If you thought you'd seen the worst of the worst in reality programming years ago, when Temptation Island still crowded the airwaves, think again! May I present for your consideration, GENUINE KEN: The Search for the Great American Boyfriend?
Now, I'm not exactly clear on what the point of this show is, because at no time in the first two episodes did they ever mention any sort of prize awaiting the ultimate winner. In fact, everything about this show makes me think that they had a budget of about $10,000 for the entire season. First, there's the limited number of contestants:
One of these eight guys is supposed to earn the title of "Genuine Ken, the Great American Boyfriend." Since there doesn't seem to be any sort of prize involved, I can only assume that these men are competing just for the honor that comes with such a title. Because what straight twenty-something year old guy isn't into plastic fashion dolls?! The other fishy thing about this show is that aside from their names and hometowns, none of the guys have professions attached to them, which makes me think that they are all aspiring actors whose agents managed to get them on this show for mere peanuts.
Also suspicious is "The Loft," which sort of looks like a kitchen and is meant to suggest that they are living in a house together, though it has clearly been hastily cobbled together on a sound stage:
These guys are probably all staying in a Motel 6 somewhere and coming in every day over the course of a week to film a few hours a day of this show, which has a run-time of about 20 minutes per episode. At least, that's the vibe I'm getting. Each episode is based around a challenge that somehow uses "KEN" in its title. The first episode was called "That's KEN-tertainment," because the boys had to participate in a talent show at Venice Beach. Unsurprisingly, none of them actually had any talent at all, except for the winner of the challenge, Cash from Las Vegas, who used to be a cheerleader in college and did an array of backflips and other cheerleadery shit:
And these two knuckleheads were both that guy in college who hangs out in the quad with an acoustic guitar doing covers of John Mayer songs in hopes of luring in unsuspecting females, so they stuck with what they do best for their talent portions:
Unfortunately for them, their Venice Beach audience was peopled entirely by sullen hipster girls:
They must have paid these girls in Raybans, jeggings, and cocaine, because even the QUEEN OF THE HIPSTERS was in attendance:
Can you believe she took time off from lounging around in her artist's loft, managing her Etsy account to be there?! Well neither can I!!!
Keith, a self-appointed "Poet," even recited a poem to one of the hipsters:
I don't know if the reaction he got was because his poetry was utter crap or because his pukka shell necklace is so 1996 in a way that is not even ironic, but this hipster was just not having it, and started sexting her manorexic film school boyfriend halfway through Keith's performance:
I guess the moral of this story is that you just shouldn't try to do anything nice for hipsters. Good news for the Kens-to-be though, because the audience had no say over who would win the talent show! That duty was left to Genuine Ken host, Whitney Port, some lady who is a marketing director at Mattel, and the guest host, some guy who is big on Youtube:
Whitney thought it just wasn't fair to send anybody home based on a talent show, because as she sagely mused, "a good girlfriend always gets to know her boyfriend before letting him go." So everyone was free to move on to episode two, entitled "KEN-terior Designs." They discovered the details of the challenge via everybody's favorite means of communication, BARBIE MAIL!!!
You guessed it! The guys had to compete in an interior decorating challenge! They had three hours to split into two teams and work their design magic on two blank rooms with a very limited budget. Big football-playing Kurtis really took charge on this challenge, coming up with the brilliant theme of "romance" for his team's room. He opined that the perfect KEN-terior design would be something "masculine...but inviting." After three hours of blood, sweat, and fighting over how to properly hang a leather framed mirror, his team created this masterpiece:
Creative contestant, Derek, even made a special painting that the hypothetical Ken living in this cold, sterile masculine yet inviting dreamscape could give to his hypothetical Barbie:
The other team faced even greater challenges, because Keith proved himself to be the most inept room painter ever and someone had the brilliant idea to do a sponge paint motif on one of the walls, which ended up looking like vomit:
Oh and that weird shape on the wall next to the table? That's supposed to represent a fireplace! Because everyone loves sitting right directly in front of an imaginary fireplace while they have a romantic dinner!
For some reason though, the judges decided that this room was better than the first room and they sent Mike, a.k.a. The Poor Man's James Franco, home for picking out that hideous bedding.
Poor Mike! He even had to suffer the humiliation of having his KEN TAG cut off in front of everybody! Now he will always be known as the first guy who got kicked off Genuine Ken. This is the kind of thing people never have children because of, just so that they will never have to answer their grandkids' probing Genuine Ken related questions and sheepishly say that they wouldn't know because they didn't make it past the second episode!
You can see this for yourself on Hulu, (because no television network is dumb enough to air it). But just to warn you, I felt like somebody had raped my brain after watching it, so maybe don't see it.
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