Super Bowl Update

It's that time of year again when all the Fall Reality Shows crown their season winner. It started right before Thanksgiving when Project Runway finally let us know that who won the season 6 finale that was filmed around 18 months ago. Meana Irina stood tall among all her competitors! This wasn't a great first season for the show on Lifetime - plus if there was ever a season that deserved a reunion show, it's this one. Since the actual competition happened so long ago, it would've been nice to get a little "Where are they now?" about some of the contestants, like Ra'mon or Epperson.

I'm sure Top Model also crowned a new winner, although blessedly I was able to divorce myself from that show this year, so I can't be totally sure. Tyra might have just eliminated everyone in the finale, to emphasize her point that in life, "short bitches never win." That probably would've made for a better finale than anything else they came up with. She could just do the winning photo shoot for Teen Marie Claire or whatever magazine is the winning prize by herself which I'm sure she'd prefer anyway.

This week we get treated to a new winning team on Amazing Race, a new Biggest Loser AND a new Top Chef. Meghan and Cheyne won Amazing Race Sunday night and while the result was not surprising (since they won seven out of twelve legs of the race this season including the last four) I thought it was satisfying. Some people thought this season was a little dull, but I thought it was well-cast and the finale was very exciting. Some of the tasks along the way weren't the most thrilling (travel to the top of the world's tallest building by elevator to... take a clue out of a box and come back down! At least make them take the STAIRS!) but this was still a good season with a deserving winning team. Next season I'd like to see the teams doing more fun and exciting tasks from city to city instead of just arduous ones. Mentally and physically challenging tasks are great, but I'd like to see a little more adrenaline involved this spring. Let's race!!!

I'm not sure who will win Biggest Loser tonight, but I'm guessing it's one of the guys. Both of them still had a lot of weight left to lose and could pull big weight loss numbers tonight. It will be harder for the girls to match them in total percent of body weight lost, but the past few years the girls (especially whoever is on the pink team) have been able to stay the most focused while training at home and pulled out the upset victories. I love to see a good underdog Biggest Loser, so hopefully one of the ladies dug deep and can take the title home.

Over on Top Chef, it's Kevin vs. Brother Michael vs, Brother Bryan. I hope that Kevin or Bryan come out victorious, which should pretty much seal the deal for Michael. This show tends to have winners I don't enjoy personality-wise. I'm sure their food is the best, but I can't taste, it so it does nothing to win me over. I watched this season of Top Chef less than I could've, but more than I intended. Fun fact: no one other than the final four contestants managed to win an Elimination Challenge all season. That's some pretty impressive consistency coming from the Top 4. I'm sure the food at the finale will all look delicious and I'll be mad I don't get to eat any of it.

Still on the horizon for next week are the finales of Survivor and So You Think You Can Dance. Both of whom still have more active contestants than they know what to do with and not enough weeks to eliminate them in an orderly fashion before Christmas rolls around. I'm not so surprised about Survivor which plays by it's own rules, adds more and more contestants each year, and will probably just stage some kind of shocking quadruple elimination tribal council on Sunday to get things back on track. So You Think You Can Dance seems the bigger head-scratcher to me. Are they really going to go into the Finale with six dancers? That's weird. In retrospect it must seem like not such a great decision to have spent THREE WEEKS on the Vegas Callbacks, eh Fox? I have to say, this fall season for one of my fav reality competitions was not a big success. The dancers were cool and talented, but the choreographers seemed a little artistically spent coming off of the normal summer season, and we had no Mia Michaels routines in the Top 20. I'm not sure how it did in the ratings, but I think I'll just take my SYTYCD in the summer months, thank you very much. I'll be happy when the show passes the Fox Reality Baton back to its big brother, American Idol, in January.

And that about does it! The best thing about these shows is that if you are disappointed in the winner, the whole thing starts over really quickly again (as soon as January for some), so you don't have to linger on the results for too long. Often it's difficult to name the winner from the previous season while you're watching the current one. You hope that these winners carry the experience of winning with them for a lifetime, because the actual title they hold usually only lasts for around 3-4 months. The Reality Winner takes it all, until they have to give it back again. Or they go on yet another reality show. Whichever comes first.