Not Logan calling his kids unserious 😭😭😭
I do have to impress on anyone who wasn't around for it how batshit the reality boom of the 2000s could be. Especially on Fox.
Here are some 100% real 2000s reality shows:
- Who's Your Daddy? A woman has to guess which of eight men is her biological father. One of them really is, and if she guesses right she wins $100,000. If one of the seven fake dads convinces her to guess them, he wins $100,000.
- Black. White. A white family learns about racism by living a month in blackface, while a black family spends a month in whiteface. The black family was a real family, but the white family was just some actors hired to put on blackface to prove racism exists
- Without Prejudice? Five strangers decide which of five strangers gets a cash prize based off clips and their answers to political questions. Cancelled when one of the choosers openly said he'd eliminate all black contestants
- Welcome to the Neighborhood. Three conservative white families in a Austin subdivision decide which diverse family gets to move in. Unaired due to being literal housing discrimination
- Seriously, Dude, I'm Gay. Two straight men try to pass themselves off as gay and whoever seems more gay gets $50,000. Unaired due to. Due to. Due to
- Playing It Straight. A woman tries to find love among fourteen men, half of whom are straight and half of whom are gay, and she must eliminate two men she believes are gay each week. If she ended up picking a straight man in the end, they'd split a million dollars; if she picked a gay man, he'd win a million dollars
- Boy Meets Boy. This was Playing It Straight but starring a gay man and he had to eliminate straight people
- Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? He wasn't a multimillionaire. He didn't even have a million dollars in liquid assets. He had a battery conviction Fox claims they didn't see. Because it was the 2000s, somehow this ended up with the woman he won being widely vilified and turned into a national punchline. How dare she complain about a massive corporation tricking her into marrying a lying abuser, good thing Matt Lauer's there to take her down a peg
- The Swan. A "ugly" woman is given plastic surgery and wins a prize if she's the hottest at the end of the season. If she's not hot enough by the show's standards she's eliminated and called ugly on national TV
- The Biggest Loser. Overweight people engage in competitive crash weight loss that often led to awful health complications. Studies showed basically everyone on the show regained any weight they lost once it was over and they didn't have abusive trainers demanding they take huge health risks to win a competitive weight loss competition. Like the others, this one was cancel-oh, it was a massive hit that ran for 18 seasons? Yikes!
- Wife Swap and Trading Spouses. These were the same show and had a wife from one family go to another family that was different politically, racially, culturally, religiously etc. Most famous for the God Warrior
At the time people focused on the likes of Fear Factor but looking back it's wild how many of the worst shows toyed with politics. So many of these shows have a premise that's like "what if we exposed these conservatives to these people they hate?" or hyping themselves up as Important Experiments. Then they'd freak out when they got the kind of viral bigoted freakout they were trying to construct the whole time.
There were also a bunch of horrible reality shows, thankfully this time mostly unpopular, in the 2010s that based themselves around economic themes as a response to the market crash, but that's a story for another time
- Murder in Small Town X. A murder mystery reality show, but unlike most murder mystery games that have a cozy manor-house-mystery vibe this one was all edgy 2000s slasher film aesthetics. The season finale aired on September 4th, 2001 and the winner died in 9/11
- Lost. No not that one. This one was actually cool (this one and the one above are the only two I actually saw at the time). Contestants were taken to a unknown country and had to first figure out where they were, and then get from there to New York City to win. In the first episode they were abandoned in the middle of Mongolia. Anyway this show about people being flown to the middle of nowhere and safely & freely traveling around the world premiered on Tuesday, September 4th, 2001 and, uh, did not seem so feasible by episode two's premiere date
- What the fuck I watched both of those. How did this silly post lead me to remembering what I was doing a week before 9/11
- The Runner: This show was about one contestant as a fugitive, running across the country, evading capture from "agents" as he bypassed security in cities and at airports. Mysteriously dropped unaired from its planned late 2001 release date - who could say why!
- Moment of Truth. People answer embarrassing questions on polygraph. Cancelled when one woman, with little prompting, admitted she stole money from her boss, wished she'd married her ex-boyfriend, and cheated on her husband, then was eliminated when the lie detector judged her saying "I'm a good person" a lie. Absolute icon
- Are You Hot?: The Search for America's Sexiest People. Maybe the nadir of reality show creativity since literally the only premise was to put hot people on a stage and judge if they're hot enough, with nothing else being considered. Lorenzo Lamas, arbiter of human attractiveness, used a laser pointer to point to the "problem areas" of contestant's bodies
- Man vs. Beast. Humans engage in athletic feats against animals. A professional eater competitively eats opposite a bear! Dwarves race a elephant! A sumo wrestler tug-of-wars a orangutan! The producer of this says he couldn't make his animals-fight-humans show today bc society is too "woke"
I'm actually curious what bizarre shows other countries had. I know the UK had several 'cause a lot of these are based on UK shows, and their reality TV boom started earlier and afaik was more popular than America's, like my distant sense is that reality TV drama got non-stop coverage over there. What batshit reality shows were airing on Channel 4 and ITV back then, does anyone know??
@ everyone: please. Add your own entries into this terrible archive
- H8R. Not a 2000s show but a early 2010s show. A show where online commentators who made fun of celebrities were shamed by the celebrities in-person. But it wasn't, like, people who had said racist things, it was people who made jokes about reality TV stars and famous-for-being-famous celebrities. You know, people whose own shows treat them as a joke? Most infamously the show took people to task for insulting Joe "Girls Gone Wild" Francis, since god forbid anyone online dare to criticize someone sued multiple times for filming underage girls. He was charged for false imprisonment and assault earlier the same year he did the show about how unfair it was that internet trolls were mean to him. If it hadn't been cancelled they planned to expose the "haters" of Sarah Palin and Mel Gibson
- Seriously, this review of it has stuck with me. They tried to frame this show about how the peasants should never criticize their betters as anti-bullying! All the celebs featured on it turned out to be exactly like they seemed on TV! All their criticism of the celebs was mild and on point (like the reality stars were mad that people are judging them based on the characters they choose to play on their shows? How else were they supposed to be judged, exactly, besides what they choose to show to the public?)
- If you made this show now it'd be called UnCancelled and everyone on it would've been "cancelled" or something. Logan Paul and Pewdiepie would be on it. Gina Carano would be on it. It would be the worst show ever made
British TV managed to find a show less healthy than The Biggest Loser. Incredible @redacted-user-69420
I thought this couldn't possibly be a thing but it was real and called Space Cadets @canutegoodman
This reminds me of an American show called I Wanna Marry "Harry", where twelve American women were taken to a castle and competed to date a British guy posing as Prince Harry.
People joked about how the women could've fallen for it but according to a interview with the winner they didn't, but Fox basically had a gaslighting regime to separate them and quash doubt??? They were isolated in hotel rooms with no connection to the outside world and told not to look around in public, lest they see a image of the real Prince? Fox had someone pose as a therapist and tell the cast they were being delusional for thinking he wasn't Prince Harry??? Like they didn't treat it as a joke, they were dead serious about making them believe he was the real Prince Harry. Incredible Sex House energy
So The Runner did eventually come out, since they did a version in 2016 for something called...go90? What the hell is go90? (A defunct streaming service owned by Verizion, apparently)
Hunted sounds worse though bc on The Runner the chasers were also game show contestants, like viewers at home could be picked to be chasers. While on Hunted they were all cops???
WIP Monday
From the Kaidan/mShep chapter of the Joker fic I’m having too much fun writing. Shenanigans!
—-
3 years, 2 months, 21 days before Hackett’s order to retreat, SSV Normandy SR-1, en route to Feros
“Relationships between officers that are unduly familiar, do not respect differences in rank and grade, and/or may be prejudicial to good order and discipline are prohibited.”
- Alliance Naval Code 5370.2D
“So how long have LT and the commander been a thing?”
Joker pauses in mid-chew as Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams drops her tray onto the table, her butt into the chair across from him, and a grenade into the evening’s conversation.
She stares at him expectantly. He stares back, momentarily speechless.
“A thing?” Tali asks from beside him. “What does that mean, ‘a thing’?”
Williams cocks an eyebrow, dumping the cup of gravy unceremoniously over the whole of her plate. She nods towards Joker. “He knows what I mean.”
Joker swallows the bite of whatever it was he’d put in his mouth—he’s having trouble remembering at the moment—and says, “They’re not.”
Williams snorts.
I posted the pre-canon thing where Kaidan meets Joker to AO3 -- it's already been around tumblr, so nothing new.
Yet.
“fish, huh?”
one of shepard’s eyes just barely manages to peek open. “wha’sat?” she mumbles, her mouth still pressed into her pillow.
“the fish,” kaidan repeats. one of his hands gestures to the tank on the wall of the room, its light through the water shining patterns along the ceiling. “they’re new.”
“new to you.” the reply is muffled, yet every bit of snark manages to come through.
“you mean you’ve had them for a while?”
“since we got the normandy back.”
“huh.” kaidan’s eyes scan the tank, watch the slow flutter of fins as the fish move through the water. “never really had you pegged as a… pet person.”
Human fingers can detect nano-size objects. This means you not only have the ability to feel a tiny bump the size of a large molecule, but if your finger was the size of Earth, you could determine the difference between a house and a car. Source
And yet its still almost impossible to find the end of the tape
cowards. i can already tell the difference between a house and a car
Source: didyouknowblog.com