It’s either love or desperation that’s brewing in the Floribama Shore house between Gus and Nilsa. Fortunately for us, neither driving force is ruled by the desire for privacy. It appears their entire courtship — from Nilsa’s bold flirtations to Gus eventually giving in to the imminent sex recorded by night vision cameras to their subsequent alcohol-fueled drag out fights — will all be televised, and I suppose I should be concerned for the mental wellbeing of all the other roommates as they become forced spectators of this probably doomed relationship, but really? I’m just one person. I can’t afford to expend energy worrying about everything that can go wrong in that house, especially since I’m far more apprehensive about the moment Kortni decides to break someone’s nose for doing something unbelievably egregious like moving her contouring kit. Still, a romance between housemates cannot possibly be a good idea, so I think it wise that we organize – that we benefit from this madness in some way. Here’s what I propose: we set up some sort of bracket wherein we place bets on all the crazy shit that will eventually transpire in that house, including how and when things between Gus and Nilsa will eventually crumble beyond reason and comprehension. And I think this bracket should involve money, as I have recently decided to redecorate my living room and the hammered stainless steel block coffee table I have my eye on doesn’t come cheap.
In the densest layers of the muck-and-scum-filled reality television ecosystem, a few Bravolebrities have risen like deranged phoenixes to the tippy top. They bob there proudly upon the fungus-ridden slimy surface and take comfort in the asinine belief that the only thing that matters is that strangers know their name. The creatures currently crowding that swamp include:
I broke. And it’s embarrassing to admit just how fully I succumbed after repeating over and over that I would never go down that road of tarnished televised cobblestones. My only excuse is a virus took over my body for a couple of days and I became housebound and I needed entertainment that wouldn’t require me to expend even a smidgen of energy. I’d been planning on rewatching all of Twin Peaks, but I was terrified of the effect a dancing dwarf speaking backwards in a blood-red room could have on my already fragile being. So with my health in mind, I turned away from the Log Lady and investigators craving damn fine cups of coffee and instead scrolled through the On Demand menu and eventually settled on the very first ever episode of – wait for it – Southern Charm.
To give you some background, I’m not averse to reality television, something my faithful readers already know. For a few years now, I’ve covered several incarnations of The Real Housewives. I’ve swum through the murky water I’m certain Jax has peed in to write about Vanderpump Rules. I laughed my ass off as I chronicled the ridiculousness of twenty very young adults stranded on an island while searching for their production-approved soulmates on Are You the One? I was paid nicely to recap that and I almost blew the entire thing even before it started by writing in the first draft of my first recap that the premise of the show was “preposterous.” Turns out producers don’t much care for such a term, but since writers don’t much care for being critiqued, I used a synonym, got my point across, and cashed my check. I’d post to Facebook or Twitter that one of my new pieces was up and I kept receiving messages back that the show I really should be covering was the one about people cavorting through the streets and on the plantations of Charleston. I got this feedback so often that I finally publicly announced I would not be watching or recapping Southern Charm because I feared doing so would literally destroy whatever was left of my already blackened soul. But reader? I caved. Hard.
