Soul Numbing TV: The Battle of the Network Reality Stars

Junk food programming that hastens Bravo's demise.

The Battle of the Network Reality Stars is the nadir the kids are all talking about. This is a takeoff on those '70s sports/entertainment shows that featured stars of the day battling those on opposing network. That indeed made sense. In a foolish attempt to align itself with a true genre classic, The Battle of the Network Reality Stars takes place where the original did. It's not clear if they preserved the ground where Bob Conrad almost twisted his ankle in a pile of tires.

In a major sense, the reason why Battle of the Network Stars worked was because they were--stars. For this these folks are not stars and aggresively not so. Unlike a lot of fair reality programs that assemble an actually tolerable set of vets, The Battle of the Reality Network Stars went for broke and got the jerkazoids, about 28 to be exact. There's many reasons why this show doesn't actually work without making a viewer feel saddened if not a little dirty. The games are boring, there's little self-deprecation and worst, the majority of the grand folks here haven't matured one bit like Survivor's Richard Hatch or Adam Mesh from Average Joe.


What’s Really Wrong: Nothing much except for everything? The cast is too large and the subsequent exits still leave a viewer with a ton of folks they’ll care nothing about. In fact the whole reality cast of clowns is filled with broken dreams, inflated self-importance and patently uninteresting people. This doesn’t make for great TV.


The Lifers: Mike "The Miz" and Coral from Real World: Back to New York. For these lifers, it seems that they can't appear anywhere unless there's giant mats, whistles and potential bodily harm. Of course "The Miz" is still irritating with his wrestling derived gibberish speak. Coral is still a shrew.


The So What's: Wowers, Chip and Kat from the Amazing Race are on this! Remember Joe Millionaire? He's here too. You know Evan Marriott wasn't going to pass this up. At this point he'd stage a bank heist if it meant he'd be on TV.

Grade: C- This is sad actually. I do like reality shows and I do like cheese but this is crammed with one too many also rans and fairly despicible human beings.

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