Why We Love Real Reality Shows

By Trish Milburn

If you were standing in a field surrounded by all the shows on television, you could pretty much throw a rock in any direction and hit a reality show. They've boomed in popularity in recent years because they're easier and cheaper to make than scripted television comedies or dramas. And I'll admit I'm a fan of Survivor. It's my mind candy. But, to me, there's a difference between "reality" TV like The Real Housewives of Atlanta or Celebrity Apprentice and what I refer to as real reality TV, things like Deadliest Catch and Extreme Couponing.

While some "reality" TV is all about the manufactured drama, the drama on Deadliest Catch is all too real. Lives are at stake as the fleets of crab fishermen take to the Bering Sea in the most dangerous job in the world. There's nothing manufactured about giant waves coming over the sides of the boats or engine failures that could lead to the disaster of the boat capsizing.

Extreme Couponing is a show I've gotten into lately. I don't have the time or the dedication to go to the extremes these couponers do, but it has inspired me to coupon on a smaller level and save money I can use on other things. But I'm endlessly fascinated by how these couponers get hundreds of dollars of groceries and other products for next to nothing.

I decided to ask the other Banditas if they have any favorite real reality shows. Here's what they had to say.

Joan Kayse:

One show I like is Must Love Cats. It features a guy who fancies himself a minstrel and who…loves cats. He travels the country to highlight people involved in rescues, unusual kitty things, i.e. a woman in Dallas who invented “Kitty Wigs”. I kid you not, she fashioned different styled little wigs to put on cats and takes their pictures. Evidently, people have gone wild for it.

Another story involved a cat who woke up his owner and alerted him to their neighbor’s house being on fire. A woman who runs a sanctuary that holds 600 cats. Her motto is “They may not find a home, but they’ll have a life.”

It offers me reassurance that despite my propensity for buying my baby cats toys….I’m NOT at crazy cat lady level yet, LOL.

The other one is My Cat from Hell. This is interesting in that a cat behaviorist goes into psycho kitty households and tames the wild beasts…and their owners who are partly to blame. I discovered a slow blink of the eyes reassures your cat that you are not a threat. I tried it with Grayson the Monkey Cat who gave me a “what’s up with that look.” It’s also given me my new idea on how to train them off the counter. We’ll see.

My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding is the new one I started watching recently. Freaky deaky insights to Irish Travellers lifestyle. Kind of like Jersey Shore meets the Amish type of thing. TLC is a learning channel…but BOY…some of the things you learn!

Nancy Northcott:

I watch Border Wars on NatGeo. I started out watching it as research but then just got interested in the various problems Customs & Border Patrol staffers face. Some of the ways people hide things in vehicles are mind-blowing.

The dh likes American Pickers. I think he fantasizes that they will show up here, clean out our clutter, and finance the boy's college education. No harm in dreaming.

Christine Wells:

I love What Not to Wear, the British version, with Trinny and Susannah. It's not just a makeover show. They really dig into why a woman might let herself go or only dress in power suits at work, and it's a very cathartic process for the women who go on there. I often find myself in tears (yes, I'm a watering pot!) when I see the struggles these women go through. Another favourite is The House of Tiny Tearaways, which is sort of like the Nanny only it's a psychologist who brings three families to live in a house together for a week. All the families have difficult children, but it's often the parents who need to sort out their own issues and it's fascinating for a writer of romance to see the real emotional struggle there to make a relationship work. Plus, I pick up tips on dealing with my boys when they're troublesome! Oh, and of course, The Antiques Roadshow. Every item has a story and that's what I love about it, as well as seeing beautiful things my Regency characters might have owned.


Tawny Weber:

I would have sworn up and down that I didn’t watch reality shows, until I realized that those shows I love on the Food Network are, um, yeah...reality shows. I love the competitions. Cupcake Wars, Iron Chef and Chopped are total faves. Mostly because they are 1-episode competitions and I don’t have to worry that I forget the shows exist when I fall into deadline and miss them for a month or so. But I have gotten sucked in to The Next Food Network Star and The Next Iron Chef.

Suzanne Ferrell:

I have a few...my favorite is One Born Every Minute, which is the Lifetime show based in Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus. They've posted 47 cameras all throughout the L&D unit and it's what "really" happens. Cracks me up!

Then there is the cooking competitions, Top Chef, Top Chef Masters, The Next Foodnetwork Star and Chopped! Uhm, Project Runway and The Next Design Star are pretty good.

And sadly when my insomnia starts in at 1 am, I have to confess I do like one Housewife show...NY. The rest drive me crazy, but I actually like Jill and hate Ramona. (Sigh, they do say confession is good for the soul!). But honestly, for me it's like watching a train wreck. I can't imagine agreeing to meet someone I can't stand for lunch, let alone go on a trip with them! Seriously, people, just walk away and don't have any further contact!

Donna MacMeans:

I’m not a big fan. I’d much rather watch a scripted show (and keep the writers employed). I do watch the auditions for American Idol – not so much the final shows, and I used to watch the auditions for So You Think You Can Dance. I often see parallels in the judges' comments and the responses to the sort of things we see in the writing world. But like I said, I don’t really watch the shows when it comes down to ranking up public votes. My favorites never win...maybe because I never vote (grin).

Jeanne Adams:

My faves are Top Chef, So You Think You Can Dance, The Voice, and Project Runway. I love that they call out the best in people and challenge them to play full out. The drama comes in when people try to worm out of being responsible for their decisions or their performances. :> Grins. Or when they make the wrong decision and try something that's a HUGE stretch and they don't commit fully and so it fails. Or succeeds brilliantly because they DO stretch.

~~~
Okay, dear readers, are you a fan of any of the shows mentioned? Or are there other "real" reality shows you enjoy? Let us know which ones and why.

Shows Gone Too Soon

Earlier this week, I watched the series finale to Stargate Universe. And while it was a really good episode, I was upset afterward. Why, you ask? Because SyFy had canceled the show, but the cancellation came too late for the show's writers to wrap up the story. It ended on a big cliffhanger! I want to know what happens to the crew of the Destiny, dang it! I hate when this happens, and I seem to have this talent for liking shows that end up in some sort of similar demise. So I thought today I'd talk about shows that I feel didn't get the chance they deserved and were canceled too soon.

1. Firefly -- This is my all-time favorite show. After all it combined two of my favorite genres (westerns and sci-fi), was created by Joss Whedon (who is awesome!), had that fantastic Whedon dialogue, and...what was the other thing? Oh, yeah, it starred Nathan Fillion. :) It lasted less than a season and I blame FOX for showing the episodes out of their intended order for part of the failure. Don't even get me started on how much I loathe the powers that be for canceling this show. But fans did get the movie Serenity after the cancellation. And if there's any doubt about how popular this show was with its fan base (known as Browncoats), you only have to go to Dragon*Con when any of the stars are there. I've waited in lines for 3 hours, lines that wrapped around the downtown Hyatt in Atlanta close to three times. The people in the back of the lines never got in because the number of people in line always exceeded the fire marshal's limit for the huge ballroom. And the lines for photographs and autographs with these stars are always very, very long. (Hey, look, it's me with Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk!)

2. Jericho -- This post-nuclear attack drama had so much more to explore. And it had Skeet Ulrich -- I love Skeet Ulrich. It was canceled after one season, but a highly publicized fan campaign in which fans sent the network tons of nuts gave it a second chance. But the network canceled it again only 7 seasons into the second season.

3. Roswell -- Three alien teens who landed at Roswell pass as human and fall for humans. My YA-loving heart loved this show. Katherine Heigl and Colin Hanks had two of their earliest roles on this show. It lasted three seasons, but I think it could have gone a couple more.

4. Veronica Mars -- Another wonderful show with snappy dialogue, great characters, and the best father-daughter relationship on TV played by Kristen Bell and Enrico Colantoni. It was a modern day Nancy Drew mixed with the sass of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And I loved the romance between Veronica and Logan.

5. Legend of the Seeker -- This fantasy series based on the Sword of Truth series of books by Terry Goodkind was a lot of fun and welcome in a TV landscape that doesn't have a lot of fantasy in it. I liked this show so much that I dressed as one of the main characters at Dragon*Con last year.

6. Moonlight -- Vampire show starring the oh-so-easy-to-look-at Alex O'Loughlin. It was canceled after one season.

7. Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles -- This was an interesting take on the Terminator stories starring Lena Headey, who is in Game of Thrones now. Sarah kicked ass. Cameron, the working-for-the-good-side Terminator kicked ass (and was played by Summer Glau, who also kicked ass in Serenity). In case you can't tell, I like strong female characters who kick butt.

8. New Amsterdam -- Only got 8 episodes before being canceled by FOX. It was about an immortal, 400-year-old NYPD officer who'd been in Manhattan as a Dutch soldier in 1642. Starred Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who is also in Game of Thrones.

9. Invasion -- This alien invasion show only got one season, though it was conceived as having a five-season arc. So, guess what. Yes, viewers were left with lots of questions.

10. Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe -- Atlantis got five seasons, but I still think it could have gone several more. And SGU got the plug pulled after two seasons even though it was getting better all the time. That's the problem now -- shows have to be a hit out of the gate with no room for a slow build, or they get the ax. I don't think shows like The X-Files would be able to make it in today's cut-throat TV world.

11. Men in Trees -- Quirky show set in Alaska. I love stuff set in Alaska with quirky characters (hello, Northern Exposure, I'm talking to you too). I think they killed this one because they resolved the love interest too soon.

So do you agree with any of these? Or are there other shows which you think were canceled too soon? Did they leave you with burning questions? And just how annoyed were you when you found out they'd been canceled?

Buried Alive!

by Susan Sey

So I broke up with my old gym. We'd been happy together for two years or more but things had gotten stale. Boring. Expensive. It wasn't any one thing but sometimes you grow apart, you know? It's not you, it's me. These things happen. Maybe we should take a break.

I decided to have a look around, see if there was an option that fit my life a bit better. As it happens, there was. The Community Center.

The Community Center has a pool. My old gym did, too, but this pool is a zero-depth-entry, chock-full-of-slides-and-toys, warmer-than-bathwater type pool. Much better for my skinny children whose lips turn blue when they so much as stroll past the beach.

The Community Center also has an indoor playground, access to which comes free with membership. A nice bennie when you live in The Land That Summer Forgot. Snow'll be flying up here pretty soon--an indoor playground will be nice to have.

The Community Center is also next door to the library (this family's idea of nirvana), has a preschool (which my youngest attends), and costs less than half what my old gym did.

Sold.

However, the CC (as it will henceforth be known because I am a lazy typist) lacks one thing. TVs on the cardio equipment. Our old gym had TVs on all the treadmills & elliptical machines. You just plugged in your headphones, picked a station & off you went for your sweaty twenty minutes or whatever.

At the CC, there's a bank of TVs hung on the wall & you have to tune your personal radio (who the heck has a RADIO anymore??) to the FM band indicated on the wall under each TV. That's the only way you can listen to the audio. Otherwise, you have to read the closed captioning they've conveniently turned on.


Now this isn't a problem for me. I'm happy to read the screen. My husband feels this is a crime against fitness but that's a different blog. No, what I want to talk about today is the joy of being forced out of my usual TV watching rut.

See, running isn't fun. When I run indoors, I need to be diverted. I need to be absorbed or I spend too much time thinking about how very unpleasant running is & wondering if it's over yet. (It's not.)

So I need some gripping TV, & I'm not interested in taking a chance on an unknown quantity. I like shows I *know* I like: reality shows where talented people work under time & material pressure--Top Chef or Project Runway. I like a good soapy drama--Dawson's Creek is a big favorite. Or something clever and quick--That 70's Show still kills me. (I have a friend Kitty Foreman only wishes she were.) The West Wing is a good one, too.

But at the CC now I have a whole smorgasbord of shows on at once & none of them are what I usually watch. It's talk shows (Ellen Degeneres), trashy talk shows (Maury Povich, I think), and soap operas.

I went with the soap. Now I haven't followed a soap opera since I used to watch the Bold & the Beautiful in college and I have to say, it's nice to see they're still burying people alive. (And putting them in comas and having secret babies, all of which happened in the time it took me to log four miles.)

My favorite was the buried alive story line. They'd sealed this woman (an exquisitely groomed sixty-something) into a crypt with a cell phone & a security camera. This allowed her to both see and rail against the idiotic young things who wandered by for some crypt-side musing, and have vitriolic chats with the villain who'd buried her.

Watching a grande dame shriek, "I'M IN THE CRYPT, YOU STUPID COW!" at a clueless mourner remarking on the unlikeliness of her sudden death was awesome, too. We don't get enough scenery chewing from Women Of A Certain Age. I'm all for more of that. I wish they'd bring back the turban as a hairstyle, too, now that I'm thinking of it. Liz Taylor rocked the turban. More turbans!

I think I'm going to like my new gym.

So how about you? Do you follow any soaps--now or ever? What's your favorite storyline? Secret babies? Long lost lovers? Premature burial? Back-from-the-dead lovers? Evil twins? Do you watch TV while you work out? What do you watch? And if they brought turbans back, would you wear one?

Need inspiration? Hello Europe!

So who watched the Eurovision Song Contest? A bit of history for you: this annual singing competition started back in 1956 and has launched several big careers - ABBA won in 1974 (with 'Waterloo') and Céline Dion in 1988.

This year, 39 countries participated. They use a rather loose definition of 'Europe' - included are Russia and Azerbaijan, for example - but who cares about the politics?!

I never used to watch this - tacky! embarrassing! - and never admitted to it if I did, but I thought Norway did a great job of hosting this year's contest. And the participants were um... inspiring!

Does your guy want a bold, new look? Go for a blonde fringe - Serbia shows you how!

Look to Turkey for your next party: blinding lights and Stars Wars fashion.

Want to know how to wear this summer's blue eye make-up? Look no further, Moldova has the answer!

So that's where Lara Croft from Tomb Raider has been hanging out! In Armenia and she now sings, too.

There were also serious performers. I quite like it when they sing in their own language but most of them choose English. And this bit is embarrassing: my husband voted! As in, he actually called, and not just once but three times! (for Albania)

I don't know how they organised these but they showed huge crowds in European cities doing choreographed dances together. (Think Austin Powers.) We just thought: all this fun, excitement and joy across Europe, it's so much better than killing each other in pointless wars!

The winner was Germany: sweet 19-year old Lena with the song 'Satellite'. She was a nobody before Eurovision! And now she's a star! 

Did you watch it? What was your favourite song? Did you vote?!