These sorts of reality shows showcase what I consider to be some of the worst characteristics of humanity. The vanity, the lack of honesty, the pandering to the audience in order to score points with the at-home audience, the back-stabbing and the trash-talking are just a few of the things that almost every contestant in this show exhibit in each and every episode. It just seems like trash TV and at first I watched it out of morbid curiosity than anything else but then something strange happened and even though it was mostly an eye-rolling, face-palming, dumpster-fire of a show.... I suddenly found myself on episode 15 and it was too late to turn back now!
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So the game is really silly to be honest and I nearly didn't watch it at all because it just seemed like so many other shows that have come before and failed: You take a bunch of really attractive people in their 20's and throw them in an exotic location and then force them to become couples. They share a bed and they are teammates in various competitions. Some of them find connections that I guess seem somewhat genuine, others are clearly pushed into it by the producers, and then there are others that seem to want to get in everyone's pants.
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The thing that is so cringe inducing is the fact that these people get "coupled up" and immediately start being jealous and possessive of the person that they are with, even when they don't really seem to get along with the person that they were sometimes forced into being with. Some of the scenarios evolve around really difficult to watch conversations where they are talking about how much of a connection they feel for the other person when they have known them for a full 1 or 2 days.
In the very first episode they all meet one another for the first time. They go through the usual bro hugs and girly screams and talking about how amazing the villa is and then they line them up and have the men choose which girl they want. I'm kind of surprised that the Twitter outrage mob didn't have a fit about that. I'm also surprised that the, as Dave Chappelle describes, the "alphabet people" didn't get outraged that the contestants were "forced" into choosing someone from the opposite sex.
This is where the lack of honesty becomes a bit funny. There is this one girl named "Caro" that when prompted nearly every one of the male contestants said they found attractive and were interested in coupling up with her.
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When asked by the host what it was that they like about her all of the guys said something like "oh she has really pretty eyes, or her hair looks amazing.." Sure thing guys, I'm definitely sure that this was the true motivation behind your attraction. If someone would have been honest and said "she has an amazing rack and I want to motorboat those puppies" he would have been my favorite contestant immediately because that would mean he was the only male contestant with a shred of honesty to him.
Instead we have people repeating the same disingenuous platitudes that are basically non answers to anything they are asked and this cringe-factor is probably part of the reason why I ended up watching it as long as I did.
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They have the "contestants" do a bunch of games that make no sense because there are no prizes. In my mind it would have made a lot more sense if there was some incentive to actually try to win. What it ends up being is that these sequences are just opportunities for people to act stupid enough to get the attention of the editing team and this results in them getting more airtime and therefore being more "liked" by the at home audience.
We are lead to believe that the at home audience plays a part in determining who gets to stay and who gets kicked out but really, we don't have much assurance that the entire process isn't simply rigged.
I think CBS did one thing correctly because the narrator is constantly taking the piss out of the contestants (they can't hear him and it was certainly just added during the editing process) and he even bags on the show in a general sense. It is good that they have a sense of humor about how ridiculous this entire show is because honestly, if they had taken this all seriously I probably would have not watched as many episodes as I did.
So as much as it pains me to say this... I actually like this show despite the fact that I think the people that are in the show, for the most part, represent a big part of what I think is wrong with society as a whole these days. I started watching it just to see how bad it was and the next thing I know the entire season was over and I hadn't skipped a single episode. I did scan past a lot of it but I actually watched this abomination from start to finish. Maybe there is something wrong with me :P
It's basically Survivor but instead of needing to actually be good at anything like surviving, you are in a luxury villa in Fiji while everyone is stabbing one another in the back and forming shit-talking alliances. New contestants are added from time-to-time and this is meant to "shake things up" but honestly, the new people don't stand a chance since the people that were already there from the start have already formed a "team" of sorts and see any additions as more of a threat to their own ability to stay.
I'm not proud of it, but I really enjoyed this and once season 2 gets released I will almost certainly watch that as well.
Let the judgement begin in the comments :P