Not Here to Make Friends: Competing on Reality TV

There are all kinds of careers in reality television. Last night's Top Chef Masters, which pits established chefs against one another in a bid to win money for their favorite charities, saw the return of a runner-up from the original Top Chef, Las Vegas' second place finisher Bryan Voltaggio. Bryan is a married father of two who owns a successful restaurant in Maryland; his return to televised cooking reads as a smart, genial publicity bid, an effort to get his restaurant's name out there and prove that, though he lost to his brother in his season's finale, he's still a world-class chef. 

Top Chef Masters is somewhere between pleasant and boring to watch; there's nothing but professional pride at stake, which mean the losses are cringier (how can someone so successful screw up frying oysters??) and the wins aren't exactly thrilling. Still, sometimes it's nice to have that kind of thing on the menu, the sense that reality television can raise up the deserving and talented, that some people are still willing to put their rep on the line and play for charity, maybe even a little bit for fun.

Then there's Project Runway, which is limping into its twelfth season this month, having been jettisoned by Bravo and picked up, none too successfully, by Lifetime in 2009. Like Top Chef, Project Runway has done All Stars seasons, giving former contestants the opportunity for a do-over; for this season, fans were asked to vote someone back into the Parsons workroom for another shot at a Mercedes Benz Fashion Week and sartorial immortality. (Or collaborations with Payless, a la the show's most successful winner, Christian Siriano– whichever.) Of course the fan favorite was a pretty but apparently prickly girl named Kate. There were the requistite determined statements about proving herself this time around. Mostly it was interesting to see other contestants crowding around her for little pieces of wisdom, a reminder that reality shows run on their own odd sets of rules (“when do we start tomorrow?” one girl asked, and Kate said they'd probably be in the workroom from “6 to 11,” which puts a lot of the show in perspective– a seventeen hour day of sewing would make anyone a little prickly, I think). 

But then there's the kind of show that's only marginally skill-based, that's intended mostly to exploit exhaustion and drunkenness and youth. I'm talking, of course, about MTV's The Challenge: Rivals II. I'm not even going to attempt to explain it–