Rock of Love: Charm School with Sharon Osbourne
on VH1
Episode Summary
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
At one point in VH1’s history, the network was known as the
music channel for mature sensibilities – the responsible, older sibling to MTV’s
impetuous young rebel. Now, with its current “celebreality” format, VH1 has
become nothing more than a cavalcade of ex-strippers, wannabees, has-beens and
never-weres. According to VH1, you’re a celebrity by merely appearing in one of
their brain-dead shows; and if your life is enough of a train wreck, you just
might be recycled into one of the network’s many inane spin-offs. Such is the
premise behind Rock of Love Charm School with Sharon Osbourne (Sundays,
9:00 p.m. ET), which features rejects from the first two seasons of Rock of
Love with Brett Michaels. Under the ironic tutelage of Sharon Osbourne
(herself a foul-mouthed reality show veteran), the girls supposedly compete to
become respectable young women. The December 14th episode of
Charm School presented clips of the season’s lowlights, one week before the
finale airs. For broadcasting a steady stream of bleeped expletives and one
unbleeped f-bomb from some of the lewdest, crudest, most conniving women on
television, Rock of Love Charm School with Sharon Osbourne has been named
the Worst Cable TV Show of the Week.
Sharon opens the episode by
giving a quick review of the semester thus far: “There’s been class. Ass.
There’s been fighting and crying. Snogging and spitting. And through it all I
have tried to turn these rock n’ roll groupie girls into women of importance.”
Hardly. From day one, the women drank, fought, and screamed their way
from one scene to the next. Within an hour of entering the house, two girls
were throwing drinks at each other; and by the end of the first night, one girl
had passed out drunk.
As the season progressed, every
episode showcased an expletive-laden cat fight. At one point, Brandi M writes,
“Megan is a whore” on the chalkboard, sparking a shouting match that ends with
Brandi M mooning the other girls as she screams, “F***ing kiss my f***ing ass
because I don’t give a f***.” The producers placed a graphic of the moon over
Brandi M’s behind. Their creative censoring didn’t stop there. After Sharon
evicted Angelique, the French stripper said to the camera, “I wished I could
have stayed a little bit longer to learn a little bit more. But you know what?
F*** Charm School. I’m not gonna stop stripping anytime soon. I love it. I’m
proud of it.” She opens her blazer and reveals her surgically-augmented breasts
-- which are covered by a graphic of a croissant.
Sometimes, the quarrels went
beyond merely screaming at the top of their lungs. Megan was evicted for
scratching and kicking Brandi M. And, in a truly vile and disgusting act,
Brandi C spat in Destiney’s face after a night of heavy drinking. The chaos
that ensued provoked the producers to step in and break up the fight.
Shots of the female anatomy
exposed or encased in tight clothing are sprinkled throughout the episode. At
one point, the girls ridicule a female lead singer of a band, whose tight shorts
elicit taunts In another scene, a drunken passenger presses her bare bottom
against the window of a bus.
Despite the series’ title, the
show is clearly designed to sensationalize scantily clad women behaving badly.
The obvious hypocrisy is embodied by host Sharon Osbourne, who is currently
being investigated for battery charges after she allegedly attacked former
contestant Megan. Far from discouraging this despicable behavior, VH1 promotes
it by giving some of the worst offenders their own spin-offs. Viewers can
suffer through Megan’s twisted morals in her new show, Trophy Wife.
(Remember, this is on basic
cable on a channel most cable subscribers are forced to order.)
For explicit language, partial nudity, setting the women’s
movement back several decades, and forcing every cable subscriber to pay for its
sophomoric, soft-core sleaze, Rock of Love: Charm School with Sharon Osbourne
deserves the title of Worst Cable TV Show of the Week.
