Review – H8R

H8R – The CW – 8:00/7:00pm Wednesday – USA

Never before has a television show come along that it so desperately begging to be hated as much as the new CW reality show H8R is. The premise of H8R is that ‘celebrities have feelings too!’ and it finds Mario Lopez (made famous playing Slater in Saved By The Bell and stayed famous through sheer force of will and an apathetic public who never worked up the energy to tell him to go home) leading the fight against celebrity haters. Through the use of hidden cameras and third rate Punk’d confrontations celebrities will come face to face with people who mock them because it just isn’t fair how people can just go around insulting people just because their famous!

Here’s a quick test as to whether these ‘celebrities’ are all that famous – take a look at the photo above, it features a regular person being confronted by a celebrity, now can you tell me which one is the celebrity? If you guessed the blonde girl, you’d be wrong – the handsome fellow is former Bachelor Jake Pavelka, and yes, apparently somebody spent enough time thinking about Jake Pavelka to work up the energy to hate the guy. The first episode of H8R features two confrontations – one involving Jake Pavelka and a woman who seems more disinterested in him than filled with rage, and Jersey Shore’s Snooki and a guy who appeared to be auditioning for some snarky E! show that only exists in his mind (wait – am I now making fun of somebody who appeared on television as a normal person? Do they now count as a celebrity because they were on a reality show? I mean, that’s how Jake and Snooki count as celebrities, so wouldn’t logic suggest that the random guy who hates Snooki is as much of a celebrity as the actual celebrities? I feel myself slowly being sucked in the abyss that is H8R).

H8R, as you can probably already guess, is pure trainwreck television that is entertaining in a way that only the very worst TV shows can be entertaining. Mario Lopez invites some celebrity (and from the look of the previews all of the celebrities just seem to be reality stars, although the second episode has Eva Longoria in it but it also features some guy named Scott Disick who was on Keeping Up With The Kardashians but is not a Kardashian) and then shows them some footage of a normal person ranting about how much they hate them before the celebrities go and confront the normal person, they then spending the rest of the episode trying to convince the person to like them. It is possibly the most desperate and ridiculous thing you will see on television all year – these celebrities are so narcissistic they are literally begging people to like them.

What’s most bizarre about H8R is that it is completely hypocritical and has zero percent self-awareness which makes watching the show a mind-boggling experience. First, the show has to lie to people to get them to rant about the celebrities. The guy who rants about Snooki does so because he was told he was auditioning for another show, same as the girl who rants about Jake Pavelka. Then Mario Lopez invites the celebrities to go and confront the normals, not so they can say ‘can’t we all just get along’, no, they want to prove that they are awesome by going and mocking the normals. Snooki spends most of her time with her regular dude insulting the guy for not liking her. She even brings out the old ‘you’re just jealous of me’ before making fun of the guy for having big tits. All the while Mario Lopez sits back laughing his head off, because if it wasn’t already apparent Mario Lopez is a douchebag (please don’t confront me about this, Mario).

The poor schmuck who has to spend a day with Snooki has her over for dinner with his family where Snooki calls out the guy’s mother for being a hater. She doesn’t like the way Snooki acts on her reality show so Snooki says “I would consider you a hater.” “I don’t hate, I dislike it.” Meaning the drunken antics, rather than Snooki herself; Snooki, who is delusional, replies “you’re a hater” because there is no grey in Snooki’s world, everything is black or white and if you aren’t with her you’re against her. After a dinner with Snooki, during which she insists they just call her Nicole, the family find out she’s a nice enough person and the hater stops hating. Go figure that if you spend time with people in real life you don’t hate them as much as you do when you watch them on TV from the safety of your living room – what an amazing revelation. Hilariously, it doesn’t hold true for Jake Pavelka who despite his best efforts is still hated by the woman he confronts.

The scenes with Pavelka are somehow more bizarre than Snooki’s confrontation because Jake proves himself to be just as fake and stupid as the ‘hater’ thinks he is. To prove he’s a good guy he takes her to the Bachelor mansion, which naturally doesn’t impress her. She just asks him to list five good things about himself and as he struggles to get to five he includes ‘morally, I’m great’ – which is so such a spectacularly awesome thing for somebody to think; who includes ‘morally I’m great’ on a list of five good things about themselves, somebody who’s morally not so great I’d imagine. She continues to think he’s just giving generic answers in an effort to convince her he’s a nice guy, and guess what? That’s exactly what he’s doing. Their time together ends with him lamenting that she still didn’t like him “it kind of sucks, I was myself completely.” And she still thought you were a douchebag? Go freaking figure.

H8R is absolutely amazingly awful television. This is the exact sort of reality trash that manages to be both stomach churning and the sort of horror you can’t look away from. For every excruciating minute I sat through this thing I wanted it to be over, but then if I’d never experienced this nonsense I’d never have learnt that morally, Jake Pavelka is great and for that I’ll be forever thankful. This is a show that has been brought to life through the sheer arrogance of barely-note-worthy celebrities and their insecure need to have everybody in the world love them. H8R exists because celebrities can always be relied on to think that they are amazing creatures and that if everybody in the world just took the time to get to know them they would like them – except, of course, for blonde 20 year olds creeped out by thirtysomething douchebags who were once on the Bachelor.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Ugly