If The Simple Life has taught us anything, it's that reality is often the biggest impediment to successful reality television. The popular Fox show following spoiled celebutantes Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie has just been renewed for a fourth season, despite the fact that its stars are no longer on speaking terms. The pair's misadventures, structured like a sitcom, are obviously heavily scripted and almost entirely staged, and the carefully constructed result is a lot easier to package than anything as messy as actual reality.
Tommy Lee Goes to College (NBC, Tuesdays, 9 p.m.) follows the Simple Life formula perfectly, and as such, it's completely fake, forced and entertaining only to those with really low standards or a deep affinity for tattooed rock stars. At least the show is honest in its falsity: A disclaimer at the end of the credits notes that certain bits are edited or completely created for comedic effect.
It makes sense, then, to treat College as a comedy rather than a reality show. It does have a very sitcom-y premise: Lee, drummer for heavy metal icons Motley Crüe, former drug-abuser, wife-abuser and star of amateur porn with on-again, off-again spouse Pamela Anderson, heads to college at age 42 to enrich his life via higher education. It worked for Rodney Dangerfield in the '80s classic Back to School, so why not Lee?
The problem is that Lee's show still has to adhere to some semblance of reality, so it can't just go all out with comedy wackiness. The result is weak humor that's prodded along by a loud, grating narrator and intrusive music cues. There are stereotypical jokes about boring professors, hot sorority girls and Lee's penchant for partying. None of them are funny. Lee is affable, but he's not a magnetic enough presence to carry a show that lacks the feeling anything is at stake or anything important is happening. As the show notes in another disclaimer, Lee isn't even an actual enrolled student at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, so it doesn't matter whether or not he does well in his classes.
The only enterprise Lee seems to be invested in is joining the marching band, which he actually works hard at and experiences genuine frustration with when he has trouble. No doubt, by the end of the series, he'll have mastered the drumline and made friends with all the band geeks, but for a moment in the second episode, you sense he's actually working at something in which he might not succeed.
Mostly, though, he plays PlayStation 2 with his roommate and ogles his hot tutor. Just like a real college student.
The new series Barbershop (Showtime, Sundays, 10 p.m.) is a curious beast. Based on the films of the same name, it's a lighthearted, mildly amusing comedy that coasts by on the goodwill of a successful movie franchise, none of whose stars appear on the show (although Ice Cube is an executive producer). It's a softened, comical take on inner-city life, and it succeeds best when all of its characters are just sitting around the titular location, shooting the breeze.
But it's hard to understand what it's doing on Showtime, known for much edgier, more daring fare. The original films were both rated PG-13, but the show ups the ante by littering its dialogue with f-bombs, for seemingly no reason other than to justify its presence on pay cable. The increased vulgarity is unnecessary, especially for a show that, at its heart, is a fairly sentimental take on the importance of community and family. This is the rare case of a show that would actually benefit from the constraints and lowered expectations of network TV.