TVSquad

TV Squad's Fearless Leader, Keith McDuffee, is in charge of meting out the free screener DVDs he receives from various networks. Sometimes the screeners are awesome -- complete season sets of popular shows or weeks-in-advance pilot episodes of hotly anticipated new series -- and sometimes, well, they are not awesome. At some point I made a joke that he seems to send me the worst of our screeners (I keed! I keed!) and Keith's response was to start sending me every single bad screener offered to TV Squad. I'm talking the kind of programming they're currently showing at Guantanamo Bay.

Well, two can play at this game! I've decided that I'm going to review every horrible show Keith sends me. If I have to be tortured with the likes of Queen Sized and The Simple Life Goes to Camp, well then, you guys have to be tortured by reading about it. Sorry, it's only fair. Our first foray into Screener Hell is Farmer Wants a Wife (Wednesdays 9 PM, starting April 30)...

If you've seen The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Flavor of Love, Rock of Love, I Love New York, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, Average Joe, Age of Love, For Love or Money, Boy Meets Boy, or That's Amore, you pretty much have seen Farmer Wants a Wife. Ten "City Girls" compete for "alone time" with Matt -- a handsome and often shirtless farmer -- while each week one of the city girls is sent home. At the end of the series, one of these ladies will have to give up life in the big city in order to become a farmer's wife.

At first blush, Famer Wants a Wife appears no different than any of the other shows listed above. Inspecting more closely, however, it becomes apparent that "no different" is too weak a comparison: this show is exactly like the shows listed above.

In a lot of ways, Farmer Wants a Wife reminds me of the good ole days of video games, when the limited memory of the cartridges meant that in order to create a "new" villain, the programmers just swapped the color palette around. Except, instead of limited memory, what we're dealing with is the limited imaginations of reality show producers. Famer Wants a Wife is to The Bachelor as Reptile is to Scorpion.

(The other similarity between Farmer Wants a Wife and Mortal Kombat is that several times during the viewing of the episode, I wished to perform a Fatality on Matt, sending his bland, tanned body off a bridge and careening several stories into a sea of spikes.)

All of these shows needs a hunk (or bimbo) for the ten bimbos (or douchey frat boys) to moon over. Farmer Wants a Wife has Matt. He's attractive -- and, have I mentioned shirtless? -- and apparently a semi-decent "manly man".

Farmer Wants a Wife feels that it's enough to simply tell us this rather than show us this. We have no indication (other than the shirtlessness) that Matt is desirable in any discernible way. Is he particularly interesting? Does he have a lot of money? Is he a young, brash farmer, rattling the establishment with his radical ideas about soybean crossbreeding? We don't know. He just has his shirt off, and that seems to be enough to capture the girl's hearts.

I mean, at least Flava Flav rapped on Fear of a Black Planet. There's a man worth fighting over.

The ten bimbos (city bimbos) offer little more than Matt does. A cynic might point out that the city most of the girls hail from is Los Angeles, almost as if they're on this show less for the chance to meet their future farmer husband than to get some really good shots of their boobs for their acting reels. I'm no cynic, though: any savvy Los Angelenos bimbo would know that appearing on a third-rate reality show on The CW has about as much chance of launching an acting career as starring in a German fetish porn. Obviously, these girls are here for love!

There isn't much to say about the girls except that, like Matt, their main attribute is attractiveness. When the human race evolves into a collection of hyper-attractive morons with only the urge to do abdominal exercises breaking through the dim hum of their empty brains, I think the last ugly scientist will be able to point to this reality show as the pivot the direction of humanity's evolution turned on. (And yes, CW, feel free to use that as your "pull quote" for the Farmer Wants a Wife print campaign).

Incidentally, having just watched 30 Rock's Milf Island episode, it was fun that Matt had to identify the Christa he wanted to have "alone time" with as "Christa with a CH", to differentiate her from "Krista with a K". The Debora/Deborah finale of Milf Island never seemed more prescient.

One exception to the bland and pretty rule is Josie, who is interesting only so far as she has made the conscious decision to be the Omorossa of the show. Her personality is either completely contrived in order to garner attention or she sprung fully grown from the brain of a reality show producer, Athena style.

She's a 5'10" buxom blond who refers to herself as a "winner" and a "goal-digger" (get it!?). She spouts wisdom from George W. Bush (no, really) and is determined to "call the other girls on their crap." At one point, this commitment to crap calling leads her to describe the other girls as "gold diggers" for being on the show, despite the fact that we're given no indication at all that Matt is rich. Apparently, the contestants of Farmer Wants a Wife can't tell the show apart from The Bachelor either.

It comes as no surprise that Matt keeps Josie around for another week; any reality show producer would be stupid to eject such an annoying idiot from the show so early. I predict her making it into the final five, despite having a personality that could not exist in the real world. Thus the exigencies of a modern reality show.

The only interesting piece of social commentary I was able to glean out of the episode was the belief, repeated approximately four million times during the hour, that being from the country somehow made Matt a better person than all the "city boys" the girls had dated previously. Is this a common belief? Does driving a tractor and purchasing Dungarees from Wal-Mart out of necessity rather than hipster irony constitute a "good character"? If so, why?

I guess you could make the argument that Farmer Wants a Wife is so bad it's good, but in all honesty, it even isn't that bad. It blandly goes through the motions of hooking up a bland, attractive farmer with one of ten bland, attractive city girls. Watching Farmer Wants a Wife is like eating buttered white bread: you can barely taste it and if you do it enough, you're heart will give out. I recommend it to anybody who watches The Bachelor and says to themselves, "Wow, I wish I could watch the same exact version of this show, except with lower production values." If that's you, have at, my friend. Have at.

For another view of the episode, I gave it to my wife, Kristina (with a K) to watch. I did this because when the screener arrived, her response was not to laugh at the in-joke between Keith and me, but rather to squeal, "ooooh, that looks good!" I thought that maybe she'd have some double-X chromosome insight into the episode. This is what she wrote:

"When it comes to my TiVoed choices, my husband usually shakes his head in disgust. In fact, he once told me that I epitomized 'everything wrong with the viewing public.'

"I wish I could say I was a connoisseur of television like my hubby, but usually the house red is as good as the expensive wines for me.

"The reason for his disgust? My love for reality programming. I can't help it, I enjoy reality shows; they are my guilty pleasure. I love the drama, the fights, the relationships -- and yes, the concept of finding love in front of millions.

"So when the opportunity to watch a new dating show before it came out to the public arose, I was ecstatic! A farmer and city girls? Sounds ingenious! What kind of delicious predictments will they be getting into!?

"From a girl who watches just about everything, I have to say sadly -- and, for the first time -- I didn't buy it.

"The common denominator in all my other dating shows is that desire to be with the main guy. I really like the British guy on the current Bachelor. I get it: great accent, lots of money and charm, and a big house in London. I would want to date and possibly marry him. Rock of Love? Not my taste, but living the rock star life and hearing him sing to you in front of millions ... yeah I get it.

"But to date or marry a farmer, you can well ... you can live on a farm, and milk cows?

"I realize that all the girls on every dating show are shallow and probably want to just get on TV, but somehow I usually forget that and believe that they want to fall in love. But this time, I just can't. Don't get me wrong, they found an attractive man who can wear a pair of jeans 'til the cows come home (even though I am a little thrown by a farmer who has a soul patch), but I can't see why the girls would want to give up their lives to be with him.

"Another problem is that a lot of this show feels contrived (yes, I know all of them are contrived but at least the other ones fake it better). At one point, Farmer Matt actually used the expression 'Hot Dog!' and the camera did a close up of him chewing on a piece of straw during a hay ride. Yeah, we get it, he's a farmer!

"The girls are not even that interesting. The only 'stand out' is Josie. A self-proclaimed high maintenance girl who asks if there is maid service and refuses to play the 'catch the chicken' game for immunity. She walks around in tight clothes she really shouldn't be wearing (meow) and puts down the other girls and life on a farm.

"Josie should be the one not getting a rose -- I'm sorry, not finding an egg under her chicken -- but I guess the televsion producers wanted to keep her around, because, Hot Dog, there was an egg for her!

"Like I said, I'll invest myself in just about anything, no matter how terrible (I mean, I married Jay, right?). I'm the kind of girl who was annoyed when Rock of Love and TilaTequila had a second part: I bought into the love story! I felt like my time had been wasted! I told my husband, 'I can't believe it! I think they end these relationships just to get on TV more. I am done with them!'

"Meanwhile, I'm addicted to Rock of Love II -- I am rooting for Amber over Daisy, in case you're interested -- in and I am anxiously, secretly hoping Tila will pick a chick this time.

"However, I don't think I would add Farmer Wants a Wife to my TiVo just yet. I'll probably wind up giving it another shot when it starts airing for real, but I can't recommend it.

"For this girl, MIlf Island sounds like a better show.."

So, there you have it, two views and nearly 2000 words spilled about a minor CW reality show. Consider the gauntlet thrown, McDuffee!