"Brooke Knows Best"
One of the joys of this time of year for a television critic is taking in some of the great shows currently on the air. These cable classics have turned summertime TV, once a cesspool of reruns, into a font of seemingly unending creativity.
But let's not talk about that. Your head hurts just thinking about another season of “Mad Men.” Googling all those 1960s references after every show. Ugh! Who needs it?
Fortunately, summer is still the silly season, and this week there seems to be more than the usual helpings of that. We'll skip every broadcast of “America's Got Talent,” like, ever and proceed directly to the new stuff.
“I Love Money” (8 p.m. CT Sunday, VH1). Have you ever tuned in to one of those VH1 celebreality dating shows, like “I Love New York” or “Rock of Love 2” or “I Love Being on TV Even Though I'm Not Making a Dime” and after a few minutes of watching, just before your frontal lobes shut down as a protective measure, think to yourself: Hey, I wonder what would happen if that ex-stripper stood in a money-blowing phone booth and tried to stuff dollar bills into her G-string?
Well, if you happened to be watching VH1 this weekend, you got the answer to this question. As part of the further de-evolution of TV's tawdriest channel, the latest spinoff of the original “Flavor of Love” franchise features rejects from those earlier series -- the midget, the guy who lives with his parents even though he's 40 and a whole bunch of people who, perhaps wisely, go by one name -- living in a Big Brother house and competing for a grand prize of $250,000.
“Brooke Knows Best” (9 p.m. CT Sundays, VH1). Don't touch that dial! Right after “I Love Money,” follow the exploits of Hulk Hogan's daughter, as she proves a complete absence of personality is no barrier to getting your own celebreality show. (Something about that word seems so wrong, and yet so right.)
Brooke's parents are divorcing after either 23 (Hulk) or 24 years (Linda). Her brother just got sentenced to jail time for a car accident that left a friend brain-damaged. “So,” Brooke tells us -- as the party music starts up -- “in order to save my sanity, I decided it was time to get out and live a little!”
And what better way to “live a little” than in your own penthouse apartment with ocean views, 2,000 square feet of space and a hot tub on the roof.
“This is insane,” says Hulk as he tours the new pad that I'm sure VH1 had nothing to do with.
“Isn't this insane?” chimes in Brooke, obviously not caring whether it saves her sanity or not.
Of course, the show isn't really about her. It's about her dad, the only person here who can even remotely lay claim to the “celeb” part of “celebreality.” Desperate to keep him from leaving the scene, the producers convince the Hulkster to sit down in his daughter's kitchen and argue why he should become … her roommate. So much for the “reality” part.
“Hurl” (8 p.m. CT Tuesday, G4). Contestants on this program eat as much food as they can in five minutes, then are spun around as violently as possible. The last person not to lose his or her lunch wins a fat $1,000. I doubt that it ever would have occurred to me that something that happened at the Yellowstone County Fair when I was 10 years old could be made into a TV show.
Alas, this is one of those reality shows like “Farmer Wants a Wife” or “Age of Love” where the premise is better than the actual program. The running time of “Hurl” is 21 minutes. Of that, I think 10 minutes were spent hyping the other 11 minutes. And in the episode I saw, only two people actually vomited during the competition.
At one point, the camera panned over to the curb to show a smattering of young people, probably crew members, cheering on the contestants. One of the show's producers, doubling as an off-screen announcer (a money-saving idea ripped off from the late great “MXC”), declared, “The crowd is divided between Johnny and Andrew!” Um, except that there were still three people left in the game at that point, including L.J., the sole African-American competitor and the only black person I saw on camera at any time during “Hurl.”
Apparently not just the people who get on these shows are idiots -- so are some of the people making them.
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