True Beauty?

I have a bone to pick with the directors and creators of the ABC show “True Beauty”. I finally caught up with watching the series (both 1 & 2). The show is about 10 contestants who have to live with each other, and who think they are being judged on their outward appearance and good-looks, yet they are being secretly videotaped all throughout their stay in the house to see if they have any inner beauty. Weekly, they are put through tests in which unbeknownst to them, they “PASS” or “FAIL”. Some examples would be if they help someone in distress while they are in a rush, if they can show compassion for someone they see who may be hurting, or if they’ll be courteous to a stranger.

While in the beginning, I thought this was a fascinating idea, I did think that there were many situations that cannot be judged based off of someone’s reaction. I noticed this more throughout Season 2’s episodes.  In Season 1, Julia was the winner and I gotta give it up for her as she did PASS every test out of the eight that were given to her. Honesty, charity, compassion, consideration, teamwork, decency, loyalty and modesty.

But upon watching Season 2, I saw how politics soon took over the general platform upon which this show was based on. 

As much as I hate to overanalyze this situation, I gotta say that I believe they chose Taylor the good looking, tall drink of water over Erika because they chose a female LAST season.

Ummm, if I remember correctly…Erika has never been in the bottom two and only failed ONE challenge. They asked the contestants to not peek at the questions they were to ask during an interview and in the elevator, she peeked. Than there was the day that they made the contestants stay up for 24 hours and hang out with Steve-O of JackAss and than wanted them to be lively and energetic for a Las Vegas commercial with no sleep. Erika didn’t have her usually upbeat energetic attitude and the judges said it was "something to think about it."

I find it absurd for them to make that judgment as if they would be happy shining examples of sunshine should they have been in the same position. This along with many other “reality tv shows” prove to be reasons why these shows usually aren’t what they seem. They claim to be about one thing, but it really boils down to another. Taylor is cool, and I think he’s actually quite handsome, but upon the tests that he was given, he failed a good amount of the tests and did a lot of jerky things.  If it’s about True Beauty, I feel they missed the ball this season and based it off the fact that they chose a female last time. Erika deserved to win. Besides her outer beauty, she showed genuine concern, empathy and love for those she encountered in the show. If "True Beauty Comes From Within" as the show quotes every episode... than base it off of that.