Life before social media was kind of wild. The media had so much power and whatever they said just went. We didn’t have the luxury of weighing options and making choices, we just kind of had to go along with whatever the media said. If we did have a problem, there were limited ways for us to share those thoughts online and of course, with the media having the power, they could just ignore it. Now, we are living in a whole new world where everyone is finally learning right from wrong and waking up from a deep media induced slumber. What I want to do today, is take us back to some of the dark times in tv.
Beauty and the Geek
Picture this- a line of skinny white blonde girls and a line of skinny white guys with glasses paired up to learn from each other and win challenges. The shallow beautiful girls teach the socially awkward virgins how to talk to women and the women learn to also have brains- wild! It went on for a good number of seasons and there was even a UK spinoff.
The Swan
The craziest of all time. “unattractive” women (aka ugly ducklings) would come on the show and be given extensive full body surgery and make overs to finally become “swans”- followed by a pageant where they showed off their full makeovers and one of the women crowned the ultimate swan. The surgeries were extensive and severe. Even as popular as surgery as become, I don’t think the show as it was then, would be accepted today.
Next
Literally, the human version of Tinder where people would go on multiple dates and just shout next if they didn’t like the person. This was one of the times when MTV was just churning out dating shows in all formats possible hoping for something to stick and it was so crazy.
Who wants to marry a millionaire
The bachelor, but if the bachelor is a millionaire (who turned out to be a fraud). It also reminds me of Joe Millionaire (where the women thought Joe was a millionaire but he was actually a construction worker).
There are so many more, like ANTM (which I LOVED but was questionable in hindsight), Tila Tequila (which was a wild mess) , I Wanna Marry Harry (where contestants thought they were competing for Prince Harry’s hand in marriage even though “Prince Harry” was just a red-haired actor). What a wild time it was.