Attack Of The Killer B-List

By James Poniewozik

Jerri Manthey is no stranger to hostile environments. On Survivor 2: The Australian Outback, she encountered extreme heat, extreme eating challenges and extreme backstabbing. But it is in her second reality go-around, on the WB's The Surreal Life, that she really finds herself out of her element: she is the only nonactor or nonmusician in a group of seven former celebrities picked to share a mansion for 10 days. "None of us know who she is," says housemate and former teen idol Corey Feldman in the debut episode. "She's not part of our society." "I felt like she didn't belong here--maybe because she was from a reality show," says roomie Brande Roderick (Baywatch Hawaii star and Playboy Playmate), disappointed that Manthey wasn't Robin Givens, whom Manthey replaced at the last minute.

The six performers eventually warm up to the reality star--which is nice of them, seeing as how they're starring in a reality show themselves. But this little incident epitomizes a key moment in the evolution of celebritus americanus, akin to the day Neanderthal man first came face to face with the Cro-Magnon: reality stars, and at least the lower tier of "real" celebrities, have become indistinguishable. As reality TV has turned the likes of Richard Hatch and Kelly Clarkson into cheap, commodified and replaceable mini-celebs, the culture of celebrity has changed. "In Hollywood," says David Perler, executive producer of reality show My Life Is a Sitcom, "I go out to dinner with friends, and they'll say, 'You'll never believe who I saw at the movie theater.' You expect it to be Julia Roberts, but they say, 'Alex, from The Bachelor.'" In this climate, who should feel insulted? Feldman, a former movie star who's being equated with a game-show contestant? Or Manthey, who two years ago was the most notorious person on TV's No. 1 show and is now being equated with the star of The Goonies?

To workaday minor celebrities, this shift--their rightful positions on Hollywood Squares being usurped by nobodies from Nobodyville!--has been the equivalent of businesses exporting desirable factory jobs to the Third World. But now Hollywood's B, C and D lists are counterattacking with their own reality shows. In addition to Surreal Life--which also includes rapper MC Hammer, Motley Crue's Vince Neil and Beverly Hills 90210's Gabrielle Carteris--E! network's Star Dates sends where-are-they-now stars on blind dates with noncelebs, many of whom, natch, have show-biz aspirations of their own. ABC's reality game show Celebrity Mole Hawaii casts seven quasi-stars, including Spin City's Michael Boatman, Suddenly Susan's Kathy Griffin and Erik von Detten (who co-starred in ABC's doomed Dinotopia for about five seconds) to complete adventure challenges hampered by one player who is a secret "mole" working to sabotage them. Fox has degraded such thought-to-be-not-further-degradable entities as Vanilla Ice and Barry Williams (The Brady Bunch) on Celebrity Boxing and Celebrity Boot Camp. For later this year, ABC is planning I'm a Celebrity ...Get Me Out of Here!, which would strand minor stars in a remote location. CBS is suing over the similarity to Survivor, for which the network has, of course, pondered a celebrity version.

Thank, or blame, Ozzy Osbourne, says Surreal Life producer Cris Abrego. The Osbournes "made it possible for us to talk to celebrities," he says. "Five or six years ago, reality TV was a bad word." Now it's CPR for a dying career, a way for forgotten celebrities to remind the world that they exist and for child stars to reintroduce themselves as grownups. Not that any celebrity will admit to such motives. On one Star Dates, Kim Fields--Tootie from The Facts of Life--says of her two blind dates, "If they call me Tootie, they're out of here." But by her second date, she seems miffed that her beau says he has seen only one episode of Facts, and she asks him if he has ever watched her other sitcom, Living Single. ("In Living Color?" he says. "I used to watch that all the time.")

For all the popularity of this new genre, working with stars who aren't show-biz naifs has some drawbacks. Abrego, who once produced the MTV reality show Road Rules, remembers its restrictive contracts: "The Road Rules kids, they'd have to sign their firstborn away. But these guys, if you don't get the right hair and makeup person to show up, there's trouble." There's the ego massaging, convincing even C-list stars and their agents that the series are not has-been freak shows--shhh, it's our secret! "They had standards," Abrego says. "There were people who said, 'If Gary Coleman does the show, I won't do it.'" (Instead, they cast Webster's Emmanuel Lewis, who is the diminutive former child star who didn't do Celebrity Boxing.)

THEN THERE'S THE FINANCING. Even minor stars, unlike civilian participants, expect to be paid real money. Celebrity Mole permits its winner to keep the grand prize (up to $250,000), while most celebrity game-show contestants must give their loot to charity. "In all fairness," says Mole executive producer Scott Stone, "we couldn't afford to hire them to do the entire taping"--though he insists that some of the stars played for charity anyway. Not so Griffin: "F___ that! The level of celebrity that will do this show, we need this money!" Butch Patrick (that's Eddie Munster to you) says he did Star Dates because "I had broken up with my girlfriend, and there was a paycheck involved." In the middle of one date, he charges a fan 10 bucks for an autograph.

But the shows are cheaper than scripted series, and a Mole stunt that involves a contestant getting soaked under a waterfall does gain a certain appeal when said contestant is supermodel Frederique van der Wal. Still, reality shows rely on, you know, reality: we watch them to see people's genuine, unrehearsed reactions, even in contrived situations. Can you expect that from people who have spent their lives performing? "You can tell when someone's acting," says Surreal's Carter, pointing to a genuinely moving moment when Neil talks about his daughter's death of cancer. But Abrego wasn't always sure. "I've seen them turn it on and off," he says. "There's a moment where Corey is crying, and to be honest, we're not sure if it's real." Feldman says it is, as is the series' denouement--he married his fiance in a ceremony officiated by ordained minister Hammer--and insists that the nuptials were not a stunt to juice his career. (Look what it did for Tiny Tim!) Rather, he says he did Surreal Life as a "science experiment."

Still, if many celebrities want to experiment with being real people, plenty of ordinary folks are willing to switch. On ABC Family channel's My Life Is a Sitcom, which premieres next Monday, eight families compete to star in a situation-comedy pilot based on their real lives. The would-be stars have their wacky home lives videotaped and evaluated by a panel of experts, including The Brady Bunch's Maureen McCormick. As executive producer David Perler admits, the show proves that the age-old declaration--My family is just as funny as the ones on TV!--"is really just a sentence." In one episode, we meet Joe Mozian, a stay-at-home dad from Old Greenwich, Conn., who seems to have learned how to be a husband and father by watching THE KING OF QUEENS. A relentlessly manic overgrown kid, he opens the episode with the one line you never want a show about a pudgy white man to begin with: "Hey, want to hear the new rap I wrote?" The network brings in a professional comedy writer to observe the Mozians, and she quickly concludes, "He is as close to a living sitcom character as I have ever met in my life." If My Life Is a Sitcom performs no other public service, it will be to demonstrate that that is not a compliment.

The reality phenomenon gets compared a lot with The Truman Show, but this version of it is more like 1983's The King of Comedy, in which would-be comedian Rupert Pupkin (Robert DeNiro), an obsessive fan of late-night talk-show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), kidnaps his idol to get a shot at doing his stand-up act on TV. It's no longer enough for Pupkin to admire Langford; he must become him. If Pupkin had just waited 20 years, he could have got a show on E! network. E!'s The Michael Essany Show, starting in March, will follow a young man from Valparaiso, Ind., who six years ago, at age 14, wanted so badly to become a late-night talk-show host that he did. Right then. In his parents' living room. Essany got a slot on local-cable-access television, persuaded Mom to run the camera, put a backdrop of the Manhattan skyline behind his desk and over the next six years managed to book actual celebrities, including Jeff Foxworthy and Carrot Top. Well, all right, they're actual celebrities compared with any you could book into your living room. It's both inspirational and creepy. Essany's dedication is amazing, but what he's dedicated to--transforming himself into a pitch-perfect rendition of a coolly ironic, middle-aged show-biz pro--seems a little unhealthy in a young man who should be fantasizing about doing things with Brittany Murphy other than interviewing her.

Essany's show and the others raise the question, What is the tipping point at which a real person becomes a persona, or vice versa? And is that transformation worth the glare of reality-show cameras? Feldman isn't sure; he's so mad at the media and the WB--which for some reason, he says, depicted him and his housemates as has-beens--that he has written a song about the matter, which he plans to put on a rerelease of his 2002 album, Former Child Actor. Then again, The Surreal Life is probably the only reason you know Feldman had a 2002 album. As for Manthey, she wants to parlay Surreal Life into an acting role in old-fashioned fiction television. "It's pilot-casting season," she says, "and there's been renewed interest in me because of the show." Reality may have changed the rules of celebrity, but the big dream is still the same: to become a true star, so hot and bright that you never have to worry about being real again.