Reality Shows!

"Screwtiny" screamed the headlines in Mid-Day today!! Yep that's the new rage in our country - Reality Shows!! It all started with KBC, a legally borrowed copy of WWTBAM! Of course that show had the Big B as an added attration and it was enjoyable initially. It however, got boring as time went by and to sustain audience interest, they gave away a crore to some chap from Bombay! Later we had many clones, all of which bombed.

Then our TV folks started aping all sorts of reality shows from the West ranging from who dares wins to the weakest link (a highly irritating neena gupta hosting the show). A good show was the Indian Idol (legal copy of the American Idol). But our audiences made a mockery of both the editions so far. In the first one we had a truck driver reaching the last 5 courtesy the audience largesse and in the second one the lesser deserving dude won because the people of his state voted for him in large numbers! Which raises the point : is it a good idea to have the audiences voting for reality shows? I have seen this happen in lots of other reality shows where a person from one particular region has lots of people voting for him and he wins and the deserving candidate loses out! Even kids have not been spared!!

On another dance show, where small time celebs participate, a couple took rigging to new heights by buying 200 sim cards and giving those to their friends n relatives so that they could vote for them!! Thankfully some better sense has prevailed and at least in the next episode of tat show the judges score is going to get more weightage!

And coming back to the headlines for today, it was about a new show being launched today - Big Boss (another copy - y cant we ever get original??). 13 celebs (supposed to include the likes of Rakhi "Item Girl" Sawant n Carol "wardrobe" Gracias!) locked in a house somewhere in Madh island for about 3 months! Of course the particiapnts were supposed to be kept top secret but all major newspapers had a list of the participants :-D The publicity stunt undertaken - the celebs were asked to undergo an HIV test - reason : ur guess is as good as mine ;-) Lets see how this one shapes up!

But to sum it up, not entirely sure if our audiences are mature enough to take into consideration the opinion of the judges and make the right choices! But am not really complaining, since these shows have given people some alternative to the torture that Ms. Ekta Kapoor has been sujecting the audiences to :-D

-uv.