If you’re a regular reader of Premium Hollywood…and while there aren’t many of them, I have to believe there are some of them, so don’t correct me even if I am wrong…you know that while I’m definitely not what you’d call a reality-show addict, I definitely have my favorite guilty pleasures amongst that particular genre. I watched every episode of The CW’s “Crowned” and “Farmer Wants A Wife,” thank you very much, and I enjoyed the former so much that I actually traded a couple of E-mails with one of the contestants, Hollis Scarborough, on MySpace. (She and her mom were totally robbed, by the way.) Falling chronologically between those two series, however, was another show that I found myself sucked into: CMT’s “Gone Country,” which took a heaping helping of disparate celebrities – Bobby Brown, Maureen McCormick, Carnie Wilson, Diana DeGarmo, Julio Iglesias, Jr., Sisqo, and Dee Snider – as they attempted to live the country music lifestyle and, in the process, earn enough country cred for one of them to win a recording session as…you guessed it…a country music artist. The winner was Julio Iglesias, Jr., but there was a trio of individuals who bonded so well together that the producers decided to spin them off into their own series, this time trying to blend reality and scripted comedy into something called “Outsider’s Inn,” which finds Brown, McCormick, and Wilson running a bed and breakfast in a small town.
But we’ll get to that.
First, let’s look at the second season of “Gone Country,” which brings in a whole new cast of contestants and puts them up against host John Rich (of Big & Rich) to see which of them has got the right stuff to take it all the way to victory.
Here’s who you’ll be watching this time around:
* Sebastian Bach (Skid Row)
* Irene Cara
* Mikalah Gordon (“American Idol”)
* Jermaine Jackson
* Chris Kirkpatrick (N*Sync)
* Lorenzo Lamas
* Sean Young
C’mon, admit it: you looked at this list, and the first thing you thought was, “I’m totally gonna watch this, if only to see what kind of batshit-crazy stuff Sean Young is gonna do.” But I also wouldn’t be terribly surprised if your second thought was, “Wow, could they have kept the formula any more identical to last season?” Heavy metal singer? Check. R&B singer? Check. Former boy band member? Check. “American Idol” alumnus? Check. Actor who’s an occasional singer? Check. Basically, the only legitimately unexpected choice this time around is…what’s this?…Sean Young!
Having seen the first episode, I can assure you that, yes, Young is every bit of the total train wreck you’d want her to be…and having attended the panel for “Gone Country 2,” I can also assure you that we were lucky that she bothered to turn up.
“I don’t pursue work real aggressively anymore,” said Young, “I don’t really want to. I guess in January this last year, when I got drunk at the DGA, I finally just went, ‘You know, I’ve had enough.’ I think it was, like, lot of years of feeling social anxiety about some of the stuff I went through in my career that I always felt was sort of unfair…but my social anxiety has kind of turned into social hostility. It’s, like, I just don’t want to deal with it anymore. This morning, I woke up and I thought, ‘God, I’ve been in show business 29 years,’ and I didn’t really want to get up and talk to the press. I just didn’t feel like doing it. And then I went, ‘Well, I’ll do it for John. I’ll do it for the show and everything.’ I know how to do it, but my interest…it’s waned a lot, because I just feel like I don’t get the attention I deserve in terms of getting better parts.”
There’s a particularly funny moment in the preview they showed for the season, which shows the contestants performing before a jailhouse audience, with poor Chris Kirkpatrick sounding terribly nervous about being a former boy band member singing Patsy Cline songs in front of a bunch of prisoners…and just to add insult to injury, they’ve used special effects to add a silvery twinkle to the eye of one of the felons.
“I don’t know how you wouldn’t be scared singing in prison,” Kirkpatrick noted. “I don’t care who you are. Walking into prison, being in the band that I was in, I was pretty sure that none of those guys had any N*SYNC CDs.”
“But they had your posters,” Rich said, with a grin.
“Posted-up posters in their lockers or in their rooms,” laughed Kirkpatrick. “The guy with the twinkle in the eye really was a fan.”
I’m not entirely sure that this season of “Gone Country” will be as entertaining as the first go-round was, if only because there just don’t seem to be as many actively outgoing personalities here as there were last time, but we shall see. Besides, having seen clips from “Outsider’s Inn,” it may not actually be a good thing to stand out on this show.
Here’s the thing: I think Maureen McCormick is lovably wacky, I think Carnie Wilson is a real sweetheart, and Bobby Brown earned a permanent free pass from me after he made the video for “On Our Own,” but even before watching a single second of this show, I was already concerned about the idea of a show which blends reality TV with scripted comedy. Real life is funny, and scripted comedy is funny, but trying to blend the two things together is nothing but a recipe for disaster, especially when you’re dealing with people who aren’t professional comedians. Now, granted, producer David Garfinkel clarified that, by “scripted,” he means, “We set up the show where they are put into these situations, cast the people that come in to the show, and then, before we start shooting, we kind of let them know where
we want to go and where we want to take it, and then they are reacting off of these real situations.” But while I haven’t seen a full episode yet, I can still testify that the pre-panel trailer was nothing but a series of unfunny moments interspersed with stuff that was just downright cringeworthy. The only segment that even inspired a smile involved Bobby going on a hunting trip with a bunch of good ol’ boys, which, as noted by another critic, just did not look like it was going to end well.
“I just made sure I stayed in the back,” said Brown, “because sometimes, you know, when you are going out in the woods with a bunch of…I don’t know what to call them…rednecks? But, usually, you know, the dark one gets shot. And I probably looked like a bear to them. I just stayed in the back and let them do the hunting. I just stayed back there with my gun ready just in case, you know, somebody made a mistake and pointed it my way, I was ready to do my business. But it was a lot of fun chasing bears through the woods. I mean, you wouldn’t expect me to have fun doing that, but I did.”
I’m sorry, but as it stands right now, I’m guessing that chasing bears through the woods would be about a thousand times better than watching a full season of “Outsider’s Inn.” But, God help me, I’ll find out for sure soon enough…
