Memo to Sherwood Schwartz: YOU ARE ETERNALLY DUMB.
Last night marked the premiere of yet another crime against humanity that can be laid at the feet of Sherwood Schwartz. "The Real Gilligan's Island", the TBS reality series stranding two teams of Gilligan & Co. impersonators in a Survivoresque competition. If you watched it, by the way, fuck you, because you are part of the problem.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If I had a time machine and a shotgun, first on my list would be Sherwood Schwartz. Not Hitler, not Pol Pot, not the inventor of the Swiffer. Sherwood Schwartz. You take out Sherwood Schwartz around, say, age 17, and you remove Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch from the timestream, leading to Utopia.
Because you don't just remove the Brady Bunch, you remove all the spinoff Brady TV movies, the spinoff Brady series, the Brady musical, the SNL sketches, the fucking Shelley Long motion picture remake, and every single bit of "post-modern", "ironic" piss-takery on the Bradys that inevitably involves some asshole making a "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia" joke. Every last bit of it, gone, never to have even happened. The collective national I.Q. jumps by 15, and everyone's correspondingly happier except, perhaps, for Barry Williams, and he can fuck off in the New Utopia, as far as I'm concerned.
Take out Sherwood Schwartz and you take out Gilligan's Island. But you don't just remove Gilligan from the timestream, you remove the Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island, the cartoon, the "New Gilligan's Island" series, the TV movies, the SNL skits, and every single "Three Hour Tour" joke in the history of our species. But most importantly, you unexist every single "Maryann or Ginger?" conversation EVER. The collective national I.Q. jumps by another 20 points, we have flying cars and national health care and nobody's ever hungry ever again except, perhaps, for Dawn Wells, and she can join Barry Williams in selling their bodies for smack in the New Utopia, as far as I'm concerned.
And you take out "The Real Gilligan's Island". In case you needed confirmation of the creative bankruptcy of post-millennial American culture, this show is the new platinum-iridium bar of one unit of creative bankruptcy, known in the English system as the Sherwood, and in the metric system as the Bennyhill.
On "The Real Gilligan's Island", there are two sets of castaways chosen so as to match the official archetypes as spelled out in the non-and-the-rest version of the theme song. There are two sea captains. Two millionaires, and their two wives. Two professors, two farm girls, two skinny first mates, two stupid fucking white hats, and two washed-up starlets. The only thing they didn't include were two shits. They asked me, but I just couldn't GIVE TWO SHITS.
One of the two washed up starlets is Nicole Eggert, who's taking a break from her grueling schedule of direct-to-video movies where she takes her shirt off to play one team's Ginger. Nicole, who's primary claim to fame is being one of Baywatch's many Not Pamela Andersons, will surely put her knowledge of sand and water to use in ways that will, with luck, cause her team's skipper to kill and eat her, then make a raft out of her skin, bones, and implants.
Her opposite number, Ginger II (or possibly Ginger I, I'm sure they mud-wrestled for the numbering or something) is model/actress Rachel Hunter. Ms. Hunter is taking time from doing all the direct-to-video movies that Eggert turned down. On the bright side, being stranded on a retarded reality show island based on one of pop culture's nadirs is a vast improvement over her last significant paying job, FUCKING ROD STEWART. So things are looking up for Rachel, and anything that takes anyone far, far away from Rod Stewart's hair, voice, and/or penis cannot be hated in its entirety.
So let's settle on 99%. Let's hate that a band called "Bowling for Soup" produced a "rockin'" version of the theme song, as if a rockin' version of a theme song had never been done before by anyone ever. Let's hate the Castaway Quiz on the show's website on general principle, and the Flash-animated googaw that asks the motherfucking "Ginger or Maryann" question that should, in and of itself, be due cause and justification for assaulting the genitals of those responsible with a nail gun. And then let's reload the nail gun and use it on everyone on the show's Fan Forums, on which the longest thread is... "Who's sexier? Ginger or Marianne" [sic].
And then we can all sit down, have a good cry, and get cracking on that time machine.