VH1’s tagline is Watch and Discuss, when it should be Watch Washed Up Celebrities and Thank God You Aren’t Them. (But I guess that’s too long.) Their television show line-up includes Celebrity Rehab w/ Dr. Drew, Rock of Love 2, Scott Baio is 46… and pregnant, Boys on the Side, and many other shows that I really don’t care to list here. (But for the sake of continuity, you can view them here.)

VH1, like MTV, has gone down the metaphorical shit-drain, following the idle and lazy path of Reality TV. From a business point of view, it’s pretty effective. Why bother hiring writers when you can just pay washed up celebrities to do the work for you? Why worry about any actual content when you can just film the modern day person in their everyday environment, being the jack-asses they are?

Reality TV is probably one of the worst things I can imagine watching. It’s pointless, and it’s boring. (Anybody remember the “Real” World? Road Rules? Etc., etc.?) How real can something be when you’re pointing a camera at it? Especially when the subject of the day is an actor? Personally, I don’t buy the realness for one second. I believe that these people are doing what they’ve been doing their entire lives and what they get paid to do: they are acting. They are acting in the greatest roles of their entire lives, ones for which no casting director or agent could ever possibly hope to cast them as: themselves.

“”Celebrity Rehab” is the first television series to chronicle the dramatic, unscripted real life experiences of a group of actual celebrities as they make the life-changing decision to enter themselves into a drug, alcohol and addiction treatment program with the sincere desire to achieve true rehabilitation and recovery.”

Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew chronicles the day to day tribulations of some washed-up actors as they go through withdraw and detox on their road to sobriety. (If there is such a thing in Hollywood these days.) It follows Jaimee Foxworth, Seth “Shifty” Binzer, Ricco “Suave” Rodriguez, Daniel Baldwin, Brigitte Nielson, Chyna, Mary Carey, and Jeff Conaway. It documents them as they get on each others nerves, behave in childish manners, and break all the rules on their road-block encrusted highway to “sobriety” (or, as their agents might have put it, “better PR”.)

Rock of Love 2 (yes, you are correct in assuming from the 2 that it is definitely an un-needed sequel… I guess love didn’t work for him the 1st time?) follows Bret Michaels (lead singer of the horrible glam-rock catastrophe once known as Poison) as he tries to find “love” (or, barring that, an easy threesome with women old enough to still find him relevant or young enough to not even know who he is but still want to fuck him anyway because a) he’s still semi-quazi-famous or b) it’ll get them on tv.

My Fair Brady… Maybe Baby? follows Christopher Knight and Adrianne Curry as they decide on whether or not to have a baby. (If that isn’t powerful tv, I just don’t know what is.)

Scott Baio is 46… and Pregnant of course follows Scott Baio as he haphazardly jumps into the world of parenthood as he “calls his entourage for a late night meeting where he confesses that his life is over as well as his uncertainties about becoming a father.” I’m sure hilarity ensues, and everyone walks away learning nothing.

And then of course there is Flavor of Love 3 (you’d think by now he’d learn or just hit up the personal ads or Myspace like every other average American) and other shows that I really don’t even care to talk about. I would like to see, in the next year, a nice gradual step away from “reality” tv and a shove back to traditional tv that involved fictitious characters doing amazing things. I mean, I know that the “characters” in the “reality” tv shows are already fake enough, but didn’t we get enough of them in the pre-80s era?

Apparently not. And they’ll be dry-humping all of those royalty checks straight to the grave. And beyond.