ve been known to do that football huddle thing where they put their hands in the middle of a circle and then shout “pride!” And all I can think of is seven-foot-tall drag queens and skinny guys with mesh tank tops.

I’ve gotten in trouble before for being a spoiler. It happens when you’re a TV blogger.

Part of me, the devil-may-care, cavalier blogger says — screw it, if you don’t want to get spoiled on something, don’t effing check the TV blogs. The other part of me (the dominant part, to be sure) is a people-pleaser, desperate for approval and terrified of conflict.

As John posted earlier, New York magazine did an article on the “statute of limitations” for spoilers. They made a chart about it to accompany the article — you guys know what a boner I have for a good chart — and I have screen-shot, cropped, uploaded and posted it below.

So, what do you think?

The most controversial part of this is probably the first row, where they basically give you a free pass to shout from the rooftop who gets kicked off Project Runway as soon as Heidi gives the ol’ double cheek kiss.

Having gotten in trouble before (repeatedly, in fact) for spoiling this very show, I have to say that the viewing public disagrees. I think there should be a 24-hour buffer for people who DVRed the show because they “had a thing” or “got caught up” or “got wasted immediately after work.” Even event television like La Runway has to be missed every once in a while and no one likes to get spoiled.

This is where I open up the floor to you…

The Ashton Kutcher brainchild Beauty and the Geek is shattering another cultural norm this season.

After previously proving that girls can be smart too, now they’re tackling the illusion that gay men can be socially inadequate. This season, in some sort of boys vs. girls set-up, they’ve cast a self-proclaimed “gaysian.”

Viva the rainbow.

Exploitational reality TV shows are like snowflakes — they’re all perverse in their own special way.

There’s the Fear Factor variety of exploitation — the “I’ll pay you a modest sum to do something disgusting” kind — where the host is the equivalent of a weaselly redheaded schoolboy who dares the kid most in need of attention to eat bugs. Then there’s the kind of exploitation embodied by The Biggest Loser and Starting Over– where people with huge problems reveal way too much of themselves.

But Big Brother is a special case among the genres. They seemingly cast exclusively from the pool of LA waiter/actor/models, thereby getting a crop of people who are willing to do anything for screen time. As mentioned before, one of their current cast members has a career kissing boys on camera.

Now, one of Big Brothers more sadistic twists has caused two of its cast members to need medical attention. The show often forces half of the cast to eat a diet of “slop” in order to incite conflict and misery. According to Reality Blurred, while one cast member had an allergic reaction to the slop, another had an out and out seizure:

Amanda Hansen passed out and then had a seizure on the live feeds after saying, “I need sugar really bad, and they won’t let me in the DR,” The “DR” is the diary room, where contestants interact with producers, and “they” equals the producers. She then said it was “because I’m hypoglycemic. I need bread or fruit or something. I need sugar really bad, and I went in the DR and told them. … They better give me some. I think I’m going to go again.” In other words, producers apparently refused to help her until after she collapsed and had a seizure, when houseguest Josh pushed the emergency button that the houseguests later said summons police and paramedics.

Of course, in some sort of bizarre commentary on fame and competition, both contestants have returned to the game after getting checked out.

This is kind of perverse, but in retrospect (now that you know everything’s okay) kind of hilarious: the video of the seizure is interrupted by the producers cutting away to Big Brother trivia clips.[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/TVnuKf9KuJo" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Yet another reality show contestant’s porn past has surfaced in the wake of his minor television stardom. This time it’s some dude named James from the new season of Big Brother. There’s a picture of him over to the right, making a terrifying and unsexy face. Reality Blurred reports that he has appeared in amateur porn and gay porn print ads. If you want to know the specifics (and how could you not?), click here.

It’s not uncommon for reality stars to indulge in the porns after their star has faded. Tons of people have done it, including Tonya from The Real World: Chicago (Cinemax), Survivor winner Jenna Morasca (Playboy) and a female Apprentice loser (Playboy). When the reality machine has chewed you up and spat you out, taking your clothes off for the camera is basically the equivalent of an acting career death rattle.

But sometimes porn is a stepping stone to reality TV stardom. Well, it isn’t necessarily helpful, but if you have the kind of personality to go out and do porn, you probably have the type of personality to go on some sort of reality show. Thusly, here’s a list of some reality TV folks who have had their tawdry pasts resurface.

I also just want to put it out there that the reason I know all this is because I’m a TV nerd, not a porn fiend. I’m serious.

Brian – Winner of Survivor: Thailand

Brian was probably one of the sleaziest winners of Survivor ever — gaining votes only because he was paired with an equally awful tribemate named Clay. He was billed as a used car salesman because, presumably, it was more flattering than his other profession: star of soft core porn on the Playboy Channel and Cinemax. His IMDB lists him as the star of gems like Passion Cove and The Pleasure Zone, while he assumed the role of “Rednick #1″ in Chick Street Fighter. You may also remember him as the dude who shot a puppy with a bow and arrow.

Militia – gladiator on the new version of American Gladiators

Fleshbot unveiled the dirt on Militia recently noting that before he became a professional jouster/hill knocker-offer, he had done some “modeling” for the gays at Colt Studios. Follow the link if you’re interested in seeing more of the scary fellow at left.

Ozzy – contestant on the Survivor (the Race War edition as well as the current season)

Ozzy was (and is) known as one of the best Survivor contestants in terms of sheer skill. He whupped butt in the challenges and secured his place by bringing home fish every night. But to pay the bills before the island, Ozzy had a stint on Playboy TV on a classy little show called “Foursome.”

Jonathan – contestant on Unan1mous

I don’t really remember this show either. But apparently it has to do with nine strangers in a bunker and they have to choose one person to get a large cash prize. One chap’s history in gay porn resurfaced soon after the show. His porn name was Tino. True story.

And now our traffic will double based on people Googling for porn. Huzzah!