Having successfully whipped America’s youth into a hedonistic, taco-and-razor-eschewing frenzy of teen horniness with Skins and, to a lesser extent, The Hard Times Of RJ Berger, MTV has continued to build on its upcoming original programming slate, revealing orders for six scripted series and four unscripted series today. Among the shows being picked up for full-season orders are many that we’ve already told you about, like: the U.S. adaptation of UK hit The Inbetweeners (which the network says has been successfully molded into “a quintessentially American suburban experience”—which is, again, a place where kids don’t regularly call each other “cunt”); Dan Savage’s probably very graphic sex advice show Savage U; that Teen Wolf adaptation that, really, should just go ahead and be renamed Twi-lite, really now; the single-camera comedy about a socially ostracized (yet still incredibly telegenic, we’re guessing) wallflower This Is Awkward and Good Vibes, where David Gordon Green channels his all-consuming pot obsession into a new animated series; and the return of Beavis And Butt-Head, which is now said to be debuting by the end of the year with an updated format that involves the teenage miscreants also watching movies and TV shows, because music videos would likely baffle MTV viewers into thinking they’d accidentally tuned into Fuse or something.
But there are also a few wholly new shows we haven’t preemptively judged, such as The Substitute, described as sort of a “school-based version of Cash Cab,” where a substitute teacher ditches the lesson plan and stages a surprise game show that no one was expecting despite the presence of cameras and a production crew, apparently. And Money From Strangers, which boasts a premise seemingly based entirely on that one Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns hires Homer to be his “prank monkey,” and finds a group of comics paying people on the street to play jokes on their unwitting fellow citizens.
And finally, while there’s still no sign of various promised Jersey Shore spinoffs like the “redneck version,” the producers of that show have come up with a totally new way to engender self-destruction with FriendZone, where they have teenagers convince their opposite-sex, platonic pals to help them prepare for a blind date, only to have it revealed at the very last minute that the date is for the two of them—“So here’s hoping you decide you want to have sex with me suddenly!” Incidentally, MTV’s programming exec thinks FriendZone “reinvents the dating show for this generation,” by which we guess he means that it features people ruining perfectly good relationships just to be on TV? Or maybe it’s just because, judging by the majority of its scripted shows, “this generation” is like a packed crate of blindly humping rabbits.
