A Phrase To Throw Under Any Bus You Can Find

As far as I'm concerned, reality TV—Worst Cooks in America excepted—is part of the problem. What problem? Oh, I don't know. All of them? Off the top of my head, it's easy to blame bad reality programming for the dumbing down of entertainment, the decline in scripted television, the continued survival of checkout line tabloids, and anything else  that's bothering me at the moment. But one thing has been irking me in particular lately, and that's the abuse of a specific phrase.

A week or two ago, I seemed to spend the entire weekend washing the dishes. While I was consumed with this oddly monumental task, my girlfriend amused herself in the other room, indulging in a consciousness-destroying cocktail of The Sims and a variety of housewives, each more real than the last. The toilet paper I crammed into my ears did not create a tight enough seal, forcing me to listen over the roar of my sink to hours and hours of only on Bravo-style "drama."​

And every five or six minutes, it seemed, someone was accusing someone else of throwing them under the bus. Here is a typical exchange, from a drama-filled house party that the producers stretched out over two episodes:​

Housewife 1: "I don't want to throw anybody under the bus."

Housewife 2: "You don't want to throw anybody under the bus, but she's throwing all of us under the bus."

Housewife 3: "She's throwing all of us under the bus."

​There are a lot of words and phrases that have been abused by reality television—drama itself being one of them—but none sticks in your ear more than this particularly ugly bit of public-transit related metaphor. It's become popular despite its length, its awkwardness, and the fuzziness of its meaning. Actually, it's meaning shouldn't be fuzzy. In its purest form, I think the phrase means something like "to make a scapegoat of." But in its current diluted state, as used by every reality show contestant from Beverly Hills to Hells Kitchen and beyond, it seems to mean "betray," "work against," or "do something I didn't like." 

Reality TV feeds on petty people overreacting to minor disagreements. To get a sense of how asinine these storylines can get, just count how often this phrase is used. If you hear someone accuse someone else of throwing them under the bus, you know three things:

1. The speaker is stupid.
2. The disagreement is meaningless.​
3. You should check and see what else is on your DVR.​

The abuse of this particular phrase is a shame because, used sparingly, it evokes quite an effective image. If you saw one Beverly Hills shrew literally throw another underneath a Los Angeles Metro bus, you would have to think, "Boy! Those housewives are really angry at each other!" But instead, the phrase is meaningless—indicative of nothing beyond another hour wasted on the couch.​

Celebrity Diving Is No Joke. Well, It Is. But It's Also Real.

I've been having fun lately at the expense of NBC, reveling—as much of the TV-conscious Internet has—in the continually lower lows to which their scripted programming is sinking.​ But shows written by writers are not the only place that broadcast networks are clueless. Although they pioneered the Frankenstein that is reality programming, the Big Four have lost control of the monster. Vulture wrote yesterday, in a round-up of opinions from "unscripted insiders,"​ that network television hasn't produced a new hit reality show since The Voice​, in 2011.

​I'm more interested in trying to figure out why network scripted programming is so awful. But the fact that its lowest-common-denominator ratings-grab reality programming is not just terrible but unpopular is interesting as well. What's the problem? Let's ask the insiders!

"They rarely take chances,"

"There's a saturation factor going on. If you put a pawn show on cable, a year later, there's 25 of them."

"The genre has gotten mature. It means that less is going to work, just because there's a cynicism that's set in with the audience. You can't shock people with an idea that would have before."

"The division between broadcast and cable is arbitrary and artificial, a way to make excuses to higher-ups who lack vision and creativity."

And my personal favorite:​

"This whole business puts you in a scaredy-cat place. It's hard to try to stay fearless."

So essentially, network reality shows are bad for the same reasons everything else they do is so bad: bloat. Shows are too big, too long and too expensive, and all that money makes it impossible to take risks. But as Vulture​ does point out, the networks do have something up their sleeve that cable would never dare attempt: celebrity diving. It's real, and it's...terrible.

Splash​ premiered last night on ABC, following hot on the heels of Fox's one-off special Stars In Danger: The High Dive​. How bad does it look? Well, sample a promo.

On Tuesday March 18th, the stars will fall. Splash marks the first time 10 celebrities will train and compete in regulation platform and springboard diving at dizzying heights in front of a weekly poolside audience. Leading up to the competition, the world's most decorated and medaled diving legend, Greg Louganis, will give each celebrity weeks of training.

This show is stupid. There's no point in my rubbing it in. But I want to point out a few questions that have to be answered before a show is greenlit. 

• ​Are Americans interested in professional diving?
• Are Americans so interested in professional diving that, when promised "celebrity diving," they won't mind being offered a former Girl Next Door​ instead?
• Are Americans so amused by the idea of fat men and little people hurting themselves that they will tune in to a show built around that concept?​
• Are Americans hungry for more Louie Anderson?​ Like, tearing at their chest, screaming in agony hungry?

Based on the promo for Splash​, ABC thinks the answer to all three of those questions is a resounding "Hell yes!" 

What shocks me about shows like this isn't that they're stupid.​ Obviously, network TV thinks Americans are dumb. (They aren't.) But broadcast television is big money. It's high stakes. There are fortunes riding on it. So why does everything they do seem so lazy? Why does everything they do seem so cheap?