5 Billionaire Reality Shows That Couldn’t Buy An Audience

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By Webdesk


America loves money, maybe more than that pretty much everything else. Sure, “parents” can save some money, but only if they are your parents. Someone else’s parents come with an expensive ailment, and the government had better not come knocking tax time for their healthcareor else people can go politically crazy and buy 12 very aggressive yard signs. Cash rules everything around usas the Wu-Tang Clan put it succinctly.

Much of our entertainment also revolves around money. We watch game shows to see people win money, we watch prestige dramas about people with lots of money, we watch Pawn Stars experience things being converted into money. And a particular serf pastime is watching reality shows about extremely wealthy people, such as farmers gossiping in the slums about the king’s new lover. But sometimes even filthy rich people turn out to be so boring that no amount of money can attract attention.

Here are five billionaire reality shows that couldn’t buy an audience…

The Apprentice: Martha Stewart

Before Donald Trump was a piece of shit as president, he was a piece of shit in the private sector, and perhaps the pinnacle of his fame was on the NBC show The intern. Whether or not you’d like to see him fall victim to heart failure on his own gaudy golden toilet, to pretend that The intern wasn’t an absolute hit of a show is a bald lie. After all, watching a hot-tempered, pigish drama queen is much more fun when they don’t have access to nuclear weapons.

After three seasons, NBC thirsted for more viewers to throw in their never-ending maws and ordered a spin-off starring Martha Stewart. This show was unfortunately a complete flop. Why, exactly, is up for debate, but a fair guess is that aside from a little insider trading, Stewart appears to be a perfectly reasonable person, which is reality show poison. The most enduring thing that came out of the show was a long feud with Trump himselfwhich the spin-off blamed on its own ratings Pupildespite the ratings dropping before the spin-off ever aired.

Cocktails with Khloe

I’m not a particularly big fan of the Kardashian family, but I’m not going to pretend that’s a particularly interesting point of view. No matter how I feel about it, the family has built a media empire by monetizing their personal lives, and the question seems depressingly incessant for all things related to them. The shows, the family, and the memes produced by both of them are here to stay, and whining about them is about as useful as talking about how fun Pangea used to be.

They’re not infallible, though, and their consistent success must have made it hurt a little more when Khloe started headlining her own reality show, which went over like ketchup on pancakes. Unfortunately known as Cocktails with Khloeit was supposed to be a talk show hosted by Khloe Kardashian on a network called FYI, which are apparently the spluttering, brain-dead remnants of the old Biography channel.

The big mistake here was thinking of success Keeping up with the Kardashians was due to their unique worldview and knack for banter, not whatever it actually is. The show was canceled “despite many viewers”, which we can raise eyebrows at, since the only public number to base that on is a very disappointing 496,000 viewers for the first episode. Khloe was apparently one too nightmare to work withwhich is much more credible.

Kris

Funnily enough, failed talk shows seem to run in the Kardashian family. The Kardashian matriarch and wife who never blinked, Kris Jenner, tried her hand at a talk show on FOX years earlier. The show, called Kris, never passed a six-week test run. The ratings were apparently middling, not terrible, but here we get some feedback on why the show failed, straight from Senior Vice President of Programming Frank Cicha, and there’s no indication of any PR massage here.

Cicha told The Hollywood Reporter, “I think she was pretty uninteresting” and that it was an attempt to “capitalize on a name”. Proof that well-crafted insults are fun, but the straightforward truth can be just as cruel. Not that he didn’t add some more figurative language to clarify, saying, “When the camera was on, she didn’t just look like a deer in the headlights, but like a deer that’s already been hit.”

Jesus. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

The benefactor

Mark Cuban may have found his reality TV role these days Shark cage, helping other billionaire hopefuls (who have the opportunity to make him more money). However, long before he decided whether to be in or out of those companies, he took center stage in a show called The benefactor, which you are much less likely to have seen. The show aired on ABC and only lasted one season.

Despite a generally cool-sounding name that to me suggests some sort of mansion murder and mysterious will, the show was neither original nor, if its track record is anything to go by, entertaining. It was, as you might guess, a fairly straightforward push-off attempt The intern. Unfortunately, The intern had already had nine months to settle in, and as Martha Stewart would later discover, people only fancied one episode a week, no matter how it was presented.

Oh, and it also created another Donald Trump feud that got started a very salty letter.

I want to marry Harry

Our last show features arguably the richest and most powerful person on this entire list. At least that’s what they told the participants. I want to marry Harry a show that, ironically, often takes the crown on lists of the worst reality TV shows ever, followed the common reality show’s premise of “lying to people.” A group of suitors were brought in and told they were vying for the hand of Prince Harry – you know, that of that royal family in England. The hardest part of casting must have been finding people dumb enough to think the Royals were bent on giving American reality TV control of their bloodline.

The show was a bust on pretty much every level. The contestants, even after showing impressive gullibility to participate at all, had many doubts about whether their co-star was actually Prince Harry, probably because he didn’t really look like him. The show then desperately tried to convince them they were wrong, having a fake therapist gaslight them and tell them it was indeed Prince Harry, and anything else would be a delusion. In doing so, they discovered exactly the line of ick reality that audiences will not cross.

It didn’t make it to a single season and was taken off the air after four episodes.



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