...television at its worst, appealing to the lowest (and basest) common denominator.
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Glancing through my local newspaper the morning I was going to watch "A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila," I noticed a listing for the top twenty most-popular TV programs of the week. Over half of them were so-called "reality" shows; you know, the ones where contestants try to out-dance, out-sing, or out-scream one another in front of a live audience, or they try to outlast one another on a deserted island somewhere. I must admit I don't watch much commercial television, so I was a little surprised at the popularity of these programs. Surprised and not a little appalled.
The box blurb for "A Shot at Love," the complete uncensored first season (2007) of a series produced by Paramount and aired on MTV, explains that "Sixteen straight guys and sixteen lesbians vie for the heart of cyber-hottie Tila Tequila...but it all starts off as a secret. When the two groups learn about one another's presence, a full-on battle of the sexes is launched."
The set contains eleven episodes on three DVDs, each episode lasting about thirty-eight minutes. I watched the first episode in its entirety and then watched large chunks of each of the remaining ten. The show was just as awful as I expected from the box jacket.
Like most other reality shows, this one supposedly hooks you into coming back each week to find out which contestants are getting closer to their goal, in this case landing a shot at love (whatever that implies, presumably "Making Love") with Ms. Tequila. However, if you read the back of the slim-line disc cases, you'll see a synopsis of each episode, clearly telling you which contestants Ms. Tequila eliminates and which ones she choses. Kind of spoils the fun, no?
Well, no, you can't spoil the fun if you consider that the only real point of the series is for viewers to ogle pretty girls and hunky guys, even though most of the girls and guys on the show have done their best to disguise their attractiveness behind a abundance of skin markings, body enhancements, lip, tongue, nose, and eyebrow piercings, bizarre hairdos, and stylishly erratic clothing. There are sixteen male contestants involved along with the females, but I'm betting it's not because the program's producers were hoping to attract many women viewers. It's all about men and boys looking at girls and hoping to see some flesh or sex or both. It's all about sleaze. Still, watching the program just for sexual titillation also seems rather odd to me, given the amount of free pornography on the Internet. (What do you mean, Am I talking from experience? Don't be rude.)
The object of everybody's affection is Ms. Tequila, real name Tila Nguyen, a young bisexual woman in her mid twenties whose previous claim to fame appears to have been accumulating a record number of friends on myspace.com. When the young male contestants first see her in person, they basically go nuts, doing cartwheels, drooling, babbling, and shouting. When the young female contestants see her, they react in essentially the same way, except louder. Apparently, none of them has seen a girl before. Or maybe it's the sight of Ms. Tequila's 800 tattoos that impresses them.
The setting for the show is a gaudy, tacky, four-story mansion that could only exist in a place like Hollywood--analogous to a metallic gold stretch limo with a bowling trophy on the hood--wherein each contestant vies to win Ms. Tequila's hand (and quite a lot more). Each of them attempts to woo her with various gifts, foods, talents, and sex appeal. Before long, the guys and gals are squabbling with one another and generally acting like children. Which isn't hard to understand when you look at them.
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