"Didn't That Show Used To Be Called..."

I'm not a fan of reality shows, but The Girl likes them, and, since she controls the TV, I end up watching quite a few. One The Girl watches is Sell This House!, on which the host and a designer help homeowners sell their stagnating properties with some simple interior design tips. I enjoy the show, because it's neat to see what some paint and rearranging your furniture can do to a house (and host Tanya Memme's not exactly hard on the eyes, either).

During a random channel surf, we came across a commercial for a show on WE called Take This House and Sell It, which appears to be exactly the same as Sell This House! (It even contains the title, which borders on outright plagiarism.) Not being a fan of reality shows, I'm not used to this sort of blatant ripping-off of ideas. But then, just watching commercials, and knowing what's already on TV, I saw that it's rampant.

Another one of The Girl's shows is What Not to Wear (which entertains me because the hostess is a total bitch-on-wheels). There's an almost identical show on Style Network called How Do I Look? Then, there's Skating's Next Star and Skating With Celebrities (both of which are ripoffs of Dancing with the Stars, which was a ripoff of American Idol). There's Iron Chef and Celebrity Cooking Showdown, Nanny 911 and Supernanny, and (worst of all), Wife Swap and Trading Spouses.

I can understand copying the formula of a popular show; that's been going on since the beginning of TV. What I don't understand is how big can the audience for some of these shows be? Are shows about swapping your spouse that in-demand that we need two of them? And we've already got two celebrity cookoff shows (the two Iron Chefs); do we really need a third one?

Sometimes, you can catch lightning in a bottle. You can come up with a totally stupid idea, and it turns out to be a hit. If you're a TV programmer, you should be happy for the other programmers, because they lucked out with something stoopid. What you shouldn't do is figure out a way to rip off that show in order to cannibalize their audience. Eventually, what you'll end up with is a whole bunch of shows that are only slightly different than one another that no one watches, because (DUH!!) they're still fans of the original show and still watch that. There's plenty of uncharted territory out there as far as "reality" goes. (I just saw one on A&E about young adults deciding whether they wanted to be priests or get married. That's not a choice at all, as far as I'm concerned.) Why don't you (and it pains me to say this, as it encourages the proliferation of reality shows) come up with some other dumb idea? People will watch it, or they won't. It's the same crapshoot you get if you just come up with some ripoff. But, at least it's your crapshoot, and not your version of someone else's.

Hopefully, my message will reach somebody, but I honestly don't think we've seen the last of Celebrity (Fill in the Blank) Shows. I know I can't wait for the next one.