The past few seasons have seen some controversy about some American Idol contestants. Particularly in the case of Carly Smithson who'd already had a major label deal. People want their American Idol to be an unknown. Some waitress plucked from Texas or something.

Now that Kara DioGuardi's sticking around on TV's top show, she wants to have her own reality show. Everybody else on the panel has side projects. So DioGuardi is shopping around a show she's developed called Dropped. The idea is simple: grab the best acts that have been dumped by their labels and give them a second chance to make it big. America loves second chances, right Biggest Loser?

What a great idea. There are a lot of talented artists who got dropped by labels because of poor sales on an initial CD, or just differences in creative direction before they even got that far.

When it comes to hoarding stuff, I've gotten better over the years, but I'm still a fairly impressive pack-rat. For instance, I've got boxes of newspaper clippings in the basement dating back to the 1980s, when I wrote for the local daily paper.

Do I need this stuff? No, but it's part of my history, so I hang onto it. Maybe at some point in the distant future, I'll make a bunch of nice scrapbooks and pass them on to my kids. Then they'll have to figure out what to do with it. Isn't that how it works? People just keep handing their stuff down through the generations, and no one knows what to do with it. Eventually, no one even knows who it belonged to in the first place, and maybe it'll get tossed out.

But I must say, after watching A&E's Hoarders, I feel downright neat and tidy.

Once upon a time, Showtime had a popular show called The L Word. When it was winding down, they worked to put together a spin-off, but that never worked. What to do. What to do.

"Them there Real Housewives of Mayberry is real popular."

"Yep."

"Ain't they just doing Desperate Housewives with real people?"

"I reckon."

"Why don't we do that?"

How's that for authentic Hollywood dialogue I just totally made up? But that's what Showtime is looking to do: The Real L Word: Los Angeles.

Do you remember the good old days? The innocent times when Lindsay Lohan was an up and coming young movie star. She received critical acclaim for those early roles. She was beautiful and voluptuous (and you know how the kids love that!). Then she got into drugs, drinking, partying, weighing less than 90 pounds, and it all kind of fell apart. Since then, she's cleaned up her act a bit.

Which is great, Lindsay. But Lindsay Lohan in a reality show? You do know what kind of celebrities appear in realty shows? Do you think Whitney Houston and Britney Spears were at the heights of their careers when they did their amazing stints in reality television?

Speaking of Brit-Brit, LiLo is working with her manager on the project. Hopefully not the same guy that helped develop Britney & Kevin: Chaotic. The series is intended to follow Lohan as she attempts to get her career back on track.

ABC's newest stunt game show Crash Course looks exactly like the kind of show that bloggers and critics watch just so they could put their "Suck Extinguishers" to good use.

And yet 45 minutes of TV viewing later, I'm not even feeling the need to break the protective glass. On the surface, it appears to be just another reality/game show with typical contestants having their ids scared for life for cash and/or prizes and most of it is just that.

And even though it met those stereotypical expectations, I still didn't hate it. Part of me actually kind of (gulp) enjoyed it. Did I just swallow my brains along with my pride?

If you haven't seen our game before, we give you a picture from a recent episode of a TV series and you provide the caption!

Last week's winner is amiguet with this:

"This is the only part that hasn't had work."

This week's picture is from the new CBS reality competition show There Goes The Neighborhood.

ABC had an earlier version of The Superstars, many years ago, and if I remember correctly the celebrities they had were actually stars. Tonight's celeb list includes David Charvet, Estella Warren, Dan Cortese, and Julio Iglesias (Junior). But at least the athletes are pretty well known. Skier Bode Miller and tennis player Jennifer Capriati should be interesting to watch, and Terrell Owens is there for some reality competition show drama.

The Cougar is in the running for Worst TV Show of 2009 honors in my mind, so it's good to see that late night host Chelsea Handler feels the same way. Here she is doing a little rant about the show (some suggestive scenes and jokes included, so put your headphones on if you're at work).

I'll say this again: isn't it awful how low TV Land has gone? It's weird that I can watch a great Andy Griffith Show marathon, immediately followed by The Cougar. There's something wrong there. (Video also here if the one below doesn't work for you.)

Justin Timberlake and MTV have teamed up for a new reality show titled The Phone (it premieres tonight at 10). Here's the trailer for the show. Though the title makes it sound like a remake of one of those Japanese horror flicks, the trailer makes it look more like The Mole or 24.

For those who might think the new Osbournes: Reloaded variety show is a quick-fix, six-episode ratings boost, think again. Reloaded, which premieres Tuesday at 9PM on Fox, was two years in the making. According to Sharon Osbourne, who spoke with reporters via a conference call Thursday, the family was given a somewhat open-ended invitation to return to television, and they wanted to make sure they picked the right project.

They cycled through a few options, rejecting most of them, including one idea that will be a smaller part of the finished product. "It was going around the country just looking for other Osbournes, and I was like, I don't think so," Sharon told the group. "But we did keep that as a segment on the show."

Have you ever wanted to audition for a reality television show, but didn't have enough sick leave to fake an illness for your boss or the patience to wait in lines that would rival the bread lines in Cold War Russia?

Mark Burnett has struck a deal that will let people produce their own audition tapes.

Burnett signed a deal with Studio One Media to supply high traffic areas with self-serve kiosks that let people put together their own tapes for a measly twenty bucks. They can also provide a web-based service that lets contestants upload their own videos.

Survivor host Jeff Probst usually reveals the location of the next season at the end of the live reunion show which happens at the end of the last episode (this Sunday at 8 on CBS). But the news has been released a little early this season.

Probst was on Ryan Seacrest's show (yes, I know, this is the second Seacrest interview I've linked to this week - who knew he'd be such a fountain of breaking news?), and Probst reveals that the next season of the show will be in Brazil. Which means it's another jungle setting, which means we can expect more bugs, more heat, perhaps some rainstorms and footage of animals that usually don't make it anywhere near the camps. In fact, they're already done filming the next season, which debuts on February 12.

Probst also talks about running into Anderson Cooper when he was doing The Mole and the debacle that was The Emmys.

There are two things that I find disturbing about the news that there's a reality show in the works for married actors Harry Hamlin and Lisa Rinna for TV Land. Number one, do we really need another show biz couple exposing their personal lives for the cameras? Number two, why is TV Land getting away from celebrating TV history by broadcasting great old shows to do banal entertainment like this kind of unscripted drivel?

Are audiences really clamoring for more of this stuff? I know I'm not, and I don't know anyone else who is! Seriously, this is not reality TV. There's nothing real about it except that they're using their real names. (Yes, those are their real names!)

Director Sam Raimi, the man who created such gut-wrenching horrors as The Evil Dead trilogy and Spider Man 3, takes his talent for disemboweling innocent people and chopping off limbs with a dull ax to television ... for a reality show?!?

13 - Fear is Real premieres tonight January 7 on The CW at 8 p.m. eastern. It puts 13 innocent (not really) people in the middle of a fake horror movie, and the last one standing on their bloody stumps takes home the grand prize.

The reality show aims to do for horror movies what Next Action Star did for action movies - rip them off and turn them into another schlock reality show that requires little to no creative ideas or thought.

Showtime is looking for call girls.

The cable network is developing a new documentary series (Link NSFW) about the world's oldest profession. They're looking for call girls to live in a Hollywood mansion and have cameras film their every, um, move. Not sure why this is called a documentary and not just a reality show. If it's a true documentary then I don't think they'd go the Big Brother/Real World route; they'd just film their real lives and what happens to them. Seems the show is having a hard time finding cast members.

There's no title for the series yet, but I have a few suggestions.