Rocco's flirty flavor may turn your stomach, but his cookbook is supposed to be fantastic. Despite the guests and staff complaining nonstop about Rocco's absence, the restaurant's popularity obviously depends on his ability to promote it and himself, and those things naturally take up a lot of his time. By the second episode, it's hard not to sympathize with Rocco, doing his best to be pleasant while under siege. Still, between the absurdly bad voice-overs and the endless griping, the whole thing rings false. Without a competition or any real point beyond a lot of theatrical carping, "The Restaurant" amounts to a foolish three-ring circus of egomaniacal acting out.

All in the family
I'd certainly rather run a restaurant than a mortuary, particularly if my co-workers at the mortuary were also family members. How in the hell do people work side by side with their families? Don't the bratty outbursts and irrational clashes of family life stand in the way of professionalism just a tiny bit?

They do, which is why "Family Plots" (Mondays at 9 p.m. ET; A&E), the "Six Feet Under" of reality shows, is almost as entertaining as it is stomach-turning. But then, Shonna and her family, who run a mortuary in San Diego, are made for TV: garrulous yet relentlessly confrontational, the family allows the cameras to share the inner workings of the mortuary -- to a fault. One daughter fights with her dad and throws a slice of pizza at the wall, another daughter vows to quit smoking and has a cigarette less than an hour later when the stress of preparing a car accident victim to be viewed gets to be too much. For all of their assorted charms and flaws, the family seems very natural and unself-conscious on camera, and the scenarios that present themselves are surprisingly fascinating, and -- not surprisingly -- often very sad.

But even with so much built-in provocation, "Family Plots" may not amount to more than a novelty. After all, watching dad and daughter bicker while trying not to drop a dead body on the floor might be a queasy mix of funny and disturbing the first time around, but can you really see yourself tuning in, week after week? No matter how flexible we try to be about death and dead bodies, the truth is, none of us really want to think about it more than we have to. While the fictional deaths at the start of "Six Feet Under" add an eerie weight to the Fishers' struggle to find happiness in life, the corpses of "Family Plots" are a little too heavy not to crush the mood. As repetitive as the empty dates and endless rose bestowals of other second-string reality shows might be, at least they distract us from the inevitability of our own deaths.

Then again, there are really two types of people in the world, the avoidant and the gleefully morbid. While avoidants see caskets and are struck with the crushing weight of their own mortality, the gleefully morbid delight in getting a small taste of the unbearable sadness of death. Avoidants tend to embrace picnics in the park and long walks on the beach as diversion from the inevitability of death, but nothing in the world makes the gleefully morbid more painfully aware of the meaningless of human existence than a spit of champagne and a cruise on a luxury yacht. Or, as a female friend of mine used to say, "Having a boyfriend is fine, as long as I don't have to lay around on a blanket in the park with him."

The Jessica mystique
Just in case that comment makes you feel a little bit more comfortable with the fact that you're a grumpy bitch of a wife/girlfriend, Jessica Simpson's sweet smile and massive rack are on display in last week's "Us Weekly" next to the words "How I Keep Nick Happy." Forget all those babyish tantrums she throws on "Newlyweds"! According to this very informative article, Jessica knows just how to please her man. Not only does she make his hobbies her own, but she's more of a homemaker than you might think! She gives Nick her undivided attention, she helps him lighten up, she lets him know she's committed, she gets him expensive gifts and she can't live without him!

Recent Stories