On its web site, the Oxygen Network claims the following as its mission: to bring women (and the men who love them) the edgiest, most innovative entertainment on television.
But if that is so, why in tarnation is the networking putting tripe like “The Bad Girls Club” on the air?
"Club” is an inexcusable waste of time and tape that, to paraphrase the classic film “Billy Madison,” makes us all dumber for having watched it.
"Club," debuting tonight at 10, is a train wreck on multiple levels. A reality show in name only, it's an unfortunate cross between “Fear Factor” and the lamest seasons of “The Real World” that traffics in stereotypes of women at their worst. Focusing on a crew of young women who share a Hollywood mansion, the debut episode alone contains enough slapfights, name-calling and drunken stumbling to fill a month’s worth of Jerry Springer episodes.
If only it were as entertaining.
"Club" is not just relentlessly crude and thuddingly repetitive, though it certainly is that. It commits the worst of all television sins: It’s boring.
Though billed as a creation of the producers of MTV’s “The Real World,” it lacks any of the charm or freshness that made the first few seasons of that show so engaging. In the inaugural New York and San Francisco editions, “World's" producers found and put together seven genuinely different people. What made the show fascinating was the clash of contrasting personalities. And if they were flawed, they were decent enough people. Thus began the reality TV genre.
With "The Bad Girls Club" we see how in the years since the genre has soared in its capacity to diminish the human experience.
The show focuses on seven women. They are: tough chick Aimee; Jodie, an office worker by day and party girl by night; Ty, a self-described hustler; failed country singer Kerry; Leslie, a stripper; small-town hottie Zara; and Ripsi, a really bad cross of the worst sides of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.
Whatever their differences, these girls are mostly interchangeable in their lack of substance, and not one is remotely likable.
In focusing almost exclusively on the girls’ screaming matches and drunken chattering, "Club" clearly aims for offensiveness.
Yet the tired clichés of party girls in crisis simply insults the intelligence. The endless shots of bikini-clad T&A is mostly numbing. And for all their wildness, there's nothing particular edgy and inventive in the behavior of these young women. In the end, it's all rather depressing.
