What’s the latest craze that’s sweeping the nation?  No, not Sam Alito and his loveable band of musical scamps, The Aleatles.  No, no, not electric pants either.  Beef Chisels?  I don’t even know what those are, and I’d rather not learn.  Okay, class, the answer I was looking for was reality shows.  However, I take your point well that they’re not really sweeping the nation anymore.  They’re a lot more like Communist nations; they used to be a big deal, and there’s still a few left, but the only people who think they’re cool are their die-hard fans.  Still, my entire purpose here wasn’t to initiate a conversation on the socio-political trends of governance and entertainment so much as it was to spice things up by starting with a rhetorical question.  My actual subject for the day, popular or not, is that clearly there’s a bit of a shortage in the reality show word of new ideas at the moment.  Gone are they days of such classic tests of the human will as “Gilligan’s Island,” “I Dream of Genie,” and “The Beverly Hillbillies vs. An Army of Ravenous Zombies,” leaving contemporary audiences with nothing better to do than tuning in to see which castaway gets an Xtreme makeover from Donald Trump this week.  With this in mind, I have once again taken it upon myself to single-handedly save American television from the smelly morass of suckiness in which it has managed to mire itself once again (no, no, don’t thank me).  Follow along then, all you junior programming executives out there in TV land, as we go over a few reality shows that don’t make your brain want to put your head up for sublet while it flies to Acapulco Laugh not, this has actually happened to the guy who draws Marmaduke (his head has since been leased to a tiny little Starbucks).

            First, let’s go with the classics and start out with “Who Wants to Marry Captain Caveman?”  Let’s face it, if there’s one thing that skanky gold-digging women from California love, it’s the chance to marry a guy who owns a Swiss Army Club and has 97.3% of his body covered in hair (it worked for Chewbacca, anyway, though the new Mrs. Bacca is of course a woman of surpassing taste and good unbringing).  Every week Captain Caveman would go on a date with one or more of them, and they’d all vie to win his prehistorical affections by being shameless brazen ice age hussies.  Finally, Captain Caveman would choose one, and in a surprising twist, reveal to her that he was not, in fact, either a Captain or a caveman, but rather an electrician from Iowa who lived in a fiberglass tree.  She would of course marry him anyway, and two weeks later the marriage would be annulled while both of them got generous book deals.

            I’m sure that if you’re like most Americans (and by most Americans, I mean me and my Waffle House Posse, not that I or anyone can really own a posse; they’re like the wind), you think magical stuff is pretty damn sweet.  It is in the interest of shamelessly cashing in on this that I offer up “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in which a group of wannabe Machiavellian orc-roasters have to debase themselves and betray each other to win the favor of famed wizards and humorously mismatched police officers, Saruman and Dumbledore.  Every week they’d all have to do wizardly stuff like conjuring Danishes, transmogrifying a mouse into Xerox machine, and rolling a natural 20 (only seven people probably got that last one, but they found it hilarious).  Finally one of them would get to be THE Sorcerer’s Apprentice and be awarded a lucrative job in a mystical tower full of gnomes somewhere in Chicago where they would listen to classical music and foolishly create an army of magical brooms to do their bidding.

            Finally, because truly there is nothing less irrelevant to life than  interior decorating, we come to “Captain Planet Eye for the Straight Guy” (I’m sorry, but it’s late, and try as I might, I couldn’t think of a funnier title to go with this idea).  In every episode there’d be some poor sap living in an apartment by himself and his well-meaning but insolent churl friends would sic the Planeteers on him so that they could redecorate him.  Like say that he had a shower that was just tiled with plain ol’ boring grout ‘n stale pancakes; they’d all come in (the Planeteers, not the pancakes) and replace it with say, lava, which is much more natural and energy efficient, though slightly more deadly.  And instead of just bumming around the house in a wife-beater and “I Heart Will Wheaton” boxers, they’d make him a trendy suit composed of nothing but environmentally friendly telepathically controlled live rhesus monkeys.  The highlight of course would be when Captain Planet (who, after his untimely death from a spotted owl overdose, will be played by occasional alpha male and full-time inventor of the internet, Al Gore) would burst in through the wall ala Kool Aid Man and torch all his appliances before saying something sappy about natural resources and pandas etc.  Then the guy whose apartment it was in the first place would get angry and call Dick Cheney, who would show up in his pollution-powered Cheneymobile and throw toxic waste on Captain Planet, who would then cry like a little girl and go off to regenerate or possibly just grow a goatee and take a job as a university professor.