Bonds On Bonds isn't a reality show in any traditional sense: There's no goal or prize at the end of the line, save maybe for a home-run milestone, and thus nothing to give it any semblance of structure. Though the first episode has been arranged in a vague chronology, following Bonds from a robust Spring Training in Scottsdale, Arizona through the boo-birds that greeted him in San Diego on Opening Day, much of the interview footage could be switched around randomly without anyone being the wiser. And most of that footage consists of Bonds playing the victim, insisting that the allegations and media pressure don't get to him, and then collapsing into childish belligerence and tears. As a piece of counter-spin, I think it will largely backfire, both because people recognize it as self-serving damage control, and because Bonds is about as sympathetic a hero as the star of Steven Spielbergo's A Burns For All Seasons. Though I'm curious about where the series could possibly go from here—or where ESPN will even allow it to go—life is most definitely too short.
NM: Yeah, I'm done with Bonds On Bonds after one viewing. Leaving aside the ethical implications of an "ESPN Original" entertainment show that's not allowed to feed scoops to the ESPN news division—I actually watched a Sportscenter segment on Bonds that was reduced to quoting Variety about something the slugger said on his show—Bonds On Bonds just isn't very good television. When the show delves into Bonds' history, and gets his first-person memories of his Dad's death and his own playoff failures, I can almost see how a reasonably good biographical documentary could be cobbled together from this footage. But as you point out, the chronology is jumbled and the point unclear. Bonds On Bonds teases us with the possibility that Bonds is going to confront his legacy head-on, and get to the bottom of whether he really cares what people think of him. Instead, he waves his hate mail, breaks down crying, and does everything but demand that people feel sorry for his lying, cheating, stuck-up ass.
Almost as egregious is Lil' Kim: Countdown To Lockdown (BET), which follows the hip-hop diva as she tries to get some business done before heading off to jail to serve a perjury sentence. The first episode was kind of interesting, since it dealt with the reasons for Lil' Kim's conviction, which has to do with the "no snitching" code of the streets. But the rest of the episodes have been pretty standard "day in the life of a celebrity" reality fare, with a lot of indistinguishable hangers-on buzzing around the star while she throws hissy fits—later justified at great length in the first-person confessionals—because she doesn't like her new video, her clothes, her dinner, etc. The show is actually pretty hard to follow, since it mostly consists of people yelling at each other about how they can't stand "drama," even though that's pretty much all they produce, all day long.
Also kind of lame: Face The Family (Lifetime), a reality dating show in which couples on the verge of getting serious spend a week alone with each other's respective parents. It's not especially revealing, because this situation is artificial—in real life, parents aren't asked to reassess their kids' prospective mates after every single encounter—and because the show's casting department tends to lean on unusual types, like a middle-aged stand-up comedian, and Matthew Perry's sister. Still, there's a modicum of entertainment value in watching some of these folks blow it, like when the comedian walks into his Asian girlfriend's parents' house and says, "I love what you've done with the place. It's like Enter The Dragon."
Is it possible for a reality show to be appalling and enlightening at the same time? I give you Black. White. (FX), which proves the case hour by excruciating hour. The premise is simultaneously brave and ghastly: a white family and a black family put on makeup and try to pass as each other's race in a series of staged situations, in order to better understand the persistence of racism in a supposedly enlightened society. But there's a couple of problems with the show, right from the top. For starters, the white family is headed up by a couple of A-1 doofuses. The father, Bruno, is a well-meaning, intractable snob who's convinced that blacks go looking for racism where it doesn't exist, and that if anyone ever called him a "nigger," he'd just laugh it off. Meanwhile, his wife Carmen is a touchy-feely type who doesn't understand why it might be offensive to call someone "a beautiful black creature." Their opposite numbers seem a lot cooler, though the black mother, Renee, does tend to prove Bruno's main point by overreacting to Carmen's social klutziness, which she presumes to be mean-spirited when it's really just clueless.
The other major problem with Black. White. is sort of endemic to the genre. Blame Heisenberg. The presence of cameras in any situation is bound to change the situation, and a lot of times when the subjects on the show think that people are treating them differently because of the color of their skin, the real reason might be the TV crew surrounding them, not to mention that their makeup looks kind of weird. The show also misses some opportunities to confront some of the stickier issues. In one episode, Renee gets mad at a white guy who complains that blacks don't value a good education, but it takes until the next episode for her to mention that her own son has been kicked out of school, and that he doesn't much care about going back.
At the same time, Black. White. really gets at some of the enduring problems between the races in America, and at least two or three times an episode, it pushes so hard that it gets uncomfortable. Whenever the families start arguing with each other, and the black family falls back on "You guys can never understand what we've been through," and the white family falls back on condescension, it reveals a cultural divide that may never be bridged. The only real hope is the children, white Rose and black Nick, who are growing up in a culture where blacks no longer feel the need to "act white," since so many whites are acting black. Nick doesn't really want to hear what his parents have to say about institutional racism, while Rose is so heartbroken that she can't be as close to her black friends as she is to her white friends—or as the black friends are to each other—that she ends almost every episode in tears. Black. White. may be too silly to do any real healing, but it deserves some kudos for probing the fullness of the wound.
That's what TV is for, right? To educate, entertain, and make you cringe.
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