Posts tagged: vh1

Has anyone besides me noticed that too many episodes of The Simpsons lately have the same theme: Marge is hot for some guy other than Homer but somehow ends up back with him.

One of the things which I felt always made The Simpsons really work was that Marge and Homer had a good relationship. Lots of sitcoms have had similar themes and jokes, but they were mean-spirited and short-lived. The Simpsons boasts more than 400 episodes, so they had to have something right to start off. The animated family at Evergreen Terrace was perhaps a bit of a menace to the neighborhood, but they loved each other. Marge kept Homer grounded and Homer gave Marge excitement. Homer might mess up extravagantly from time to time, but he’s still a good provider. How many men, in 2008, can support a stay-at-home wife and three kids and own their home and two cars?

Lately, Marge seems to be finding Homer more and more of an oaf. Tonight’s episode, rewrote the history of the Simpsons family in order to mock Kurt Cobain’s legacy. As part of the stupidity, Marge miraculously gets a retroactive college degree and a radically different set of values. And a crush on her womanizing womynist professor. She does this while Homer is working at his father’s Laser Tag establishment (which we’ve never heard of before) in order to pay for her college. For the moment I will leave aside the part where FOX’s send-up of the 90’s makes the VH1 I-Love-the series look positively academic in its depth and accuracy.

Just now, let’s look at how much Marge has stopped appreciating Homer over the last few years. In January, she had an affair while Homer paid for her …

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The incredibly mild fame conferred by being on a reality show opens a person up for so much unpleasantness and, as near as I can ascertain, being on the show itself is a bummer. I know I used to be pretty responsive when television shows wanted to cover Blue Blood. I turned down Jenny Jones and all the talk show scum who asked me to tell everyone I was, like, totally a vampire and gawth is like, oh my goth, my life. But, even when I didn’t have cable or a TV with reception, Forrest Black and I both appeared on MTV, HBO, and FOX multiple times. I don’t know if it helps sales, but, as a journalist myself, I am reluctant to refuse someone access. At least I used to be. Now I regularly turn down television show producers who tell me how much they want to give Blue Blood exposure or how they plan to present a “positive spin” on my community. I used to believe some of the promises television people made, especially when I wrote them into our appearance contracts. I used to feel like being asked to appear on a show as an expert was a compliment. In a time when people have fleeting brushes with fame for defecating on Flavor Flav’s floor . . . well, who wants to be famous?

In my article Flavor Flav Has Hot Tub Love on VH1 but Ladies Best Be Nice Girls (who like threesomes) last year, I covered Flava Flav’s apparently hypocritical casting aside of Toastee, one of his supposed suitor chicks. For those just tuning in now, another supposed contestant on the show ratted Toastee out for appearing in Barely Legal and …

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I used to watch music videos and just feel the mood they were trying to evoke. I’d believe that the peformers really were that cool. It was all so sexy and exciting. I just wanted to pass through that TV screen into a cooler and more passionate world.

Given that I kind of did manage to live my life so that I got to pass through the screen to the other side, I actually only got cable television because I was offered a really good deal on getting it with a cable modem. Time Warner Cable recently bought out Comcast, who I think bought out RoadRunner, and maybe AT&T was in there somewhere. I didn’t totally follow all the transfers and my cable bills literally did not have a return address on the envelope for a while because the changeovers were so hasty.

The upshot of all of this is that I recently had a channel line-up re-shuffle and it is easier for me to TiVo lots of music video shows, fast forward through stuff I don’t like, and still get to enjoy lots of videos I do like and might not have come across otherwise. Music videos used to be one of my favorite forms of entertainment and one of the only types of television I would watch. My college had a room in the student center with a gigantic projection TV and a friend of mine (who had a first and last name which were surreally both slang for penis - he was even more surreally named after his father) and I used to sit there and watch MTV on it, missing stuff we were supposed to do because we were just going to stay …

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Okay, Flavor Flav is officially off my TiVo queue. For those of you who haven’t been following his post-hip-hop reality television career, here is a quick recap. Flav appeared on the TV show The Surreal Life. I’ve never seen it, but apparently they picked oddball assortments of celebs such as Vince Neil and Gary Coleman and the not-dead dude from Milli Vanilli and did stuff like send them shopping at my local grocery store. Leggy blonde bombshell Brigitte Nielsen appeared on the show the same season as Flav and they had a relationship, at least while the cameras were on, and this spawned a spin-off show called Strange Love, which I’ve only seen clips of on Flav’s newest venture Flavor of Love.

Full Disclosure here: I usually limit my reality show viewing habits to The Apprentice, but I watched the entire first season of Flavor of Love (and the first couple of America’s Next Top Model so long as I’m letting it all hang out.) The basic conceit in that eighteen or twenty chicks go to a house where Flav supposedly lives alone and lonely but for his extremely competent butler and maybe whoever drives the stretch limo SUV. They compete for his love because all he wants is to really connect with someone real. The episode where Nielsen visits shows how ludicrously more chemistry he has with her than any of the contestants. At the end of the first season, he chose the game-playing girl he supposedly hadn’t banged yet, but who had given him some non-penetrative threesome shower action. Apparently he then banged her, didn’t hit it off with her, and they parted ways, except for a contractually obligated and tepid season reunion.

The …

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