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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 21, 2004)
018024 taste the difference! -catering for the wedding of your dreams rehearsal dinners, bridal showers, luncheons *>+5-7779 • www.cfiefbecku.com {t GIVE ME 5! Run your “for sale" ad (items under $1,000) for 5 days in the ODE Classified Section. If the item(s) doesn't sell, call us at 346-4343 and we’ll run it again for another 5 days free! FREE ADMISSION Oregon Coast Bridal Show Win a $12,500 r Complete Wedding Package for wO Including a Hawaiian Islands Cruise Honeymoon! Free Entries at the Bridal Show Create) beach 'our dream wedding! Just imagine... a wedding on the beach, overlooking the magnificent Pacific Ocean. The new bride and groom exchange vows just as the sun sets on the horizon. Then the wedding party and guests celebrate the night away... This is your invitation to attend the Oregon Coast Bridal Show January 24 & 25. Here you will find answers to all your wedding and reception needs. There will be dozens of vendors and exhibits to see, plus a fashion show! Saturday, January 24, 10am to 8pm Sunday, January 25, 10am to 6pm Free Admission • Dozens of Exhibits and Vendors • All Ages Welcome ChinookWinds Casino It's Better at the Beach! Lincoln City, Oregon 1-888-CHINOOK • (541) 996-LUCK • www.chinookwindscasino.com ‘Obnoxious Fiance' takes reality shows to different level The Fox program features a woman trying to convince her family she’s marrying a slob so she can win money By Brian Lambert Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT) Say what you will about Fox, when you're a TV network willing to try ab solutely anything for a buck, you're bound to hit it big every few months. Fox's latest reality show/practical joke, "My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance," debuted Monday night (immediately after the launch of the new "American Idol") for a six-week run. On the face of it, "Obnoxious Fiance" is one of those "ripped from a sitcom" concepts that seem to hold great potential for both hilarity and ratings. Reaching beyond the primary audi ence for reality television, "Obnoxious" will likely be a lot funnier to those who've been rolling their eyes and gag ging at "The Bachelor," "Average Joe," "Married by America" and their various wedding spinoffs. The set-up for "Obnoxious Fiance" is simple enough to explain, but it quickly gets more and more convoluted. Basically, the lucky bride-to-be, Ran di, a 23-year-old grade-school teaches, from Scottsdale, Ariz., wins a big cash prize, a half-million bucks, if she can put a huge joke over on her parents. If she can get "Steve," a beefy pig with worse manners than a ffat-house party chairman, to the altar, she wins. But the gag gets more complicated because Randi herself is being scammed by Fox. She thinks Steve is a real "reality" contestant putting the same prank over on his parents. But in real-real-"reality," fat, obnoxious "Steve" is an actor through and through, and so are all his equally ob noxious family and friends. In other words, the bogus bogus fi ance ("Steve") and his bogus family are being paid to sabotage the bogus bride's bogus wedding ... thereby giv ing a whole new meaning to "reality." It sounds funny. But it cuts across a lot of conventional wisdom regarding "reality TV." Namely, it risks alienating the large audience of viewers, mostly young and female, who invest real emotional interest in the dreams of other young women competing for the prize of a loving relationship. "In its very short shelf life, reality TV has already become postmodern, in that everything about the newest gener ation of shows is a variation on the orig inals, the 'Survivors' and 'Bachelors,'" says John Rash, director of broadcast negotiations for Campbell Mithun ad vertising in the Twin Cities. The brilliance of the original "Joe Millionaire" was the twist of letting the audience in on the joke But the second "Joe" bombed, because everyone knew what the joke was. Nevertheless, the ba sic direction was clear. Lacking a wholly original reality concept producers can steal and recycle from previous series if they can improve on the "twist," which in this case is very much of the mock ing-parody variety. Therein lies the gamble of "Ob noxious Fiance." How far can pro ducers go essentially ridiculing the often extraordinary emotional in vestment reality TV's core audience makes in these programs? All reality shows, from "Fear Fac tor" to "The Bachelorette," are watched by far more women than men. "The Bachelor" is watched by two times as many women as men among 18- to 49-year-olds, and even the macho exploits of "Fear Factor" attract 20 percent more women than men. "Average Joe" had twice as many women watching as men, and reality powerhouse "Survivor" pulls in nearly 25 percent more women. Only Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie's 'The Simple Life" came close to attracting equal numbers of female and male viewers. But the publicity sur rounding Hilton's Internet sex tapes immediately prior to the show's launch may have more to do with the relatively slim 10 percent disparity among male and female viewers than the show's ac tual appeal to men. So what comes next? If successful, "Obnoxious Fiance" would seem to of fer rich soil for other long-form, "Can did Camera"-style pranks. But reality TV is eminently disposable. Yesterday's hot fashion is today's Von Dutch apparel, passe before it even hits the shelves. "The bar keeps getting raised in terms of the twist these shows re quire. Ultimately, the genre will have to change significantly," I*ash says. "As time goes by, viewers bring more and more scar tissue to this type of programming." (c) 2004, Saint Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.). Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services. We have exquisite wedding packages. SALON • DAY SPA 301 West 5th Avenue ‘Eugene, OR 97401 • 541.334.6533 Have you made the Aveda connection? 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