It's not August yet, but the dog days are surely upon us where television is concerned. Perhaps in an effort to make the new season that starts in September look better, the networks are bombarding us with cheapjack reality shows made with little money but lots of hostility.
It says something creepily unpleasant about broadcast-network executives that all three of the shows debuting over the next two days are based on the principle of public humiliation of the innocent. And if any of the shows become hits, it will say something creepily unpleasant about us.
Easily the worst of the bunch -- in fact, there's a good argument to be made that it's one of the most atrocious TV shows of all time -- is NBC's Breakthrough with Tony Robbins. Hosted by the I'm-OK-you're-a-pile-of-crap motivational guru himself, the show offers help to people with hard-luck stories in return for tearful self-debasement.
It's a couples version of the original sob-sister reality show, the 1950s era Queen for a Day, in which female contestants recited every tragic detail of their train-wreck lives (My kids were kicked out of school for setting fire to a teacher! My husband left me for a cocker spaniel!) for a studio audience, which rewarded the most piteous story with a new washing machine.
Breakthrough has removed the competitive element but substituted humiliating Fear Factor-style challenges for the guests asking for help. In the debut episode, a jobless and bickering married couple, Ron and Marie, first have to endure barrel rolls in a fighter jet, then live in a Los Angeles homeless shelter for a week. Presumably they'll be more employable once they can list such skills on their resumes as ``can ride in the passenger seat of a Russian MiG at the speed of sound without peeing on myself'' or ``able to fall asleep on the sidewalk while surrounded by crackheads.''
But the real heart of Breakthrough, just as on Queen for a Day, is groveling for applause. Grovel before a committee of homeless people! Grovel in front of your families! Grovel in front of a sadistic studio audience! Confess your ineptitudes and impure thoughts, embrace your degradation, assassinate your own character! Admit that it's not just your life that sucks, but you, and now all America knows it! Or at least, the increasingly tiny percentage that watches NBC.
`PLAIN JANE'
Plain Jane, The CW's counterfeit ugly-duckling show, is too triflingly stupid to reach Breakthrough's profound depth of awfulness, but give it points for its abject phoniness. It takes young women whose fundamental prettiness has been disguised by dressing them in potato sacks and running their hair through lawnmowers, then gives them a ``makeover.'' Provided, of course, that they first stick their hands into a bucket of snails or do something else that reduces them to tears.
Plain Jane is not lacking in bizarre moments. For instance, the big romantic dance in which the debut episode's Jane gets to snuggle with her dream guy is performed to the mournful Sam Cooke tune A Change is Gonna Come. (Sample tender lyric: ``It's been too hard living, but I'm afraid to die . . .'') Yet all pales before Louise Roe, the bony British host whose previous gig was a BBC show called, I swear, Addicted to Boob Jobs. Sporting the emaciated look of a heroin addict, dispensing little-known fashion tips such as guys like cleavage, she looks like she's auditioning for the lead role in a sequel to Tim Burton's Corpse Bride.
`MASTERCHEF'
Gordon Ramsay, the host of Fox's MasterChef, is also a bit of a cartoon, albeit the type you find drawn on bathroom walls. Instead of ranting obscenities at professional chefs, as he does on Kitchen Nightmares and Hell's Kitchens, Ramsay is bellowing them at amateur cooking contestants. But otherwise this show is pretty much identical to the others.
Ramsay reduces the cooks to tears, reduces their spouses to tears, and probably beats their children and steals their kidneys, though you'll have to buy the deluxe Blu-Ray DVD to see that part. Even Ramsay's most barbarous fans are likely to find this formula so thin by now that, by comparison, Louise Roe looks like a blimp.
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