Full Frontal PR Report
Mark Ramsey

The “help wanted” sign is in the window of a TV network near you.

But do you have what it takes to apply?

Is your self-worth so low that a flea could limbo beneath it? Are you attracted to the flame of celebrity like Anna Nicole to a child-resistant cap? Does your cup size determine whether that cup is half full or half empty?

Then has television got a reality series for you!

If your acting skills were honed in the action-packed world of amateur porn, what are you waiting for! If you can eat raw maggots by the fistful and do it in a belly-tee, step right up! If anyone in your family committed murder, sign on this here dotted line! If a symbiotically parasitic relationship with Julie Chen makes you swoon with anticipation, we want you, houseguest!

Lizzie Grubman has her own reality show. Although ostensibly a party-planner to the stars, Lizzie’s notorious for allegedly running over bar patrons in her daddy’s SUV. Reality TV shows are reserved for this kind of person: The kind who doesn’t let obstacles or flesh-and-blood speed-bumps get in the way of success.

Ours is a great and powerful country where, between scenes from Michael Jackson’s child molestation trial, we are pitched a CD compilation of his number ones. Forgive me for asking, but isn’t it unsavory for the alleged perpetrator to be advertising during his own legal proceedings? Wouldn’t this be like Rudolf Hess selling commemorative Nazi plates between sessions at Nuremburg? Oh foolish me! There is no right and wrong anymore. There’s only profitable and the unexploitably un-.

Oh for the days when adventurous programming meant watching Regis lob softball questions to idiot contestants: “The plural of ‘cat’ is: A) Cats B) Mice C) What does ‘plural’ mean? D) Yes” Get me my lifeline!

Against this backdrop are the most sweeping and puritanical changes in the handling of “decency” the media world has ever experienced.

In our country of guilty pleasures and pleasurable guilt, eating intestines isn’t indecent. Lying and cheating to win a job with Donald Trump, that’s not bad either. Having an affair with a married man who murdered his wife and writing a book about it, that’s not horrible. Illustrating the poisonous effects of drug and alcohol addiction for our amusement, nothing wrong. Murder and bloodshed, why not.

But say “tits” and I have to cover my kid’s ears.

Thanks to the magic of pixilation, a generation of young boys has learned that a woman is topless when her shirt is off and her breasts shimmer like they’re covered in sequins. Don’t reveal a nipple, despite the fact that 100 percent of us have not one, but two of them. Don’t avoid such teasing and titillation altogether, Reality TV, because then what would be the point of watching?

In some cases jittery Standards and Practices departments are even censoring the word “breast.” Many TV episodes that already ran untouched are now being edited for the same content that was once beyond reproach. You have to go to the “public” beach to see thongs because if one happens to appear on the “public” airwaves it will look like an ass-level explosion of gauze.

A malfunction of the wardrobe kind during the Super Bowl earns a fine for the network and a national media-able radio hit for the culprit. You don’t fine the Postal Service for distributing Anthrax, so you shouldn’t fine CBS for Janet Jackson’s allegedly sloppy wardrobe architecture.

We can’t show the bare butt of a corpse on ER, but because Paris Hilton’s sexual exploits were Web cast worldwide, she has been rewarded with a career on TV, in music, in publishing, in fashion, in jewelry design, and at the movies. It’s Hilton’s world. You and I check in and check out.

We tell our kids some words are dirty and some parts are private. Then we give them a fashion label called “FCUK” and demonstrate that displaying your tits on the Internet can leverage a party girl persona into an entertainment mega-brand. We tell them to stay out of jail. Then we reward a jailbird guilty of obstruction with a brand new TV show featuring how quasi-cool she is.

It’s a vast conspiracy of “Do as I say, not as I do.”

TV, and in particular Reality TV, is the new Sideshow Culture. But instead of pathetic pinheads we now have Pathetic Attention Whore syndrome: namely, Men, women, and Chyna.

The television networks collect blood money while all the things we love to hate collide with all that we hate to love. So take another slug of that whisky, Flava-Flav. Because the sure-as-hell lesson of Reality TV is this:

We love to hate everything about ourselves. And we’ll pay for the privilege.

Guest columnist Mark Ramsey is founder and publisher of movie review satire site MovieJuice.com, named “one of the top 20 movie sites” by Roger Ebert. Ramsey once posed for a picture with Angelina Jolie—almost like she knows him!