Thursday, February 27, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Goldberg: Virtue, diligence and brother

By Tod Goldberg

Generally speaking, I'm not a big fan of reality television. I think this is because the reality being televised is nothing like my own--for instance, I've never been marooned on an island with a bunch of actor/waitresses pretending to be normal people but who are actually narcissistic 15-minute celebrities, nor have I ever lived in a house with seven sexually ambiguous 21-year-olds with nothing better to do than screw each other, fight, bitch and then recount it over and over again on reunion shows, cross-over challenges and "Where Are They Now" specials. I'm also free of any fears that I need explicated by that annoying guy in the sweatpants and brush-on tan. I'm uninterested in going on any blind dates, with or without celebrities.

All of which makes MTV's new reality show "Fraternity Life" very troubling. See, that was my reality. And let me tell you: If there has ever been a worse idea about how to fill up prime-time television...well...it would have been this show my brother was the producer of called "Martial Law." For anyone expecting riveting TV filled with the kind of bonding, sexual tension and troubling human drama that reality programming typically thrives on, guess again. There is nothing more mundane than spending time with 50 beer-drenched men between the ages of 18 and 22 mugging for face time. I know. I did it for five years.

To be clear, I loved being a fraternity boy. It gave me all the excuses I'd ever need to act like an asshole without truly embarrassing my family, plus I got to have sex with girls who wore mini-skirts, kept their hair in scrunchies and equated puffy paint with true love. I also got to torture pledges, thus relegating them to a status below human for the 10 weeks they spent under my charge. In normal society, being a sadistic fuck to an 18-year-old kid named Udie would be looked upon as, well, criminal. In my case, it was just a Friday night well spent spooning potato salad into said 18-year-old's hair while demanding the Greek alphabet be recited. Backwards.

Of course, most of the time fraternity life is about sitting around doing nothing except dreaming up cool party ideas ("What if we have a mandatory thing where all the chicks who show up to the house have to dance in a cage? People would totally come to see that shit."), talking about your favorite movies ("Dude, how aggro was it when Keanu confronted Patrick Swayze on the beach?") or simply dispelling popular notions on how to get rid of crabs ("Grabow said if I sprayed Aqua Net on my nuts, it would kill them. Ford said he heard if you did that, they could burrow up into your crack and you'd be screwed. No way am I going to the health center with that issue."), none of which makes for terribly compelling television drama.

Which begs the question: Why on Earth did MTV make this show?

The short answer would be a show called "Sorority Life," which aired last season on MTV and featured some of the most witless broads I have ever seen. I mean "broad" in the best sense of the word, as in "crimp-haired bitches who make World War III out of every small act of life captured by the camera." The show was awful, of course, and while I'm sure the Idiot Box Savant might have been able to find something redeemable about it, I could only stomach it in two-minute segments. In those two minutes, however, I always held out hope that this would be the episode where the full-fledged girl-on-girl action would take place. It never did and the big drama ended up being, shock of all shock, the depledging of one of the crimp-haired broads. The horror! Alack, at least the girls were cute. The boys don't have that luxury.

There can't be anything attractive about drunken frat boys on TV. Sure, it would have been a moot point had they asked me and my fraternity brothers 10 years ago to do the same show--we would have been on that like it was our job, thinking all the while that the show would boost our rush numbers, that National would gape at the strong bonds of our brotherhood and that girls would totally flock to us. "Just make us look cool," we'd tell MTV and for the year that we were on, we'd probably feel justified in that pursuit.

Ah, but nothing on MTV lasts for one year. They've even been kind enough to keep my first book in print for three years, which in the publishing industry is akin to having sex with Pamela Anderson without getting hepatitis. So these poor schmucks (and they really are--check out mtv.com for their full bios and you'll be amazed by the profundity found in their lack of intelligence) will be sitting at home with their teenage daughters at some point trying to explain just why they got drunk and accidentally had man-sex with that pledge. Now THAT would be a reality show I'd watch.