TOTALITARIAN: “If someone gives you a tuna-fish sandwich with anchovies on it, you say thank you and pretend that you like it!”

With the built-in advantage of a bout of unrestricted mixed martial arts at the end of each episode, Spike’s The Comeback — in which 16 fighters are housed together, train together, and gradually eliminate one another — should really be the cream of reality TV. Guaranteed carnage is a tremendous asset, and a nifty way to consummate all the cultivated animosities of your standard reality household/prison: the squabbles, the scapegoating, the your-turn-to-do-the-dishes, etc. But even reality TV is occasionally hostage to reality, to its deflationary laws, and not everything is as exciting as it might be. Carter and Serra, despite having this five-year-old spinning-backfist thing between them, couldn’t seem to get any proper pre-fight needle going. Shonie Carter is a creature of Rodman-esque flamboyance and self-absorption, Matt Serra a white ethnic pitbull — plenty of rivalrous possibilities there, one might think. But no. On the eve of battle, the two warriors found themselves alone together, by some potted plants outside the fighters’ dormitory. “I hear that ice cream calling my name,” said Shonie thoughtfully, looking through the window at the shared fridge. “Man,’ said Matt, “I scream, you scream . . . ’ And then they both said: “We all scream for ice cream.”

Over at the Meerkat Manor, meanwhile, it was all action, as Animal Planet delivered its Friday-night payload of gang war, tooth-and-claw, and Kalahari hardcore. Last week, as you may remember, we left the dominant Whiskers female Flower and some of her brood pinned down in a bolt hole by the marauding goons of one-eyed kingpin Hannibal. Sticky situation — until a party of Whiskers skirmishers appears on top of a nearby tussock, silent, on their hind legs, peering down the slope with the fixed, even curiosity of foot soldiers about to get in a major rumble. It seems to intensify, this humming unanimity of focus, until at a word from someone the whole crew drop to all fours and charge headlong through the scrub: let slip the meerkats of war!

Well, Hannibal’s mob are put to flight, Flower is reprieved, and as the dust settles, the victorious Whiskers get together for a sort of low-level orgy of grooming. “But Fortune has not smiled on everyone today,” says narrator Sean Astin (Sam from Lord of the Rings). Ozzy, son of Hannibal, lies utterly dead, dead, dead in the desert sand. “There’ll be one meerkat missing from their burrow tonight.” I think I need to start writing scripts for these people. Now the action switches: the sex-mad buck Youssarian, left behind at the Whiskers burrow to stand guard over Flower’s fresh litter of pups, has deserted his post. Forget the babies — young meerkat must follow his balls! Youssarian heads into enemy territory to seek out his regular thing, Pancake, who is of the Lazuli family. Meanwhile, the Whiskers war party has been maddened by the discovery of a fresh Lazuli latrine inside the Whiskers boundaries and is obliterating it in a frenzy of digging and defecation.

Now tell me — who can’t relate to this moment?

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There’s just room to mention the increasingly totalitarian bizarreness of CMT’s Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team. DCC director Kelli Finglass and choreographer Judy Trammell continue to harp viciously on the “thickness” and “heaviness” of the rookie girls, who say “yes, ma’am” and gnash desperate smiles between their silver-and-blue pompons. And this week the hapless Meaghan Flaherty, on the basis of some backroom tattle, was singled out for the crime of being “ungracious.” Why was she not smiling during the group outing to the Backyard Beach Bar? Why was she not squealing with joy in the pool? “If someone gives you a tuna-fish sandwich with anchovies on it,” said Judy Trammell, mean as a Roald Dahl aunt, “you say thank you and pretend that you like it!” Meaghan, gaping, was handed a biography of Jackie Onassis and told to read it so that she might be educated in “social graces.” The ads in between were for the diet pill Cylaris and a group called Celtic Woman. Not sure how much more of this I can take.

Reality images of the week: Shonie Carter’s pre-fight warm-up (violent rotations of the torso, with the arms bonelessly whipping the chest and back) and the Kalahari face-off between some junior meerkats and a Cape cobra: the ’kats get round their ancient enemy in a circle, fawning and jabbing, looking for a strike, heads bobbing in an old, old dance of menace and obeisance.

Stay tuned, because next week I’ll be returning to the dysfunction and doggy-do of House of Carters and also reporting on TLC’s new The Monastery, in which five men “from varying backgrounds” are cloistered with a bunch of Benedictines in the desert.