Big Brother 8

I don't watch much broadcast TV, especially in the summer, but one thing I always seem to get hooked on is Big Brother. I admit this with a certain amount of shame, because this is real lowest-common denominator television. A gaggle of shallow, preening young adults, mostly from LA, are put into a house and over the course of two months vote each other out, a la Survivor, except there's none of the outdoor survival stuff. Instead they sit and around and sun themselves, smoke cigarettes, and examine themselves in the mirror.

Yet I watch, fascinated. The eighth season of this ghastly enterprise just got started, and already I'm addicted. This year the producers have outdone themselves, and gotten some real characters. For example, there is Dick, a forty-something guy with multiple tattoos and piercings, and who wears Suicidal Tendencies t-shirts. He is penned up with his daughter, Daniele, whom he hadn't spoken to in two years. She appears to have some sort of eating disorder, because her face, though cute, is drawn back on her skull without a hint of baby-fat. She's caught the eye of Nick, who is said to be a former pro football player (I looked it up--he played in the European league, so that really doesn't count).

But this year's star of the show has got to be Jen (pictured), who is supposed to be a nanny but is really a model of some sort. She is the most narcissistic, vapid, infuriating person I've seen on a reality show in a long time, and that's saying something. She first stood out of the crowd when she became upset over the picture of her that is displayed on the wall of the house, and cried copious tears over it. Then she took a picture of herself and her mother off the wall because she wasn't wearing makeup. She is utterly loathsome.

But, here's the rub, and the inherent dilemma of the male animal, she's smokin' hot. If I were in that house my brain would tell me to despise everything she stands for and try to vote her out immediately, but my gonads would urge me to make an idiot of myself, on the one-in-a-trillion chance that I could get some action, or at least get another chance to see her parading around in a bikini. Dick, to his credit, will have none of her, and openly tells her to her face how despicable she is. I'm not sure I could do that, though, as I am cursed by biology.

Ah, the lazy, stupid days of summer on U.S. television!