Ways Reality TV Can Go So, So Wrong

Now, I'll be the first to say I'm no professional decorator of cakes. If you give me a piping bag and ask me to write "Happy birthday" on your cake, you're probably just going to get sugar-laden projectile vomit shrapnel, and maybe a random curse word. That said, I've never gone on TV claiming that I could do any better than that. I'm sure the stress of being under a time limit is limiting, but when the result looks like black market Pokemon knockoffs that were recovered from a warehouse fire, perhaps you're in the wrong competition.

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The conceit in the scene seems to be that Deputy Doofus has either never fired a gun before, or that when he does, he somehow shoots himself and several other people in the foot with each shot. But Seagal is here to make sure he gets it right this time. After popping off a few rounds, his sage advice to the officer is to aim using the gun's sight and then squeeze the trigger. You might know this as "how everyone shoots a gun."

But here's where it stops being amusing: An LA Times article pointed out that Seagal doesn't actually have the police credentials he claims he does -- at least, not according to the organizations that give out those certifications. Technically, to do police stuff where Seagal was working, they can pretty much say "Hey, you're a cop now" and bestow you with a ceremonial title that lets you arrest people. But that only makes the whole situation depressing. "Even Steven Seagal qualifies as a cop here!" isn't a joke; it's the sign of a system that gives even less of a shit than Seagal does.

Then there's the time Seagal teamed up with Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona, whom you may remember as the guy who likes to torture people. They rode in on a goddamn tank to break up a cockfighting ring.

I used a TV news link, in case you thought this was a staged bit or a terrible SNL skit. It's neither of those, unless you subscribe to the increasingly popular theory that we've all secretly been sucked into a terrible SNL skit that we can never, ever escape.

Probably the most staggering example came when an Asian elephant competed against 40 little people to see who could pull an airplane the farthest. I can't stress enough that no one involved seemed to grasp the obvious, which is that none of the animals could possibly be aware that they were expected to actually compete. So when a Navy SEAL got through an obstacle course ahead of a chimpanzee, it wasn't really the shining victory for the American armed forces the show suggested.

Proving no idea is too dumb for a sequel, Fox made Man vs. Beast 2 one year later. This one featured four little people competing in a relay race against a camel. Please read that sentence again and try to imagine in what universe someone sat down in a writers room to decide what little people and camels have in common. They like to relay race, don't they? Fuck yeah they do! Alright, I realize I've accidentally made this show sound amazing, and that a good number of you have abandoned this article to look up clips.

Every week, the winning group got to choose which side of the house they would live in, and surprise, every chance they got, the people from the warm side of the house chose to go back to the warm side of the house. Did this prove that people from the future are more able to handle themselves than our caveman ancestors? Well, since the future was just people from the present using present technology and the past was people from the present deprived of present technology, it mostly just proved that low-key torture doesn't make for compelling TV.

The poor contestants really tried to play along, but consistently had to point out to the show's host (and presumably production staff off-camera) that they were all freezing, it was impossible for them to make fire because they'd been given wet wood, and none of them were actual cavemen. But hey, how could anyone have known this would be an issue prior to filming? Sometimes you just have to try things and see what happens.

Related: 5 Depressing Realities Behind Popular Reality TV Shows

The idea was, I guess, to shine a light on the inconsiderate practice of ghosting and help the rest of us understand why people do it. The problem is that the moment you enlist the aid of MTV to stalk your ex across social media (escalating to interviews with their friends and finally showing up at their house), it seems like you become a prime example of why they ghosted you in the first place.

And it's right around here that you realize that the moment you point a camera at a subject, you've already corrupted it, because it now exists only as fuel for the content machine. That's when you see that none of these shows actually have a point. They exist only because somebody thought we might watch them, to distract ourselves for a bit from the fact that we've all been ghosted by the system, and that our generation is in fact just a poorly made Pikachu with a pipe shoved up its ass.

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For more, check out 5 Shady Tactics Reality Shows Use To Trick You - The Spit Take:

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