Most reality shows are just dumb but “Stars Earn Stripes” (NBC, 8 p.m.) is almost maliciously bad, built on deceptive premises blown up to a jingoistic, action film level with the rah-rah tone loud as its adoring gunfire.
It’s a tribute to our military men, don’t you know, who “keep us free” they keep saying (and not “simply carries out any crazy intervention plan that politicians with no personal stake will enlist them into fighting”). But why pull elite fighters away from their jobs so they can babysit some D-list celebrities for a dim reality competition that is some forged-in-hell alliance of cliché slingers Dick Wolf and Mark Burnett?
Gen. Wesley Clark is a co-host of this embarrassing thing, and it’s sad to think that he’s fallen to this. The respected guy was once a Presidential candidate.
The husband of last election’s vice presidential candidate is also involved – the personality-free Todd Palin. Compared to him people like Dean Cain and Nick Lachey come off as articulate wits (and Lachey says outrageous things like after being in a boy band, he knows what it’s like to be in a war).
It’s crazy casting of the kind you only used to see on “The Surreal Life” or “Celebrity Rehab” – a Palin, Lachey, Laila Ali, Terry Crews and a WWE diva Eve Torres.
And with one of the worst reality show hosts, Samantha Harris, the teams of celebrities with special forces fighters are put on something they keep calling “real missions,” which of course are only real practice missions, real fake missions. There may be bullets in their guns, but there’s not exactly incoming enemy fire.
It’s more like a lopsided “American Race,” with one partner much more capable than the other; “Far Factor” in camoflauge.
It’s the militarization of the reality competition, and to be the network’s first new show in primetime coming after the Olympics it sends just about an opposite message — not brotherhood, humanity and world understanding, but brazen armed defense to the teeth.
Still, it may be the closest realization yet for the still unseen Burnett autobiographical sitcom, “Commando Nanny.”