LITTLE ROCK — A production company populated by CBS News producers is scouring the country, according to various reality-TV casting-call Web sites, for a chosen few chicks who are sex-obsessed, rage-filled, exercise anorexics, bulimics or “shopaholics,” and willing to share the details in a new reality series for the CW network.
You can apply on the CW network’s Web site.
And, CW wants you to know, all applications and inquiries are confidential.
Applications to go on a reality series.
To reveal to America that you are a sex-obsessed person.
Strictly confidential.
Right.
“We know the pressures young women like you are under,” CW says on its Web site. “We want to explore how you cope and how you untangle the web of your double lives. Our hope is to get you to deal with your obsessions by confronting them and getting help.”
CW further explains that participants will get free psychiatric advice, adding that “our production team has over 20 years of TV experience. We will treat your story, your family and friends with the utmost sensitivity and compassion, dignity and respect.”
All this under the headline “Addicted ... Obsessed ... Confess.”
But this “sensitivity and compassion, dignity and respect” will not be afforded to just any sex-obsessed person or bulimic.
No, CW is looking specifically for sex-obsessed people, bulimics and anorexics who are “by day ... beautiful, talented and ambitious” and, naturally, “twenty something,” and who, by night, “give in to temptation, to the dark side of yourself,” who “enjoy the duality and the excitement that accompanies your obsession, but you do know it’s a dangerous game.”
In other words - only pretty party girls with eating disorders need apply.
The production team for this latest blot on the public weal includes executive producer Susan Zirinsky, who, since 1996, has executive produced documentaries, entertainment specials and other programming for CBS, including 48 Hours Mystery; and senior producer Paul Ryan, who is currently a senior producer at CBS’ 48 Hours.
“We don’t comment on development,” a CW spokesman said recently.
Meanwhile, whither go the Washington do-gooder “celebutantes” of CW’s much-ballyhooed Blonde Charity Mafia reality series?
Word is they may have been out-blonded by partygirl stewardesses of Virgin America Airlines and by Gossip Girl cameo star/New York socialite Tinsley Mortimer. Both are the subject of their own reality series in development at the network.
CW’s on-again, off-again D.C.-set Blonde Charity Mafia has disappeared from CW’s Web site. The network pulled a fan page that linked to the chicks’ Facebook page, according to Blonde Charity Capo Katherine Kennedy.
“They really haven’t told us much. They said [the series] was still on the books to be delivered, but no date - no specifics,” Kennedy said.
Sources say the show’s fate hinges on the network’s reaction to two other reality series it ordered after it bought Blonde Charity Mafia when Lifetime decided to take a powder on the show back in late 2008. Those two series are Fly Girls, about flight attendants who work for “uber-hip” Virgin America, and the as-yet-unnamed Mortimer series.
When CW picked up the orphaned Blonde Charity Mafia in the spring, it originally said the six half-hour episodes would air over five weeks in July.
But the network then yanked it off the schedule - ostensibly because CW programming chief Dawn Ostroff liked the episodes so much that she felt they deserved not to die the sad death that is the fate of any reality series debuting on CW in the summer.
Instead, CW wanted to wait and hold this gem until the fourth quarter, when networks trot out all their best programs.
According to one source who wished to remain anonymous because he doesn’t want anyone to know he pays that much attention to Blonde Charity Mafia, the network originally jumped at the chance to snare this reality series when Lifetime bailed, then along came the other two shows and they looked so much more interesting and attractive. Like dating - in high school.
The Mortimer project and Fly Girls have each been given an eight-episode order.
The first series follows Mortimer as she hits the New York social scene. She’s important because she’s a blonde - and the daughter of real estate mogul George Riley Mercer Jr. and interior designer Dale Mercer.
Fly Girls will follow five Virgin America flight attendants as they jet to Las Vegas, New York and South Beach in pursuit of “good times, great parties, adventures and love,” CW said in announcing the project.
Weekend, Pages 30 on 12/31/2009