Old, familiar sensation
I've come to this conclusion thanks in part to the arrival this week of Mark Burnett's latest creation, "Rock Star," which takes us through the process of auditioning a new lead singer for INXS. But see, the way I just described the show, it almost sounds original or different or interesting. An auditioning process? A search for a new lead singer?

So let me reframe that. "Rock Star" (Mondays at 9 p.m. on CBS) is like "The Apprentice," only replace the type-A yuppies with tattooed, ultra-sensitive rocker types and replace The Donald with Dave Navarro, and replace the business-speak with words like "sweet" and "no way!" and "I'm not feeling her, dude."

You know the rest: There's the typical Mark Burnett opening credits, with smiling sepia-tone faces and names, set to a really awful Muzak-y version of "New Sensation." There's the host, Brooke Burke, who's basically just like "Survivor's" Jeff Probst, but with fake boobs and rocker lingo.

And, of course, there's the moment when the wannabes enter the mansion where they'll be staying, which, of course, looks exactly like the mansion where all reality TV wannabes stay. "Oh my god, look at that pool!" "Can you believe this place?" they mumble like a bunch of extras ad-libbing unconvincingly. The sound of bad rock music can be heard. Brooke huskily intones, "Now I know you guys hear that sweet music that's coming from inside the house, right?" Yeah, man! So the wannabes shuffle inside, where they find -- oh my god! -- Dave Navarro, jamming with INXS! Everyone is very psyched, but no one says anything specific about INXS, probably because they're all too young to remember how the hit single "Suicide Blonde" took the rock world by storm. We old folks can remember it well, but only because we were once drunk, whoring sea donkeys, and INXS was the kind of blandly aggressive pop they played in the murky dive bars and back-alley vomitoriums we frequented way back when.

Brooke and Dave don't even try to convince us that INXS matters or ever did. Instead, everyone's told that they'll have to perform a song in an hour, at the Mayan, a club that no one's ever heard of or it wouldn't require on-air promotion in the first place.

So then there are the performances. You know how "American Idol" presents a Disneyfied, plastic version of pop music? Well, not surprisingly, "Rock Star" makes rock 'n' roll look about as spontaneous and sexy as a ham sandwich. Basically, you could've turned on this part of the show and convinced me that I was watching the "fierce rock star" challenge on "America's Next Top Model."

Apparently, most of the assembled wannabes think that "acting like a rock star" translates into the same handful of gestures: pumping fists, flailing arms, thrusting hip action and the knee-dip appeal to the screaming fraudience. (Striding back and forth, wailing as if in pain, and covering eyes with hair are all optional.) Still, the whole goony spectacle is deliciously self-conscious and awkward and sad, and features the level of talent and originality you'd find at a high school talent show, with two notable exceptions, Ty and Heather. I'm sure there are a few more decent contestants in there, but the leather and the tattoos and the carefully mussed hair sort of blend together in my mind.

Look, the performances were sort of fun, to be honest, and most were edited down until mercifully short. But as soon as they were over, we were left with the same old bunch of dreamers, mingling and offending each other back at the mansion. Snore city. "We got drunk, I didn't sleep a wink, one of us is going home soon!" Blah blah blah.

Basically, Wannabe TV is now about as exciting as most procedural cop shows, which have the excuse of having been around for decades. Those producers better go back to their Big Idea Laboratories and come up with the next big thing in reality TV before we all go back to watching families cracking bad jokes around the couch and cops mumbling incoherently around the water cooler.

Don't need you tonight
And then there are the emoting mutants of the second season of "I Wanna Be a Soap Star" (Thursdays at 11 p.m. on Soapnet), perhaps the weakest of the wannabe species, mostly because we've seen so much bad acting in our sorry lives, we hardly need to see any more. I would review this show right here, right now, only there's nothing to say. You can fill in all the gaps using your powers of imagination and the loose outline we've already established: Fit young humans, bantering host, bad acting, mingling and offending, more bad acting, empty feedback, worries about who's going home, and finally, the weepy departure. Next!

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