Cru Jones Society

It seems that in the evolution of creating one’s brand, the current chic thing to do is to create a reality show around yourself. Whereas endorsement deals used to be enough to keep any celebrity in the public eye when between actual, art-creating jobs, our present, obsessive love-hate relationship with celebrities dictates that a weekly series featuring the mundanities of everyday life become the new branding mechanism.

If you’re a celebrity in decline – head off to “The Surreal Life” to mainline some low-level publicity. If you’re in decline, and happen to have packed on some extra pounds – “Celebrity Fit Club” it is! And if you’re looking for complete humiliation, chances are excellent VH-1 is just itching to give you your own series where you can break down, get completely emasculated by your wife/girlfriend, go through the soul-crushing process of rehab, and be revealed as an extremely maladjusted, narcissistic creep.

For those not yet on the downswing of their careers, E! and MTV are more than happy to accommodate you. And many a celebrity has jumped onboard. However, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, the late Anna Nicole Smith, any of those worthless fuckers from “The Hills” – these people don’t concern me. They can take on as many reality shows as they damn well please. Just please stop ruining people I actually respect. That’s all I ask. Here are the five worst examples.

5. Hulk Hogan

Stupid Name of Show: Hogan Knows Best

Premise: Hulk Hogan and his annoying wife attempt to raise their two teenage children while simultaneously launching his daughter’s singing career and fail miserably at both tasks. Also, inexplicably, horrible wrestler and disgusting fat guy Brian Knobbs hangs around a lot.

Ran From: July 10, 2005 – October 21, 2007

Worst Moment: (tie) 1. Hogan interviews potential bodyguards for Brooke and most of them fall all over themselves telling Hulk how much they loved his career. God, grow up, you idiots. You’re interviewing for a job, not meeting him at ComicCon. 2. Hogan installs a tracking system on Brooke’s car and monitors where she goes on his computer. He then calls her to verify where she is and is surprised when she lies to him.

Irreversible Damage to Career/Life Inflicted: Substantial. Let it be said that I turned on Hulk Hogan Jan 19, 1992 and haven’t spent one moment liking the guy since. But I always appreciated the way he saved his money, planned for life after wrestling, and seemingly took care of his family. Then he promptly flushed all that down the shitter in an effort to get his daughter’s career on track.

Hogan would return to WWE for a few months every time he needed to hype this show. Hogan’s always been able to pop a crowd, but eventually even the painfully dull-witted wrestling crowds became hip to this game and saw Hogan for all he really is: a shameless and pathetic shill who cannot find a low to which he will not stoop to sell himself. If any of them were dumb enough to watch the show, they’d see Hogan just get nagged to death by his wife and act as an obnoxiously overbearing father. He’s not exactly the American hero when he’s watching his daughter party on the beach from a nearby boat through a pair of binoculars, now is he?

And now with he and his wife going through a messy divorce, his son still serving a jail sentence in juvie for vehicular assault, and his daughter about one step away from selling an appearance at your birthday party on eBay for $100, it’s safe to say that maybe all the exposure wasn’t such a good thing for the family unity. Hulk’s new show Celebrity Championship Wrestling is set to launch on CMT and features the likes of celebrity powerhouses Todd Bridges and Trishelle Canatella learning to wrestle. Also, horrible wrestler and disgusting fat guy Brian Knobbs is one of the coaches. Yeah, this show should be awesome.

4. Travis Barker

Stupid Name of Show: Meet the Barkers

Premise: Travis Barker plays kickass drums for two really awesome bands – blink 182 and The Transplants – while his worthless wife apparently forgets that she’s a model and spends days at a time laying around the house getting soggy around the midsection while a hired nanny raises her children.

Ran From: April 6, 2005 – February 7, 2006

Worst Moment: Travis meets up with Mark Hoppus for lunch and the two discuss how they can’t sleep past 7:00 a.m. because they’re waking up with their kids. I think they discussed further the challenges of fatherhood, but it was hard to tell since I was bleeding out of my eyes watching my childhood die in front of me. Hey thanks guys! Remember when you made songs called “Happy Holidays, You Bastard,” “Dysentery Gary,” and “Dick Lips”? Didn’t need to see you grow up into boring old squares, but I appreciate you televising it anyway. Fuckers.

Irreversible Damage to Career/Life Inflicted: Indeterminate. Blink 182 promptly broke up after releasing that god-awful self-titled album in 2003, but I doubt it had little to do with this show and more to do with the fact taht this album sucked balls. The Transplants haven’t made an album in over three years. And Travis has been back fatherhooding it up with Mark Hoppus in +44, a band that’s nearly impossible to Google. He also divorced that bimbo he was married to, but got back together a couple of years later. I’m glad to see he’ll be all right after his recent plane crash, and I hope he’s able to start drumming again because in terms of sheer entertainment value, no one comes close to matching Travis Barker.

One final note: I really hated this show. Mostly it was because of Travis’s nauseating baby talk to his wife, but it could have used more drumming as well. But considering no one even remembers this show, that’s probably a good thing.

3. Snoop Dogg

Stupid Name of Show: Snoop Dogg’s Father Hood

Ran From: December 9, 2007 – Present

Premise: Snoop Dogg invents bizarre nicknames for each of his children and wife, and raises them.

Worst Moment: Snoop Dogg’s wife needles him about his diet and he sneaks off to Waffle House (I think) and eats what he wants. I don’t know about the rest of you, but it’s upsetting for me to watch a man who once shamelessly rapped freely about murdering cops and smoking truckloads of weed having to sneak hash browns behind his wife’s back.

Irreversible Damage to Career/Life Inflicted: None – at least on a wide scale. I have a hard time taking the guy seriously anymore, but that started when he agreed to play Huggy Bear in that mediocre Starsky & Hutch movie and after he made that irritating “Drop it like it’s hooooottttt” song with Pharrell. Snoop Dogg has a bit of a Teflon personality. He could probably show up as the new PC guy dressed as Urkel in those Mac commercials opposite Justin Long and still retain all his street cred.

This is an important distinction between he and Diddy. Snoop and Diddy are both essentially whores now. The difference is that everyone has always known Diddy is a whore. We’ve all known that since he rode Biggie’s coattails all those years ago and started changing his name like it was a bodily function. Diddy’s a miserable rapper, so he’s got to do something to stay famous. Snoop, on the other hand, is terrific. He doesn’t need any of this shit, and because he’s such a phenomenal rapper and beat a murder rap for chrissakes, anything he does that calls his ethos into question automatically gets dismissed as, “Eh, whatever. I mean, this guy was on ‘Ain’t Nuthin’ but a G Thang!’” He can do whatever he wants. It’s nice to be Snoop.

2. Ozzy Osbourne

Stupid Name of Show: The Osbournes (alright, this name isn’t so stupid)

Ran From: March 5, 2002 – March 21, 2005

Premise: Ozzy Osbourne lives in his mansion with his peppy wife Sharon, annoying daughter Kelly, moron son Jack, and about a zillion dogs that shit all over the place. They all fight and curse at each other while the audience at home laughs and forgets that Ozzy was once accused of corrupting the youth and being the spawn of Satan.

Worst Moment: How do you pick just one from this dumb show? You could make a case for any of a dozen of Kelly’s whiny tantrums, or anytime Ozzy failed to manipulate the remote control properly, or Jack hanging out with his scumbag friends and getting in creepy gay wrestling matches with them. I’ll forego all of them and choose Sharon throwing a ham over her fence into the neighbor’s yard because they were making too much noise. Who the hell does that? And what was she hoping to achieve?

Irreversible Damage to Career/Life Inflicted: Minimal in a commercial sense, disastrous in terms of personal recollection. I find every time I’m playing Guitar Hero rocking out to “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath, I then have to remember that Ozzy embarrassed himself for three years cleaning up dog shit and taking out the garbage on television. Sure, I remember him for pissing on the Alamo, but I also have to remember him for complaining about Food Network. And that sucks. Most good rockers have the decency to die before they become self parodies, but Ozzy apparently never saw the value in this. He’d rather unleash his ugly, irritating children on the world instead and make us look at him with his shirt off.

Ozzfest sells out every year. Ozzy continues to bring headlining acts to his metal tour, and people crash the gates to see Ozzy rock “Crazy Train” one more time. And while I regretfully admit that I giggled at Ozzy’s senility during the initial run of this show, I now feel nothing but guilt and remorse every time I listen to “Mr. Crowley” or “Iron Man.” Why? Because a metal God was reduced to pathetic jesterhood before our eyes and clowned on television for us while we were all complacent in the destruction of a living legend’s mythic status. I suppose we got what was coming to us, though. Because of this show’s high ratings, we all had to endure two truly atrocious singles from Kelly and more media appearances from Sharon than anyone can even remember. Apparently, instant karma’s in full effect. Ozzy does have Satan on his side.

1. Hugh Hefner

Stupid Name of Show: The Girls Next Door

Ran From: August 7, 2005 – Present

Premise: Hef’s three girlfriends go on adventures and turn another living legend into a farce and inflict on the world three of the most annoying laughs in the history of recorded sound.

Worst Moment: Since there are three girlfriends, let’s choose one for each girl, shall we? For Bridget, it’s got to be whenever she tries to dress up that butt ugly dog of hers in a costume for whatever party’s happening at the mansion that week. Don’t dress up your animals. That goes for everyone. For Kendra, it’s got to be a tossup between declaring the food at Olive Garden is better than the food in Italy and getting a Flava Flav style grill made. Two things here: 1) You’re white. 2) You’re a moron. And for Holly, easy. Any time she excitedly cries out, “Puffin Boo!” when Hef enters the room, I start seething with anger. It’s infantile, it’s degrading, and it’s just plain irritating as hell. It’s okay to give the man a nickname, but try to choose something that makes you sound like you’re over the age of five, you gold-digging hooker.

Irreversible Damage to Career/Life Inflicted: Disastrous… or whatever the complete opposite of that is. Despite spending the majority of his time with women young enough to be his granddaughters and suffering their idiotic bullshit all night and all day, the fact that Hef bangs three hot women that all know about each other and gets away with it speaks for itself. And with magazine sales plummeting across the board, Hef needs to grow the Playboy revenue stream however he can. And this sumbitch has been a cash cow. It’s the highest rated series on E! It’s reinvigorated the stodgy old Playboy brand. And its merchandise is everywhere – which is only troubling when you see young girls at the mall wearing one of these t-shirts.

“Mommy, I want to be just like Kendra when I grow up!”
“Maybe we should consider private school for you, sweetie.”

This show does a splendid job of extending the Playboy brand, but that doesn’t mean I want to see Hef getting cutesy with his girlfriends. I remember one episode where they were all standing on the beach and Holly had herself wrapped around the octogenarian Hef like a mental patient gone awry and cooed, “I have your love to keep me warm.”

WHHHHAAAAAAAAARRRRRFFFFF!!!!!

God, that’s like something you’d hear on an awful 80s sitcom or something. And the show is full of nonsense like that. Each girl is so unforgivably cornball and/or obnoxious in her own way, it’s a wonder I can make myself watch each new episode Sundays at 7:00 MDT. I have a feeling it’s because I have a strange fascination with blurred out nudity, but I definitely hate myself nevertheless.

Reality shows like this not only lessen the amount of quality programming on the air, but also aid in the continuing destruction of our idols. And as much as I bitch, I know I’m part of the problem. I watch the Real World/Road Rules Challenge. I watched Tough Enough ruin professional wrestling more than I thought even possible. And I’ll bet to whatever extent – you are too. Anyone out there watching Hard Knocks? How ’bout Newlyweds?

Think about that 10 years from now when Steven Tyler is inevitably hosting some sort of rehab experiment with the members of Fall Out Boy on VH-4. Hopefully by then, we’ll be smart enough to stop watching. Or maybe our fascination with celebrities will have stopped.

Probably not. Pass the sledgehammer. I’ve got some careers to help destroy.

Until next time…

edagger@crujonessociety.com