The Real World San Diego

Real World made Jamie Chung’s Samurai Girl casting “more challenging”

Tonight, ABC Family debuts its new six-hour scripted mini-series Samurai Girl, and its star is a familiar face to MTV viewers: The Real World San Diego’s Jamie Chung. The TV show is an adaptation of Carrie Asai’s book series; Chung plays the title character, the “sole survivor of a plane crash” after “ninjas attack her wedding and kill her brother,” according to the network.

While her time on MTV’s reality series made her recognizable, it didn’t make it easier for her to get cast. “If anything, it made it more challenging. When I would go in to audition, they wanted to make sure I was taking it seriously. Someone from a reality background would blow it off. That’s the stereotype. Acting is something that I always wanted to do. I did plays in middle school, high school and college, but it was drilled into me get an education and climb the corporate ladder,” Jamie told the Boston Herald.

She told the Wall Street Journal something similar, saying her time on the show “didn’t really help me out. They’d think, ‘Oh, it’s another reality girl.’”

The three-episode mini-series, which airs tonight, Saturday, and Sunday, and on which Jamie performed some stunts, may or may not get picked up for a full season, but Jamie told the Herald, “I’m grateful to be one of the few Asian actors with a job. And I would like to play a part where color of skin doesn’t matter. What I really want to do is have a lasting career in this industry.”

Survivor Gabon

Kelly Czarnecki: “I need to be manipulative; I need to be different personalities”

Kelly Czarnecki, the 22-year-old jean salesperson and student from Chicago, was recruited for Survivor Gabon via her MySpace page, and even more unsurprisingly but still shockingly, revealed that “my page was private so they only saw my picture.” Yes, casting producers contacted her based upon a single photograph, which may explain why it was so difficult to have a conversation with her.

Kelly ranks at the bottom of my likability list because she was so extremely inaccessible and difficult to talk to—especially after my three pleasant, interesting conversations with Danny/GC Brown, Bob Crowley, and Susie Smith. Kelly never took off her oversized, Paris Hilton sunglasses, and I became increasingly convinced that she was utterly bored and staring at the ground. I laughed nervously throughout the whole interview after she’d make some kind of outrageous or nonsensical declarative statement that I had no response to. There was a lot of dead air as she’d just be done with a question even though she hadn’t even started to really answer it; sometimes she’d just say single words as answers.

Kelly sells jeans and says she’s “one of the top salespeople at my work,” E Street Denim in Chicago, and said she is “consistently exceeding sales; I manipulate people instead of buying the $40 jean to like the $400 jean.” That skill didn’t exactly come across in our interview, but maybe it’ll work for her in the game.

She seemed very impressed with herself and over-confident, but ultimately came across more like a Big Brother contestant, especially considering the way she’d say things that made no actual sense, like “I’m not going to be an act,” “my nature to compete,” “I’ve always been into jeans … and my middle name is jean so that may have something to do with it,” and “I need to be different personalities.” And can’t you just hear a houseguest saying this? “Some of the guys, I think, are really cute. This one guy looks like Nick Lachey. Yeah. The guys are cute. And I like the girl—the Spanish girl, the Mexican older lady. She’s cool. The other woman looks mean,” Kelly told me.

Kelly’s role model in the game is “Poverty” (Parvati, the winner of Survivor Micronesia) and plans to “get all the guys on my side,” and told me she couldn’t think of a single thing that would challenge her in the game.

That said, she did have sympathetic moments, and I kind of felt sorry for her. Talking about her three brothers, she said they “raised me” because “I’ve always looked up to them. It was hard being the girl in the family because, like, oh, hey, I didn’t win any awards, I’m just like this blonde, pretty girl. They made me toughen up and go for something that I want. … No crying, no nothing.”

Listen to Kelly talk about her strategy, confidence, and game play—and hear a lot of the birds and sounds of Gabon during those long pauses:

Big Brother 10

Sumo wrestler enters the house to save Big Brother 10 from its end-of-season doldrums

In a season with no big twists and very little trippiness, last night’s Big Brother 10 episode ended with a sumo wrestler sitting in the living room on a box that apparently contains some kind of information the houseguests need for an upcoming luxury competition, which Julie Chen said will award “a trip outside the house with a twist that could change the game.” Apparently the houseguests have to get the guy off the box. Intriguing, perhaps, and probably necessary to help fill the dead air over the remaining four episodes.

Meanwhile, Renny, my favorite houseguest thanks to both her hysterical antics and intelligence, was evicted by Dan and Memphis. Next up, new HOH Dan will likely nominate and evict Jerry, unless he wises up and realizes that Memphis is marching toward a victory that I think April, of all people, predicted earlier in the season.

Speaking of Memphis, his family starred in last night’s waste-of-time segment, which included photographs of his younger, skinnier self. But it was insightful, if only because we learned that Memphis’ best friend Matt either shares his fashion sense or is borrowing his clothes, because he, too, wears the oversized v-neck t-shirts that show all kinds of man-cleavage. (So, for that matter, does Memphis’ girlfriend.) After commenting on Memphis’ stupid, overly-large v-neck t-shirts, I stumbled across Radar’s deconstruction of “the deep V” trend, which it calls the “douchebag neck.” A-men. I had no idea it was such a scourge on the country, although now I’m starting to notice them everywhere. Ugh.

Anyway, just when I started to get annoyed with the remaining houseguests and the stupid “renegades” (stop naming your alliances, dumbasses), along came footage from the jury house to remind me how pleasant the remaining contestants actually are. Michelle, for example, is as dumb and vain as ever. “Oh my god, I do look good on camera!” she said while they watched competition footage, and Libra looked ready to throw Michelle, April, and the TV in the pool.

And despite being evicted, April is convinced that she has an even more important role now on the jury. Best of all, April even had the gall to say, “I left the house with all my respect and dignity and pride.” Must we remind her that she encouraged a virtual stranger to ejaculate all over her on camera? Off camera, whatever, but in a public space in a house full of strangers and cameras broadcasting video and audio to a worldwide audience? If that’s dignity, then the box the sumo wrestler is sitting on is actually the jury house.

other shows

Michael Vicks dogs featured in DogTown; The Locator, Sandhogs also debut this weekend

A diverse group of of new reality shows debuts this weekend, with subjects ranging from rehabilitated dogs to men who work in sewers.

Tonight with the 9 p.m. ET return of National Geographic Channel’s DogTown, the series that follows the rehabilitation of dogs at the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Utah, which the network says is “often the last hope for dogs requiring specialized or urgent medical attention or for abused and neglected animals.”

Tonight, a special two-hour episode titled “Saving the Michael Vick Dogs” follows four of the 22 pit bulls that were sent to be rehabilitated after Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick’s property was raided and dozens of fighting pit bulls were discovered. One of those four dogs, Georgia, had her teeth removed for an unknown reason; another, Denzel, is sick with a life-threatening parasite.

Saturday night at 9, WE tv debuts The Locator, a series that follows professional locator Troy Dunn as he reunites people who have somehow lost touch or otherwise become estranged. The series follows a monthly “Angel Case,” which the network says “usually comes to Troy because there is an urgent need to find someone and because she has exhausted all other possible avenues.” If it’s not obvious, it’s a tear-jerker.

Sunday night at 10 p.m. ET, History Channel looks for another Ice Road Truckers when it debuts Sandhogs following the second-season finale of its first tough-jobs hit. The new show exchanges freezing cold environments for the tunnels beneath New York City, and follows the “urban miners” who “are the builders of water and sewage tunnels, subway systems and bridge footings, all of which are the most crucial and underappreciated elements of the city’s infrastructure,” according to the network.

international shows

Algerian reality show contestants recite the Quran

A reality show airing in Algeria on state-owned TV is a competition between men who recite the Quran. ENTV’s Knights of the Quran “allows viewers to vote for their favourite reciter” and will announce its winner, the “Knight of Quran,” on the final day of Ramadan, The National Reports.

The show “replaces two racy music talent shows that were pulled out from Algerian screens by the state-owned broadcasters following pressure from Islamic political parties” and is “designed to appease religious conservatives increasingly concerned at pervasive western influences,” according to The National. The Middle East’s version of Idol, Star Academy, has already been banned.

The paper reports that more than 16,000 men applied to the show, which is “being promoted by the religious affairs ministry” and “is one of many Quran recitation contests that will be held throughout the Muslim world this month.”

Marwan Kraidy is working on a book about reality TV and the Middle East, and told the paper, “Once you put Quranic recitation in the form of a game show, there is a give and take. The Islamic form does not stay pure as there is a mixture with popular culture. … It could be a way for the government to appease the Islamists to say ‘Look, you are demonstrating against these shows, you are constantly objecting to these kinds of talent shows, here we are offering you a talent show that furthers your aims’. It’s partly a political compromise with the Islamists to appease them because they have been very vocal in Algeria and elsewhere against these western-formatted shows,” Kraidy said.

Top Model 11

CW says Top Model’s lowest-rated debut ever is “fierce”

America’s Next Top Model 11 debuted last night, and despite Tyra’s imitation of a moose and the faux Star Trek theme, Tyra and company were watched by 3.5 million viewers, an all-time low.

The show was “down 11% from last February’s cycle, and down 32% from last September in the adult demo” and overall the “lowest-rated premiere since the show debuted in 2003 on UPN,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

But you’d never know that reading The CW’s press release. It says that despite “tough competition” the series “ranked first on Wednesday with the network’s target young female audience.” But it then goes on to note how it tied in most of those demos: women 18 to 34 and 12 to 34; it only won “female teens.” And The CW is also excited that it “gained momentum through its premiere night,” adding 11 percent more viewers in the second hour, which was the first real episode.