They're baaack: Has-beens find new life in reality

Contrary to F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation, there are, indeed, second acts in American lives.

They're called celebrity reality shows, a curious subgenre that airlifts has-been performers out of obscurity.

The result is Frankenstein-like, as yesterday's D-listers lurch around alarmingly in the unaccustomed spotlight, looking much the worse for wear.

The pioneer of this programming was Ozzy Osbourne, the rusted-out heavy metal king who was resuscitated by MTV in 2002. Ozzy's Herculean struggles with basic domestic tasks and with forming intelligible sentences in The Osbournes gave the channel its highest rating to date.

That was followed by The Surreal Life in 2003, which gathered a bizarre menagerie of past-their-prime performers, put them together in a house, and turned on the cameras. The first season's random residents included long-time-no-see actors Emmanuel Lewis, Gabrielle Carteris, and Corey Feldman, along with long-time-no-hear musicians Vince Neil and MC Hammer.

It was like a spooky wax museum come to life.

"The idea of coming on a non-scripted project back then was considered a nail in the coffin of your career," says Mark Cronin, the co-owner and founder of 51 Minds Entertainment, which produced the show. "There were no celebrities who said 'yes' in the first conversation."

But when Surreal Life, too, attracted gaper traffic from TV viewers and opened up doors for some of the participants, suddenly the zombies were coming out of the woodwork.

"Besides the paycheck, which for some of them is enough incentive, they're back in the public eye, and if they play that right it can help them out," Andy Dehnart, editor of realityblurred.com, a website devoted to the reality genre, writes via e-mail.

"As a bonus, being on TV feeds celebrities' egos," Dehnart continues. "But it's not a given that they benefit. Many people have come and gone from, say, Dancing With the Stars with no major resurgence in their careers."

Sure, it's a crapshoot, but it's better than sitting home waiting for the ringtone to sound.

Performers quickly discovered that any type of extended TV exposure could be a game-changer. When Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica debuted in 2003, Nick Lachey was a forgotten boy-band (98 Degrees) member, and Jessica Simpson a quickly fading pop singer. Before you could say "Chicken of the Sea," the pair were not only viable - they were hot.

Soon, everyone who hadn't heard from their agent in months wanted their home life scrupulously documented in half-hour episodes: Hulk Hogan, Gene Simmons, Denise Richards, Scott Baio, Lorenzo Lamas, even Bobby Brown.

The patron saint of resurgence through reality show will always be Flavor Flav, whose glory days as the colorful hype man for Public Enemy in the '80s had ended in a morass of addiction and arrests.

In 2004, he lobbied to become a castmate in the third season of The Surreal Life.

"For our first meeting, he had just driven all the way across the country from Rikers Island [a New York City jail]," says Cronin, an Upper Darby native and University of Pennsylvania grad. "He still had the orange prison jumpsuit in the back of his car. He said, 'I'm ready to come back.' "

Boyee, did he ever! The guy who had recently been the subject of a VH1 Where Are They Now? special quickly became the mainstay of the network.

His memorable antics on The Surreal Life landed him a follow-up show, Strange Love, charting his tempestuous romance with the statuesque Brigitte Nielsen.

That led to his own dating show, Flavor of Love, which ran forever and spawned a phalanx of spin-offs. Flav became a one-man reality show industry.

Shows with "celebrity" in their titles began sprouting up: Celebrity Fit Club, Celebrity Apprentice, I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here, even Celebrity Rehab.

It became commonplace for participants to migrate from one reality show to another. Among the double-dippers: George Hamilton, Bruce Jenner, Bret Michaels, Carnie Wilson, Corey Feldman, Bobby Brown, Dennis Rodman, Tawny Kitaen, and Maureen McCormick.

In a disturbing trend of late, people whose only claim to fame is having appeared on a reality show are using that experience to claim legitimate celebrity status on other shows. Culprits include Omarosa, Sanjaya, and the dreaded Speidi.

To discerning judges of celebrity cachet, this usurpation of the title is unimaginably arrogant.

"A reality star is still one of the lowest rungs of celebrity," Cronin says. "It's a little below a disc jockey."