Last night was a great evening of relaxing, upgrading my blog software, having green tea ice cream and watching one of my favorite guilty pleasures: I Wanna Be a Soap Star. I love this show. They take ten wannabe soap actors, make them act out a crazy scene each week, and the last one standing gets a 13 week contract on a soap.
The winner of season 2 and the runner-up of season 3 have gotten lasting jobs out of it, though the other two winners got very small parts and were dropped when their contracts were up. I didn't watch season 1, but the season 3 winner was terrible. Could not act his way out of a paper bag. I never understood what they saw in him. The runner-up was much better, and I'm really glad she's the one who got a decent part.
This season, the fourth, the winner gets a contract on Days of Our Lives, and two of the judges are the head writer and an actress (Mary Beth Evans) from that show. Last week the "mean judge," agent Michael Bruno, lived down to his reputation by giving a Brazilian contestant a hard time over her accent. He went on and on about it until one of the other judges interrupted to remind him that an accent isn't like an outfit you put on in the morning. I guess the producers must have had a word with Bruno, because this week first thing he told the Brazilian contestant "when I said you needed to work on your accent, I meant you need to enunciate more clearly." If I recall correctly, he actually told her she needed to get rid of her accent. Which may actually be true, TV casting being what it is. Still I can see why they wouldn't want to say that so openly on the show.
My favorite thing about I Wanna Be a Soap Star is that the contestants are judged based on exactly what they would be doing if they got a job on a soap. It annoys me when America's Next Top Model makes the contestants do ridiculous tasks and pretends it has something to do with modeling. ("Now you have thirty seconds to put on makeup while riding in an elevator! Now you have to pose while escaping through a field of laser beam! Now you have to perform a Japanese tea ceremony!") But on Soap Star, they're acting out the exact same ridiculous scenes that appear on real soaps every day.
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