tavie.com

Let's talk about trashy tv.

My roommate has excellent instincts about trashy tv. She started DVRing what has turned out to be the most ridiculous, over-the-top, eye-rollingly bad show on tv, and we've been watching it, and we cannot get enough.

This monstrosity is called True Beauty. It's produced by Ashton Kutcher and Tyra Banks. That should be all you need to know, but I'll explain it anyway.

The premise is that 10 beautiful people are living together in a house and competing for the title of "America's Most Beautiful Person" or somesuch. They get to be in People Magazine's "100 most beautiful people" issue and they get some money or something.

What the show actually is is 10 "porn-pretty" airheads - 5 men, 5 women - who are the most horrible human beings on the planet. Vain, vapid, shallow, nasty, backstabbing, plastic, collagen-filled, pec-implant-filled dumbasses. And what they're really being judge on is their personalities. All the "beauty" tests are a fake. They're being filmed behind the scenes, their "challenges" are seeded with paid actors who set up situations that test whether these people will act like complete assholes when confronted with, say, a sobbing wardrobe girl or a bike courier who flips over onto the pavement. Will the airheads stop and help the distressed people? Will they be nasty or nice?

At the end of each episode, two people are picked to visit the "Hall of Beauty", where each contestant's portrait hangs. The judges (an ex-supermodel, an ex-beauty pageant winner and one of the reject fashion-mavens from America's Next Top Model) then decide which of them is "beautiful enough to continue in the competition", and send that person back to the house.

Then, before they let the loser leave, the real payoff of the show happens. They confront the loser with footage of them being a complete asshole to everyone around them, and tell them that the competition is really about inner beauty. Then you get to watch the airhead cry with anger and indignation, and stomp off the set. Finally - oh lord, this moment never fails to crack me up - two janitors come with a big rolling garbage bin, take the portrait of the loser off the wall and throw it in the trash. Roll credits.

This show is absolutely worthless. It's hideous. It's funny as hell.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:25 PM | shower me with attention