ODD COUPLE: Rarely is the banter between Rob and Big free from an oily undertone of bitchdom.

Last time, in a weakly alliterative moment, I promised that this column would return to the “dysfunction and doggy-do” of House of Carters, the E! Channel show in which Backstreet Boy Nick Carter and his pop-moppet brother Aaron are quarantined with three of their sisters and various loose-boweled terriers and shih tzus in a house in the Hollywood Hills. Was it gratifying, then, for me to switch on Episode 5 (“Everybody Hates Carter”) and find the house’s mettlesome inmates actually tossing dogshit at one another? Not so much. The show’s dramatic axis is the aggro between big brother Nick, puffy with righteousness, and tear-away bag-of-bones Aaron, and this one was all about the sisters, who were fighting — B.J. and Angel versus Leslie. They fought in the bowling alley (“Nick! Look what she just did! She fucking kicked my purse!”); they fought in the kitchen (“I’ll slit your throat! A knife is way better than a spoon, bitch!”); and they fought, finally, in the hallways, which were lined as usual with the unscooped droppings of their vagrant pets. It was thoughtful of Angel, as the turds flew, to enquire of her outgunned sister, “Leslie, why are you so depressed?”

Elsewhere in the Hollywood Hills (which are to reality TV what the San Fernando Valley is to porn) we find an unlikely pair of roommates: pro skater Rob Dyrdek and 300-pound Christopher “Big Black” Boykin, his “bodyguard and best friend.” Best friend my ass. MTV’s Rob & Big, which premieres tonight (November 2) at 10:30, is a highly self-conscious and rather subversive piece of reality theater. Dyrdek is a skinny white kid from Ohio burbling away in a groovy Esperanto of skate backchat and hip-hop fraudulence; Boykin is vast and black, heavy all over, and cheerfully in the pocket of this callow youth-culture mogul. His brief, we’re told, is to stop the squares from hassling Dyrdek while he skates the gnarly spots: in fact he is Dyrdek’s butler (even down to the Jeevesian preparation of a hangover cure), his amanuensis, and his psychosexual big daddy.

Rarely is their odd-couple banter free from an oily undertone of bitchdom. During a conversation about Boykin’s taste for large women Dyrdek notes wistfully that he himself weighs only 135 pounds: “I’m not even on your radar,” he says. “If we was both locked up,” Boykin assures him, “you’d definitely be on my radar.” Later, in the park, a girl wonders whether the two of them are gay. “C’mon, do you think that would physically be possible?” asks Dyrdek. “I’d whip him like Ike whipped Tina,” Boykin growls contentedly, as if only the economics of the situation and his own good nature were preventing him from giving Dyrdek a solid jailhouse seeing-to.

But let’s turn our minds to higher things, to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, in New Mexico, where five secular and lumpily various dudes (an alcoholic, a Marine, an ex-con, etc.) are getting to grips with the spiritual life in TLC’s The Monastery. For 40 days and 40 nights these men are living and praying alongside their hosts, a community of 30 Benedictines. Huge tranches of solitude and silence, advanced states of boredom, mental attrition; four hours of psalm-chanting every day — to quote D Boon, this ain’t no picnic. Last week Alex the Marine bumped heads with chiseled ascetic Brother Joseph Gabriel, the monastery’s enforcer/terminator, when he slumped sullen in his pew instead of standing up like all the other brothers; this week he raided the community’s larder for beer and slurped it defiantly in his cell. Notes on Alex: 23 years old, lost his leg in Fallujah, pale eyebrows and ginger sideburns (the difference in color suggestive of some interior process of combustion, hotter at the core), narrowed eyes and a Halloween grin. Reminiscent in manner of Metallica’s James Hetfield. Can the monks crack him? Jon the firefighter, meanwhile, finds the God of the Psalms to be a “bi-polar egomaniac” and worries that putting his trust in his fellow man will reduce him to the state of a “hillbilly moron.” It appears that next week the men will be compelled to shave their heads. I look forward in particular to seeing the well-tended locks of Warren, the sci-fi buff and ex-druid, falling in glossy coils around his feet.

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They’re still weeding ’em out over at CMT’s Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team. Perusing photos of the girls in their uniforms, DCC director Kelli Finglass and choreographer Judy Trammell were characteristically merciless. “She looks short and heavy,” murmured Finglass, an ex-cheerleader herself, her face blowtorched into a mask of disdain by decades of Texas UV. Trammell happily agreed, “You don’t want to see it, but you do!” Last week, you may remember, bumbling rookie Meaghan Flaherty was ordered to school herself in graciousness by reading a biography of Jackie O. This week her humiliation was completed when she was forced to give a book report before the whole squad. “Posture! Tuck your bottom in!” hissed Judy Trammell as Meaghan lurched blinking to her feet.

Her speech, sadly, was a brief vortex of illiteracy ending in pure enigmatic Bushspeak: “Jackie Onassis . . . She made an effect on the things that she did.” All right!

Next time: more randy meerkats, disconsolate Ultimate Fighters, and the nightmare life-in-death that is the Celebrity Paranormal Project, in which a distinguished company of supermodels, Survivor winners, and fitness gurus spend the night in an abandoned insane asylum. Stay tuned.