The Bad Sun
Did you hear the one about the actor who's only working as an actor until he can land a low-paid service industry job and break into show biz? Once upon a time, of course, only porn directors considered a tanning salon the perfect venue for their dramatic vision, but that was before cable hits like "Queer Eye" and "Blow Out" helped pioneer the reality grooming genre. And thus "Sunset Tan," a new E! show about Hollywood's premiere flesh-dyeing studio and all the vapid tannequins who work there.
Combining bikini-clad women in tanning beds with, well, bikini-clad women in other fake-tan application machines, "Sunset Tan" is so gloriously moronic it makes "The Girls Next Door" look like "Masterpiece Theater" -- why didn't anyone think of this sooner?
Along with the cheesecake, there's a side order of celebrity, and this makes perfect sense. While tabloid photographers tend to congregate outside restaurants in their endless hunt for famous prey, one glance at Nicole Richie's sumptuously spray-painted clavicles should be enough to confirm that today's stars spend far more time tanning than eating. "Do celebrities come in a lot?" asks a Sunset Tan newbie in the show's debut episode.
"You're gonna see it," a veteran staffer promises. "Lindsay, Paris, everyone ..."
A few moments later, href="http://www.eonline.com/on/shows/girlsnextdoor/">Britney Spears shows up, fretting about the horrible state of her toenails while she gets ready to have a fresh bronze topcoat applied to her ass -- but it turns out the episode's true star is the real-life desperate housewife who arrives at the salon with her adorable daughter in tow and announces that the little girl "needs to get tan" for her school picture. "Last year she was a little pale, and I want her to stand out this year," the mom yips in a moment of chipper psychosis, providing the perfect opportunity for an excited sales jackal to propose the "Lindsay Lohan Special," which is apparently the regimen the leathery ingénue uses to keep her hide looking sun-raped and brittle. And, really, what loving parent wouldn't jump at the chance to make her hideously apple-cheeked daughter look as radiant as a piece of beef jerky with substance abuse issues? $1,300 worth of noxious chemicals later, the prepubescent tanning victim emerges from the ordeal looking like a deep-fried Oompah Loompah. Yes, she is definitely going to stand out in the class pictures this year, Mom, in a way that she will likely remember in $200 therapy sessions for the rest of her life. And so it goes on "Sunset Tan." For the most part, it's just tasteless and insipid, the same as every other reality show on basic cable where at least 80 percent of the cast look like AWOL porn stars. But every once in a while, like a red, scaly squamous cell carcinoma peeking through multiple coats of dihydroxyacetone, a moment of genuine horror erupts. If that's your thing, you've got a new favorite show to watch. If not, best stick to kinder, gentler fare like "Monster Facebaths" or "Felony Fights 3." A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected].
