By Jennie

Is it wrong to hate a TV show that one has never seen? If so, I’m wrong in my disdain for much of VH1′s “reality” line-up. And recently, a show premiered on MTV that annoys the heck out of me, simply based on the commercials I’ve seen for it (and speaking of bad reality TV, I wouldn’t have been subjected to those commercials if I hadn’t been bitten by the “Jersey Shore” bug (oh, the shame), as well as taken to watching the somewhat less objectionable “Teen Mom”).

The show is called “The Buried Life”, and it purports to follow four young friends in an RV traveling across the country and attempting to fulfill items from their “100 things to do before I die” lists. For each item that they cross off their lists, they do a good deed for a local. Now, this sounds like an unobjectionable, even a worthy, concept. And maybe the show is indeed uplifting and enlightening and in every way superior to “Jersey Shore” (now, that’s setting the bar high).

But the commercials I’ve seen do not convince me. First of all, I may be spending too much time on Jezebel lately, but my feminist ire is piqued by the fact that the group consists of four male friends. Of course. These sorts of aspirational lists seem to be seen as the purview of men – us ladies are no doubt back at home baking and painting our toenails. (Actually, one of the strengths of Ivy: the Story of a Friendship, by Gwen Morrison, which is our current read in Book Nook, is that one of the main (female) protagonists does have a “things to do before I die” list.)

My main problem with “The Buried Life” is the overwhelmingly banal (and at times, obnoxious) nature of the tasks on the list: “Be in a protest”? You should participate in a protest if you feel that you have, you know, something to protest. Otherwise it’s kind of pointless and silly. “Visit the Playboy Mansion”? Really? Is that still a goal for anyone with five brain cells to rub together? Granted, I’m a girl, and the Playboy Mansion has probably always been fairly low on my list of important destinations, but it just seems to me that any cachet it might once have had would have dissipated by now. I think there are plenty of places in LA and elsewhere that young men can hang out with pretty bleached blondes with fake boobs. If they want to see those fake boobs naked, there is always the internet. If they want to see the fake boobs naked AND in person, well, yes, that might require developing an actual relationship with, you know, a real woman. Maybe that should be a list item!

Another goal: to kiss the actress Rachel McAdams. Why? So you can tell your friends that you did? Isn’t that something boys get over in middle school? (Or at least by high school? Please, tell me boys get over this sort of thing eventually.) Without getting too censorious about it, Rachel McAdams is a real person, who may or may not want to kiss some strange guy (I’m guessing not). Treating her as an item to be crossed off a list strikes me as immature and a bit dehumanizing.

I guess my objection to many of the items on the list boil down to this: doing things just so you can say you did them seems superficial and empty, especially when we are talking about life goals. If playing basketball with President Obama and making a music video was the best you could come up with, you might want to reconsider what it means to have an aspiration. I always thought such lists were about doing things that were in some way meaningful. Not every goal has to be “deliver a baby” (which is on the list, and makes more sense to me, though I think I’d settle for seeing a child born – and I’ve crossed that one off myself!). Silly little ones like “grow a mustache” or “go skydiving” are fine, I guess. But goals that seem to be more about “hey, look at me!” or to be just plain pointless (“destroy a computer?”) make these guys look like asses, in my opinion.

It’s funny, but as I was writing this I happened to see a story on the front page of Yahoo, about a woman who had achieved her goal of earning a college degree at age 100, and then died the next day. This struck me as so much more worthy of celebrating than “get Megan Fox to go on a date with you.”

What about you? Do you like the concept of the show? Have you watched it? Do you have your own “things to do before you die” list?

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