Rick Dean
Registered
In "The Simple Life," Paris Hilton (left) and Nicole Ritchie go rural and bring along their high-society
'Real' girls are easy
On unscripted TV, the perfect lady is a tramp or a ditz
By Ellen Gray
graye@phillynews.com
THE APPRENTICE. 8:30 p.m. Thursday. Moves to 8 p.m. Wednesdays starting next week.
FROM FOX'S "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?" to the new pay-per-view series, "Can You Be a Porn Star?" most of the questions posed by "reality" television seem to involve women.<b
>
Can Paris Hilton milk a cow? Live for a month without her credit cards?
Will the women of "Survivor" triumph over the men who, season after season, are caught on videotape disparaging
them
?
Why would so many beautiful women compete for the attentions of ABC's "The Bachelor" - especially when history shows that relatio
nships forged on the show don't survive their 15 minutes of fame?
Who will be "America's Next Top Model"? UPN wants to know. Again. Starting Jan. 13. And no Adonises need apply. This show's girls only.
(Don't worry, guys, we'll get back to the porn stars in a minute.)
Here in the 21st century, pitting groups of boys against groups of girls might be frowned upon by educators, but on NBC's "The Apprentice," which premieres Thursday, the first thing Donald Trump does with the 16 men and women competing for a job running one of his companies is to divide them into teams of eight men and eig
ht women and order them into the streets of Manhattan to sell lemonade.
The guys - who must have missed the four out of seven editions of CBS' "Survivor" that have been won by women
- are natur
ally confident that they can win this battle of the sexes.
On "reality" TV, the men are always confident.
Frequently, they are also deluded.
You'd think that would be good news for women like me, w
ho die a little every time we see someone with two X chromosomes making a fool of herself on television, but even when we're winning, it often feels like we're losing.
While the women of "Survivor" play no dirtier a game than the men, they're far more likely to try to use their sex as a weapon, and in a game where bikinis are often the uniform of the day, producers make sure they get every opportunity, even when they have to pixilate the footage of them bathing together topless.
Being female and blond doesn't make Paris Hilton a
nd Nicole Richie stupid. For that, we can blame their parents, who allowed them to escape from home undereducated and underdressed. But if for every "The Simple Life" and "Rich Girls&
quot; there were a &
quot;Rich Boys," featuring some of the simpering scions of America's wealthiest families, the Parises and Nicoles of this world might be easier to take.
(Some would suggest you could find a show like this on C-SPAN, which covers Congress, long a haven for rich
boys. But I think that while you'll find plenty of spending there, there's less emphasis on shopping and grooming.)
You might think that a show like "The Apprentice," which features 16 MBAs, entrepreneurs or all-around eager beavers, would be a hopeful contrast to shows like "The Bachelor," "Joe Millionaire" or "For Love or Money," where women's greed is too often the naked sort that leads them to hot tubs, not hot prospects.
You'd be forgetting The D
onald, though.
Trump, whose hair alone makes him the most frightening "reality" show host ever, at one point awards some of the contestants a tour of his over-the-top apartment,
a tour that includes meetin
g his girlfriend, model Melania Knauss, who probably didn't intend to be seen as yet another of his possessions.
The subtext is there, though, and so when one of the women contestants - who's competing, mind you, for a $250,000-a-year job - gushes to her, "You're very, very lucky," I cringed. Though I was pleased to hear Knaus
s, who's identified in the show by her first name only, reply, "And he's not lucky?"
I suppose I should be happy, too, that Trump's not conducting a search for a new girlfriend on "The Apprentice," but having seen the first episode of "Can You Be a Porn Star?" I'm not sure "Can You Be a Millionaire's Mistress?" is all that far behind.
"Porn Star," wh
ich premieres Thursday on pay-per-view (check with your cable or satellite service for times), will introduce 28 contestants over the next seven weeks. During a 90-minute special in the spri
ng, the seven finalists will compete
for a $100,000 prize and a one-year contract with an adult video distributor.
Oh, and like Fox's "American Idol," viewers get to vote. At, naturally, canyoubeapornstar.com.
For those of us who've watched as "reality" shows, in particular, have pushed the boundaries of acceptability on broadcast TV - Paris and Nicole talking, for instance, about threesomes at 8:30 p.m. - "Can You Be a Porn Star?" is an eye-
opener.
Let's just say that they can do a lot more stuff on pay-per-view than they can on Fox, and considerably more than I can describe here.
Certainly it's hard to be shocked by female MBAs kissing strangers to sell lemonade on "The Apprentice" once you've seen a teenage girl named Prince
ss who claims, rather suspiciously, to have been raised Amish, having, or at least simulating, girl-on-girl sex for the first time.
Though the show's Web site suggests that th
ey're already recruiting for a male equi
valent, the emphasis in this "Porn Star" is totally on the women, and indeed most of the sexual contact, simulated or otherwise, is between the contestants themselves.
Which makes it all the sillier when the show resorts to one of those "Real World" standbys, the housemate fight. And over, of all things, one contestant's missing skirt.
Because, of course, nothing epitomizes the women of "reality" TV like a catfight.