Just when you thought FOX had set the reality TV bar about as low as it could go with such upcoming shows as The Littlest Groom and Playing It Straight, along comes UPN to demonstrate that the bar can go even lower.
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UPN has announced that it has teamed with producer Bruce Nash (For Love Or Money, Meet My Folks, Who Wants To Marry My Dad?) to produce Awful Pretty, a one-hour weekly reality series will follow a group of men who are transformed into women by their wives or girlfriends.
According to Variety, the men will live together in a house and be forced to live as women 24 hours a day, seven days a week. During their stay in the house, the contestants will be put into various scenarios where they'll "learn what it's like to live as a woman." Similar to UPN's America's Next Top Model (which actually casts real young women as contestants), the men who don't get the hang of posing as women will be eliminated, one by one, every week.
"There will be funny moments, but this is really an experiment to see what it's like to be a woman," Nash explained to Variety. "They'll live in some sort of chick pad, watch 'Dr. Phil,' take the Cosmo quiz and make sure they don't keep the toilet seat up."
Demonstrating how little apparent genuine creative thought goes into some of these emerging reality concepts, Nash told the paper that he came up with the idea for the show after looking over one of the American Film Institute's list of The 100 Greatest Movies and noticing that several of the films on the list (Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire) were based around cross-dressing plot lines.
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"Movies are a great place to look for reality ideas, particularly romantic comedies," he said. "Movies where guys are dressing up and pretending to be women are funny. Why not see how it would work on a reality show?"
So far there's no word yet on exactly what type of prize will be offered to the men which agree to appear on the program (nor exactly how deeply the producers will investigate legitimacy of each contestant's relationship with their "girlfriend") but we're assuming its going to have to be one heck of a reward.