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Uncommon Want Last night there was nothing on TV. My wife and I had just finished our workout and then picked up dinner (mmm . . . fajita burritos). We plunked ourselves down on the couch to consume our feast and allow ourselves the guilty pleasure of a little vacuous entertainment. Problem is: we have standards. That’s always a dangerous criterion when attempting to select a program on the boob tube, but we usually manage. Last night, though, we couldn’t find one damned thing worth watching. Thus, since we had nothing better to do with our burritos in our hands, we subjected ourselves to ABC’s thoroughly mindless Are You Hot? Now, I have to say that I’m disappointed in ABC for putting this kind of crap on the air. The network that has brought forth such gems as Monday Night Football, Schoolhouse Rock, and Twin Peaks chose to abandon groundbreaking television and go out on a limb usually reserved for FOX. Then again, this is the same network that also gave us The Bachelor and its spin-off, The Bachelorette, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Anyway, applying the same logic that allows one to look at a train wreck, we absorbed some of this pedantry. We came in on the part where the first cuts were made for the Northwest region. I was struck by the fact that most of these people were either from Denver or Seattle – two cities that I would not put in the same geographic region – but I suppose I’m being too picky. These people came down a catwalk, posed briefly, and then were told if they were hot or not. Those who were hot got to move on. Those who weren’t got to go backstage and cry. I’m not kidding. When the show went to break, it interviewed some of the “losers” backstage. The two women with whom they spoke were practically bawling. The one guy sounded as though he was close to tears. This stunned me. These people were actually upset because a panel of three has-been celebrities decided they weren’t hot after looking at them for all of five seconds? Really? These people were that shallow? Sadly, the answer to that question was yes, but I’ll come back to that in a minute. As I watched this show, I kept thinking that this couldn’t really be happening. It all reminded of a game show you would see in a 1980’s movie about a dystopian future. You know, like the titular show in The Running Man, or maybe that weird comedy show from Robocop where the guy is always saying, “I’d buy that for a dollar.” Surely, I wasn’t sitting on my couch eating a fajita burrito and watching a show where people competed for a chance for complete strangers with only the most questionable credentials to tell them if they were sexy. I was actually watching a movie where that happened, right?
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