THE REALEST: Meerkat Manor amounts to Titus Andronicus performed by mongooses in the Kalahari desert.
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As a good citizen at the end of the empire, I’m sure you’ve been watching the Ultimate Fighting Championships. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Octagon — the caged canvas, with blood by Jackson Pollock, around which bazillions of Spike TV viewers are ringed in distantly baying terraces like a Colosseum made of bong smoke. The big event a week ago last Tuesday was the light-heavyweight match between Ken Shamrock and Tito Ortiz, and the undercard was the usual feast of maulings, throttlings, and elbow strikes to the eyeball. Ed Herman went against Jason “The Athlete” MacDonald in a middleweight bout and got himself swiftly bundled into a triangle choke hold — a clincher move, no escape from it, the helpless, reddening bulb of his head pincered between the Athlete’s strangulator thighs. He held out (that is, didn’t pass out) for a long time but at last, with a sort of drowning tenderness, tapped faintly three times for submission on MacDonald’s chest. A minute later Herman was in the post-fight interview with Joe Rogan — his breath back, but his whole being immersed in a glum seethe of shame. “I felt myself going to sleep,” he told us, “and I should’ve fucking gone to sleep like a man. But I tapped out like a little bitch.”
Close behind this moment, in the red-eyed candor of its defeat, was a sequence in House of Carters (E! Channel, Mondays), the show in which Backstreet Boy Nick Carter, his pop-moppet brother Aaron, their three sisters, and a number of unfortunate dogs are all condemned to one another’s society in a house in the Hollywood Hills. The idea here is for the Carter kids to create an alternative family unit, away from their ghastly parents (from whom little Aaron legally emancipated himself in 2003), with Nick as dad and perhaps big sister Bobbie Jean (B.J.) as mom. So Nick teaches the semi-feral Aaron how to do his laundry, puts on a glower of paternal solemnity when he finds his sibs all boozing by the pool (“Nick comes in like the Grinch,” complains Aaron, “when he should’ve come in like Ronald McDonald. . . . Where’s your YOUTH, bro?!”), and so on. Disco biscuit Aaron, with charisma constellating across his 18-year-old beach-bum frame, looks like the star of this one. But keep your eye on B.J: she drinks/smokes and appears to have no long-term professional strategy. At the end of Episode #2, having fought nastily with her boyfriend, she slumped alone and booze-tragic in a plastic chair. One of her lapdogs came sniffing at the damage, a white shape on tiny feet: ‘C’mere baby!’ blubbered B.J. with arms outstretched. But the dog skittered away, offended, and we heard the sour clank of a toppling beercan.
Yes, these pathologies will flower. And that’s more than can be said for the seventh season of America’s Next Top Model (the CW, Wednesdays), which is suffering this time out from a pronounced lack of insanity. Last week drippy Anchal, eavesdropping from her balcony, heard herself vilely traduced in the outdoor jacuzzi: mean Melrose was down there with a bunch of other models, and the heated water roiled with her venom as she told them all that Anchal was fat, fake, etc. “She’s not becoming more beautiful to me,” announced Melrose. Anchal fled in gusty tears, and a sympathetic A.J. said, “I hate Melrose,” and that was more or less it. Plenty of high-altitude fashion-freakery, of course — “I’m designer Bao Tranchi,” said one person, “and I’m very well known for my decadent collections! And I’ve brought with me famed jeweler Erica Courtney!” — but no scratchings or faintings.
For that kind of action we may have to look to Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team, which got going last week on CMT. DCC director Kelli Finglass and choreographer Judy Trammell are weeding out the pudgy and the uncommitted from their squad of star-jumping hopefuls. “Why are her arms thick?” they murmur, their pampered, pitiless faces leaning close. Or: “She’s got good hair and a good body.” Most of the girls have a brittle, pageant-queen brightness of aspect and will gush unprompted about how much they all love one another, but there was no missing the slow looks of loathing directed at last week’s winners. Loony trainer Jay Johnson, in combat boots and camouflage pants, had them hopping through an assault course — “Get your war face on! The only easy day was yesterday!” — and there were uniform fitting sessions at the Cowboys’ Valley Ranch HQ, a series of one-story structures that resemble the outbuildings of a low-security prison or an experimental facility. We shall see.
The realest reality currently on TV — which is to say, the most violent and operatic — is the peerless Meerkat Manor, over on Animal Planet on Friday nights. This splendid show amounts to Titus Andronicus performed by a settlement of mongooses in the Kalahari desert: the 12-inch beasties are heavily surveilled with cameras and tracking collars, and my word do they get in some ructions. Last week’s episode ended with the tragic Mozart — evicted by her bitch queen of a mother while pregnant — wavering at the burrow’s mouth, having miscarried her litter, uncertain as to whether she’ll be welcomed back in or have her head chewed off. Meanwhile Flower, the dominant female in question, is out on the dry riverbed with her family, chirruping in panic as one-eyed Hannibal and his crew come loping toward them with no friendly intentions. Stay tuned, motherfuckers.
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