So Celebrity Rehab and Project Runway ended in the same week. I was feeling kinda bereft, TV-wise, (and slightly let down--Project Runway was fine, but I just didn't get that into it this time. Celebrity Rehab, on the other hand, was riveting to the end. But then, you know, there's no winner at the end, except I guess Seth and Mary both went to sober living, so maybe they're the winners.)
Fortunately, two of my other favorite shows came back, both retooled. Celebrity Fit Club is back in a special "Boot Camp" edition, and thus far, I'm not all that convinced. For one thing, they've brought back four previous contestants, which just kind of goes to show that, like most diets, Celebrity Fit Club doesn't really work. (I got this also from the five minutes of Gone Country where Maureen McCormick had definitely gained a bunch of weight since the end of her fit club experience.) I guess it's cool that Dustin "Screech" Diamond is back, since he's usually good for some entertaining TV, but, as much as I hate to say it, I think this franchise feels a little tired, and this reformatting feels like the reality show equivalent of the big wedding, baby, or inexplicable kid who comes to live with the main character (Like Glen Scarpelli on One Day at a Time or Poor Heather O'Rourke in the last days of Happy Days.)--a desperate, post shark-jump attempt to breathe some new life into what's pretty much already a corpse.
Dirt is also back, and it's also been retooled, and I'm still not really sure what I think of the results. Watching the first couple of episodes, you can almost hear what must have been the tense meetings between Courteney and David and the FX execs when they were deciding whether to renew it or not: "We need Lucy to be more relatable," I'm sure they said, so now she's not the same ruthless, coldhearted bitch she was in the first season, and the show is less fun for it. "Does the crazy guy have to be, you know, crazy?" Well, apparently not. He's consistently on his meds for the first time, thus removing another entertaining element of the show. Though I guess this part is kind of interesting: last season, Lucy's only vestige of humanity was the way she took care of Don; this season, Don's taking care of her. Their relationship is still kind of sweet, but it's less poignant than it was last season. "Dial back the depravity," they said, so we're left with lots of roman-a-clef celebrity stuff, which is kind of entertaining, but overall the whole thing is far less seedy and depraved than it was last season, and I liked seedy and depraved. Now Lucy's all noble--she's going after Tweety just because of what he did to poor Rick Fox. The most recent episode did feature Don trapped in a senatorial candidate's sex dungeon for hours on end, so that was pretty depraved, but still, for a show that had Rick Fox pegged with a strap-on in its first episode, and Wayne Brady threatening to cut off and saute a penis with some chopped fennel somewhere around episode five, it feels like Dirt has lost its nerve. I still like it, I'll still watch it, but so far, it's not the refreshing breath of foul air it was last season.
