BALIS! It took me a while, but after hours of quiet contemplation I was able to come up with my Top Ten Reality Seasons Ever (So Far) list: Amazing Races 1-3, Survivor 1 (Palau Tiga) and 6 (Amazon), Real World Hawaii and San Francisco and Joe Millionaire were the easy first eight.
(Fun though it may be, American Idol is just a talent show -- there's really no narrative, and you never really get to observe how the participants behave.)
The other two were both on HBO. One was the first season of NFL Films' Hard Knocks: Training Camp With The Baltimore Ravens, a brilliant, tense, funny, fun mini-season two summers ago that made stars out of Tony Siragusa and Shannon Sharpe and took you inside Ray Lewis's unfinished house. Hard Knocks kicked ass because it was 100%, completely, undeniably real: no contrived environment, no silly contests, just a bunch of guys fighting for their actual jobs in the real world while the veterans prepared their bodies for one more war.
And then there's the one that's the reason for this post: Project Greenlight, the show that showed just how much can go wrong in filming a movie when the director's an amiable, stubborn dunce, the producer's a hard-driving asshole, the cinematographer's more interested in making an artsy highlight reel than filming a movie, the kids in the lead role can't swim (yet are scripted to swim in Lake Michigan), Ben Affleck is drunk half the time and, finally, the incomparable Jeff Balis, serves as coproducer and all-around punching bag, whose relationship with executive producer Chris Moore was so hysterical (and abusive) as to warrant its own side filmmaking contest.
Again, a real environment and a hilarious one. A real movie, with real actors and a real crew, was being filmed -- the only contrivance was the neophyte director. You got to see all the details, all the waiting, all the tension . . . just a great, great show (leading to an awful, awful movie), made even better because HBO supplemented it all with an exceptional online archive.
Well, Project Greenlight 2 begins Sunday night (after SatC), and, by all accounts, we're in for some high-quality entertainment. What's more: Balis is back. Balis, get me my coffee!
Do watch.
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