There wasn’t much on last night (I switched to the A’s game about 5 minutes into the NCAA final, I had already seen enough), so I did a little experiment. My goal: To decide which was the stupider show, ABC’s “Surviving Suburbia” or MTV’s “The Hills.” Here’s the verdict.
Let’s start with “The Hills,” as it kicked off its fifth season. The exploits of Lauren & Co. were as vapid as usual, and if anything seemed even more artificial than ever. It has to be fake, right? I mean, people don’t act that way on their own, do they? Knowing producers were prodding the awkward conversations and steering the ridiculous plot points would be somehow reassuring. Just to know that people aren’t that stupid in real life.
Take Spencer’s “friend” Charlie. Who is this guy? Why have we never seen him before? I think the producers must’ve cast him as an extra, since we know Spencer has no real friends. Same with the bartender, Stacie. Could she be that stupid in real life, to not know who Spencer and Heidi were? Although she did ask if Mexico was a country, so I might be giving her brain too much credit. But she seemed like an obvious plant by the producers to stir up trouble. Spencer’s extra-shiny face, his lame come-ons, his now-that-I’ve-been-emasculated-I-must-fight routine were just too idiotic to believe that they exist in the same world I live in.
Apart from all the stupidity, there was a bonanza of unintentional comedy. From Stephanie’s doomed-to-fail manipulations to Heidi’s gigantic hair to Spencer’s cheap-shot punch, there were plenty of “Ha!” moments. Like Lauren flat-out telling Heidi that Spencer is an a–hole. (Quite perceptive, that Lauren.) There was Lo’s brutally honest advice to Heidi to get over it and stop stalking Lauren. And maybe my favorite, Heidi’s mom’s heavy-handed reunion of Heidi and her high school boyfriend, and her point-by-point contrasts of the two guys. Heh. Good stuff.
On a Stupid Scale of 1 to 10, I give “The Hills” an 8. It’s very stupid. But as long as you know it’s all not real, it’s also pretty funny. And it looks good. Nice cinematography counts.
OK, moving on to “Surviving Suburbia.” I turned it off after about 10 minutes. I just couldn’t do it. It’s so, so bad. It’s got every single tired, generic sitcom cliche (wacky neighbor, precocious kids, grumpy dad, chipper wife and showroom home) and is a humor vacuum from which laughs can never emerge. It reminded me of a show-within-a-show, you know, like “Terrence and Phillip” on “South Park” or the Mexican telenovella on “30 Rock.” A fake show which is meant to be so bad, in very small doses, that it’s funny. It’s as if there was a show starring Bob Saget as a once-famous actor who needed money and took a lame sitcom to pay the bills (like Lisa Kudrow’s “The Comeback”). “Surviving Suburbia” would be his awful, demeaning show-within-a-show. And the overall series would revolve around his revulsion to his new job and how he’s mailing in his performance for a paycheck. That would totally work.
But inexplicably, someone at ABC thought the lame show was a better plan. Which is baffling, since theoretically that same executive also green-lit the terrific “Better Off Ted.” So much for consistency.
On the Stupidity Scale, this is a 10. Possibly the worst thing on network television now that “The Chopping Block” is gone. From the jokes written by a second-grader (“It smells like the back of your house farted”) to the horribly annoying laughtrack, this is a grade-A hack job. You will lose brain cells by watching an entire episode.
Thank goodness “Rescue Me” is back tonight. It’ll be like a television sorbet, cleansing the inanity from my brain. And on the bright side, at least now I know I’m not missing anything on Monday nights.
