This week in reality TV had the magic and nuance of a pitchers’ duel. It was low-scoring, but to the trained eye, to someone who really appreciates the underlying hatred of a good tribal council, the blossoming of a new relationship that will inevitably wilt, and watching liars tell transparent lies, this week had it all. When you dive deep beneath the lowbrow surface, you find lots of lessons. Lessons like how to accept alternative lifestyles, and the guilt and dishonor that come after gallivanting with “musicians” LMFAO. If you spend an evening going shot-for-shot with LMFAO’s “designer,” who wears Zubaz, you’d better make sure you don’t have work in the morning. This last lesson was one learned the hard way by this week’s top scorer, Nate from Real World.

Top Scorers

Nate (Real World, Kang): 10 points. Let’s start from the beginning at the top of the list, nah mean have situation like this. Whoa, sorry. I’ve been listening to a lot of Mobb Deep lately. Anyway, here is how it all went down: Nate met some San Diego-y bros at a bar. Turned out those San Diego-y bros have a line of rubberish watches, and proceeds from these watches go to charity. Maybe a little of the proceeds, maybe all of them, it was unclear. As you tend to do when you have a dozen adult beverages in the middle of a sunny day at a bar, Nate got chummy with the San Diego-y bros and was impressed by their charitable intentions. One thing led to another, and the San Diego-y bros warmed to Nate and eventually built him a website to promote suicide awareness and help those who may be at risk. This was an amazing gesture on the part of the San Diego-y bros, this I am 100 percent sure of. However, I am 99 percent sure that, were Frat Boy Nate not being followed by MTV cameras, the San Diego-y bros would not have built said website. Even for good men (which my gut says San Diego-y bros are), the allure of reality-TV cameras, and the effect they can have on one’s personal, professional, and sexual life, are hard to resist. Ask Terrell Owens.

Bored? Don’t worry, it is about to get boozy and weird. The idea of this project invigorated Frat Boy Nate: “My mind is exploding with ideas. WOOOOO! Huge events. I am just going to explode,” he said. One of these ideas threatening to make Nate explode was a fashion show. Now, if you were going to spread the word about suicide awareness, would you use a fashion show? Where on the list of potential suicide-awareness-promoting events would a fashion show be? Somewhere right above a battle of death-metal bands and below a Botox party seems about right to me. Not to Frat Boy Nate. In order to spread the word, Frat Boy Nate and the San Diego-y bros (read: Real World producers) enlisted the help of members of the “Party Rock” crew. Real World fans will remember the leaders of the Party Rock crew, LMFAO, from their befriending and inslopsicating of the Real World Cancun cast. Non-Real World fans will know them from their at-first-fun-but-then-quickly-nauseating single “I’m in Miami bitch!” This season, LMFAO must have been on tour or hallucinogens because producers could only scare up LMFAO “stylist” Koco Blaq and a couple of Koco’s nondescript homies. Nate felt so accomplished after having the idea for this potential fashion show that he decided to celebrate with Koco Blaq and his cronies. It did not end well.

After a night of shots, shots, shots, sha sha sha shots, Frat Boy Nate and the Party Rock boys ended up back at the house and in the confession booth, where they slurrily asked, “Should we eat more snacks?” Now, I’m not saying that what they meant by “snacks” was edible marijuana — wait, no, that is exactly what I am saying. I may be wrong (not sure, but I think I have to say that last bit because of lawyers and stuff) but I’m probably not. The next time we saw Nate, he was stumbling to his bedroom like a mare taking its first steps, collapsing head-first into the crevice between his bed and the wall. We’ve seen this before. It’s called the “Ronnie” (10 points). The next morning, when Nate woke up for work, he looked like Beetlejuice. No, actually he looked like the love child of the Michael Keaton Beetlejuice and the Howard Stern Beetlejuice. This is probably not the last we’ve seen of Frat Boy Nate/Beetlejuice. I can’t wait.

Second Tier

Jackie (Basketball Wives LA, Connor): 5 points. “Crazy” Jackie cried (5 points) and that is all I am going to say about her, because she is crazy and she scares me.

Dawn (Survivor, Simmons): 5 points. If you have seen Survivor and you don’t know who Dawn is, she’s the one who looks like Gollum from Lord of the Rings. Dawn cried this week (5 points) because she didn’t know why the rest of her tribe treated Cochran, the Harvard Law School Survivor Super Fan, so poorly. I’ll tell you why, Dawn: Because he is a Harvard Law School Survivor Super Fan.

Cochran (Survivor, Kang): 5 points. Cochran, the Harvard Law School Survivor Super Fan, was the focal point of this week’s episode. When Cochran’s tribe seemed headed into the merger without the majority vote, their tribe leader, Ozzy, hatched a plan. The plan looked great on paper: Ozzy goes to Redemption Island, pretends he was blindsided by Cochran playing the idol, wins the challenge, the tribes merge, then they send Cochran to infiltrate the other team. Cochran thought this was a great plan and that he was “in control of the game” (5 points). What he didn’t consider was that the plan’s mastermind was so much of a stoner that you could probably get high from smoking his toenails. Mind you, this man was also the star of a weird porny Playboy Channel reality show. If you were going to rob a bank and you asked your fellow masked criminals, “Guys, hold on a sec — who came up with this plan again?” and they responded, “Jenna Jameson!” would you carry it out? No, you wouldn’t. Another problem with the plan: It relied on Ozzy’s acting ability. Here is the transcription of his monologue/lie, and, in parenthesis, the inner monologue of everyone he was trying to convince:

“I gave everything to my tribe and we lose one challenge because somebody can’t operate a clip?” (This doesn’t sound like Ozzy. Odd.) “And that ends up being the person that sends me here?” (Wait, this is some bullshit.) “You play the idol? I know one of you had it.” (God, this guy is a terrible liar.) “As far as I am concerned, tribe boundaries, we are at the merge, they don’t exist anymore!” (Oh god. I just went from being insulted to getting that uncomfortable feeling that comes when you watch someone embarrass themselves.) “It is all one for one and whoever sticks together and from this point on makes it the farthest in the game.” (Okay, think about drowning kittens. Anything to keep from laughing.) “But I thrive on the pressure to come back in the game … FOR REVENGE.” (Drowning kittens, drowning kittens, drowning kittens…)

If anyone ever hires Cochran as a lawyer, it’s because they’ve either never seen Survivor or they just want to tell whomever’s suing them, “Oh yeah? Well, my lawyer is Johnny Cochran! NOW WHAT?”

Frank (Real World, Connor): -10 points. Frank met a boy. Frank met a boy while doing a huge shot of Jägermeister. Actually, it wasn’t so much a shot of Jägermeister as it was an entire glass of Jägermeister. It was at least four ounces. Watching it made anyone who has ever tasted Jägermeister (read: everyone) gag. Mind you, Frank is “curbing his drinking” on the advice of his therapist after acting like a total psychotic crazypants the last time he got drunk. The second these lovebirds started making out (5 + 5 = 10 points), I said to myself, “There is 100 percent chance that Frank gets slammered and ruins this relationship.” Frank has a better chance of diving into a pool and coming out dry than not ruining this relationship in a drunken rage. If the two of them end up getting married, as they discussed just after meeting each other, I will chop off my right thumb. It was kind of cute watching them enjoy their new romantic connection. But only cute the way a lemming is cute before it reaches the edge of a cliff. Frank also got into an argument (5 points), volunteered (-25 points), and wore a bandanna on his head. At first I thought he was wearing it as a fashion statement, but soon realized it’s actually the source of his insanity. I think he acts so irrationally because he cuts his forehead with a razor blade, covers the cuts with an LSD-soaked bandanna, and is on a perpetual acid trip like Jimi Henrix. If he bangs out a legendary guitar version of the national anthem at a Padres game on Real World this season, you’ll know why.

Sam (Real World, Lane): -20 points. Sam cried (5 points). I would write more, but there is nothing funny left to say after Bill called her Eminem.

Priscilla and Alex (Real World, Bill and Lane): -25 points. Priscilla and Alex both lost 25 points this week for volunteering at gay pride. The entire focus of the last two episodes has been on the homophobia of Football Guy With a Facial Regimen Zach and I Can’t Tell lf She Is Hot Ashley. Granted, their homophobia is a terrible thing and worth exposing to show us all how far the rest of our generation has come in the acceptance of alternative lifestyles. That said, though, if this cast were halfway decent, the producers would have spent a few minutes on homophobia and moved on. In order to help the producers in the future, this week’s GRTFL Top 5 list is of the other storylines they should have given more time to, listed in order from “Yeah, they should have done that” to “Wait, they should have done that too.”

5. Zach and Ashley aren’t having sex? What? They’re always together, they’re the most attractive people in the house, they’re both single, and they share facial products — how are they not having sex? The only thing that I can think of is that Zach has no game and is the shy hot guy we all wish we could switch bodies with. The guy looks like a male model, lives in Pacific Beach, San Diego (if you are a single man, book a flight now), is being followed by cameras, and hasn’t hooked up yet? I thought the only one who could pull that off was Pauly D.

4. Alex is a psycho girlfriend. What happened to Alex and her Roger Federer look-alike, guitar-playing boyfriend? You have one of the top Jekyll and Hyde girlfriends on your cast and you can’t fly that dude back out? In case you didn’t see it, she got legitimately angry at him for not holding her hand, and for drinking a glass of wine without her. The only reason they could possibly have not explored this further is that immediately after he left the house, he filed a restraining order.

3. Sam and her hot new girlfriend. Sam/Eminem met a smoking-hot lesbian out at a club and we didn’t see her for more than 90 frames the whole episode? How does this happen?

2. Priscilla and her busy chauffeuring schedule. Underage Priscilla lives the life of a Brooklyn livery cab driver. She drives aimlessly around San Diego waiting for a call over a shortwave radio to pick up her drunken roommates at nightclubs. She should just give up and buy a Town Car with tinted windows that smells like chana saag.

1. More beach montages. Look, if the cast sucks, just focus on the city. Come in and out of every commercial break with 45 seconds of surfer dudes, bikini babes, and crashing waves. Everybody wins.

David Jacoby is Grantland’s Reality Czar. Listen to him on the B.S. Report or follow him on Twitter at @jacoby_.

Previously: Reality Scorecard: Worst Real World Cast Ever?
Reality Scorecard: Not With a Bang But With a Smush
Six Ways to Fix Jersey Shore
Reality Scorecard: Snooki’s Crying Game
Reality Scorecard: Snooki’s Wilt Chamberlain Night
Reality Scorecard: Meatball Sandwich

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