Word: survivors
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Buoyed by the successful comedy career of Rick Rockwell, the VJ stylings of Eric Nies and the just-waiting-to-juggernaut acting career of Survivor Colleen Haskell, MANDY LAUDERDALE, redheaded devil woman and breakout star of Temptation Island, is fielding offers to capitalize on her fame. So far, she's been surprisingly fastidious. She told Howard Stern that she turned down a $1.5 million Playboy offer to pose nude, though a Playboy representative said the figure was much lower. The tragic loss to greasy-palmed men is a victory for the arts, as Lauderdale plans to focus on a singing...
...producer Mark Reisman: "There aren't enough [funny actors and writers] to meet the demand." But TV comedy hasn't disappeared so much as migrated to hourlong shows such as Ed, Gilmore Girls, the resurgent Saturday Night Live, the plethora of late-night comics, and even reality shows like Survivor and dramas like The West Wing. The true culprit may be an overly cautious development process. "Networks give writers development deals and then interfere with development," says Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld, who last fall debuted the discomfitingly funny, semi-improvisational Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO. "Ultimately, anything...
...doesn't take much, you will have noticed, to become famous these days. Eating a rat or sticking a pig on Survivor is enough to get you talked about around the water cooler the next morning. If someone should ever actually get laid by an insignificant other on Temptation Island 2, that would doubtless do the trick too. We tune in to "reality TV" in hope of seeing one or more of our fellow citizens degrade themselves for (mostly) short money and (very) momentary fame. Watching these shows, we shake our head wryly: What are we coming to? Where will...
...does not prevent us from fashioning a sociology of America's dumbing down. Nor, as it turns out, does it stay the hands of our satirists. It is not hard for them to imagine a fairly near future--or an alternate contemporary reality--in which the conventionalized perils of Survivor begin to pall, and some TV producer decides to raise the stakes. Give equally dull people real guns and ammo, and set them to stalking one another. The last man or woman alive wins...
Everyone's well-played blandness and unquestioning acceptance of the game's rules are this film's sharpest satirical shaft. Of course Minahan is grateful that Survivor has come along, in effect, to validate an idea he's been nursing for five years. But he thinks the show is pretty small potatoes--nothing more than "mean-spirited office politics being played out on TV." Despite that send-up, Minahan, a onetime producer for the MTV tabloid show Buzz, is an avid viewer of reality TV. "It brings out the worst in everyone. It's exploitative, manipulative, it encourages narcissism...