I'm going to make an attempt to tap out some opinions about what I'm going to call "the crappy parenting hour" on E! - Denise Richards: It's Complicated and Living Lohan. The opinions aren't going to be a problem, sitting through the shows might be.
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9:54PM: Caught a few minutes of Keeping up with the Kardashians, which featured the Kards going to New Orleans to take a poor family out to dinner and then bring Reggie Bush in to sign a football. Then the family goes back to their FEMA trailer. Heartwarming. And what the hell happened to Bruce Jenner? He looks like he bathes in Botox. It's kind of sad.
10:02PM: OK, Denise is going to the DMV to get her license changed back to her maiden name, and is busting the clerks' chops in a very staged way. Wow. Stunning.
10:03PM: We open with Denise explaining that she knows what we're thinking - that she's the "Bond" girl, the girl from the tabloids, blah blah - but "look past all of that and my life is all about family." Her father lives with her, along with about 12 dogs and a couple of pigs.
Richards is either stupid, insane, or both. The idea that doing this show is good for her career in any way is ludicrous, although I don't know what she was doing before this ("Bond girl" was awhile ago.)
10:17PM: You know what? The main complaint from a television perspective is that this just isn't very interesting or entertaining. She's looking for a "boyfriend" for her pet pig, who is in heat. This search coincides with her own attempts at dating. I guess that's what passes for storytelling on reality television.
Everytime her two daughters pop up onscreen I get a creepy feeling. It's one thing to want to do a reality show yourself. Putting your own young children on a show like this is just disturbing.
Denise informs us that she's "just a girl from Illinois who lives on a f**kin' farm" (lots of "F" word, bleeped of course.) Then her Tanning Specialist comes over to spray her bronze in the privacy of her own home. Kinda makes the claim that she's doing this show because she needs the money a little tough to believe (not to mention the $52k/month in child support, and possibly a piece of ex-hubby Charlie Sheen's hit TV show.)
10:30PM: On to the Lohan show.
"There's nothing more important than family to me. Next question!" I hate her already.
Dina is another plastic surgery disaster. Do these people not realize that they look worse after going under the knife?
10:39PM: "They better not start on Ali like this." That refers to the tabloids and how they cover Lindsay. Now, if you want to reduce the amount of attention paid to your children, is putting them on a reality show the best way to do that?
Talking to her daughter about choosing songs for her second record (she's 14): "or anyone else that I manage." Dina. Who the hell else are you managing other than your daughters?
Some music producer shows up at her house to play some tracks. They make it look like he just pops by after IM'ing Dina, which doesn't even kind of sound true. Five minutes later he's babysitting the son, Cody. Or maybe he's dating Lindsay. So he's a liar! He's playing them for suckers! Gosh, it's all unfolding before our eyes, in real time. OMG!!!! It's so REAL!
Dina definitely takes pains to try to show that she's a "regular" mom, opening the show with a typical brother-sister fight, or something. Messy house, Long Island, and so on.
The editing is so quick that it's giving me a headache.
10:49PM: "There's gotta be boundaries with these people." I agree, Dina. I'm going to call Child Protective Services, that cool with you? Oh wait, you meant other people. Got it.
10:52PM: I sort of like Gramma. She's got one of those deep New York voices, sounds like she smokes three packs an hour.
10:56PM: Now Ali and Jeremy are arguing about his supposedly dating Lindsay, but Lindsay doesn't even know who he is, but we never see Lindsay, because mom banned her from the show, and... I don't know, I can't really follow what they're talking about.
If Dina says "I'm a single mom" one more time I'm going to get on the LIRR to North Merrick and slap her silly. Wait! There, she said it again. OK, I lied. I'm not going out there.
11:03PM: After watching these two shows I actually feel drained. In order to make these shows seem like something is happening, they use reallyquickcutsandedits. Maybe I'm old but it makes my head hurt.
I'm vaguely curious to see if either of these shows gets any ratings. They've both been hyped as if they were something that people were desperately clamoring for, which really seems unlikely. Did anyone really give a crap about Denise Richards? Do we want to see her "set the record straight"? At best, we wanted to see her making out with Neve Campbell in a pool, or playing a nuclear scientist in a bikini while seducing James Bond. When she isn't doing those things, is she interesting?
Of the two shows, "Lohan" is definitely more palatable; in this context, that means less offensive. Mostly that's because she doesn't have really young children like Denise does. Cody's young but not 3 years old young. That's something, right?
It's actually not as easy to make fun of these shows as I thought it would be. Obviously this because of the parent factor. I don't mean to be self-righteous but I really do feel strange watching those little Richards children. Do they have any idea what's going on? Is there any good that can come from them being on a show like this? It's bad enough that they have to live with the fact that video of their mom yapping about their father and other men she slept with will be around forever ("What can I say, I like hot guys with big d**cks!"). Do they need to be onscreen as well?
All right, enough moralizing.
Well, maybe a little bit more:
The "single mother" line shows up in both shows. It's fairly obnoxious, frankly. Neither one of these women fits the bill as a "single mom." Yes, both are divorced. Dina's ex is apparently nuts, but Charlie Sheen is looking more normal by the day, and that's really saying something. (Well, except for that whole "I hope you get cancer and die" thing. That's not so much on the normal side.) I don't think you can play the "single mom" card when your morning ritual is scanning the tabloids for naked pictures of your kids with your personal assistant.
Feh. I'm tired. Maybe I'll add more tomorrow. Bottom line: neither show is really worth watching. So I've saved you some time.
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photo: NYPost
