In what may well be remembered as the final affront, VH1 has confirmed that “My Fair Brady,” a reality show starring Christopher Knight (the former Peter Brady), will return for a second season.
Even the most stubborn holdouts have now been forced to concede: The Cycle of Celebrity is dangerously out of whack. Put simply, old celebrities are not being allowed to die off in the natural way, and it is threatening celebrity life as we know it.
Like any delicate ecosystem, the Cycle of Celebrity relies on a balance among the four known phases of celebrity development.
First the celebrity is discovered at a casting call or on local radio and identified as a Next Big Thing. A “Who is this person?” profile in a national magazine usually accompanies this phase.
In phase two, the celebrity matures into a full-blown personality, which entails headlining big-budget action movies and/or comedies, starring in a hit prime-time television series or recording catchy hit singles. Intense tabloid scrutiny is a hallmark of this phase, as the celebrity’s shopping trips, wardrobe malfunctions and thigh cellulite become breaking news.
In phase three, the celebrity shifts toward more contemplative dramas, spinoffs of the original hit series or moody ballads. The celebrity returns to being the subject of magazine profiles, although now it’s in the genre of the “revealing portrait,” in which the established celebrity finally “tells all.”
Finally, in the fourth phase, the celebrity is allowed to pass into a kind of quasi-anonymity and is confined to cameos, sporadic minor supporting roles and Greatest Hits albums. The celebrity appears on television only as the lower right corner on Hollywood Squares, in newspapers only as a celebrity spokesperson for some obscure disease and in the tabloids only as a rehab patient.
The length of time a celebrity spends in each phase correlates strongly with talent, which is how you can account for the differing shelf lives of Bruce Springsteen versus, say, Vanilla Ice.
That is the natural order of things. Or at least it was until “The Osbournes” (2002) introduced the idea that the nation’s youth could be enthralled by the antics of a washed-up, drug-addled, utterly incoherent former rock star simply because he was once famous.
Now old celebrities just keep … coming … back. They do reality television shows. They do absurd game shows. They do more reality television shows.
“My Fair Brady,” which features the exploits of an actor whose last/only significant role came on a situation comedy that has not released a new episode in 31 years, is just one example. VH1 is also serving up “But Can They Sing?” in which America will be subjected to the warbling of Morgan Fairchild, Larry Holmes and others.
Another pending insult is a Fox series called “Skating With Celebrities.” The “celebrities” are people like Dave Coulier (who among us can forget his masterful rendition of Joey Gladstone in “Full House”?), Bruce Jenner (whose only important public act, winning an Olympic gold medal, came during the Ford administration) and, yes, Todd Bridges.
Todd Bridges is still a celebrity? To paraphrase his TV brother of yesteryear: Whatchyou talkin’ ‘bout, Fox?
Even Danny Bonaduce (think “The Partridge Family”) has his own VH1 reality show, one in which he is subjected to intensive psychotherapy while we are subjected to viewing the wreck that once-cherubic Danny Partridge has become.
This hasn’t happened in other realms. In sports, a career – and thus time in the spotlight – is limited by wear and tear on the ever-degrading human body. Eventually, even Michael Jordan shuffles off to the relatively harmless pursuits of charity golf tournaments and perfume sales.
In politics, term limits ensure that even once-mighty world leaders fall by the wayside. Bill Clinton is now toiling in some office in Harlem, a former president consigned to the digs of a ham-and-egg lawyer. Jimmy Carter accepts peace awards, campaigns against guinea worm disease and writes books that make you wish he had been that smart when he was president.
But in entertainment, the rhythms that define healthy ecosystems have gone haywire. If Cyndi Lauper were a buffalo on the Great Plains, her corpse would by now have been picked clean by other celebrities, her bones slowly decomposing and enriching the soil where her career fell (an event dated to roughly 1987).
Instead, Lauper appeared this past summer on the NBC game show “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” which also allowed the likes of Wang Chung, Howard Jones and Juice Newton to achieve reincarnation.
It’s all leading nowhere good. After all, if we can’t escape Cyndi Lauper, how are we ever going to get rid of Ashlee Simpson?
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