Bad Girls' Cudgel
Congratulations to the twisted geniuses behind Oxygen's Bad Girls Club 2 for giving us something that no other reality show has ever managed to produce: a monster.
Yes, there have been plenty of "un-scripted television" villains who have graced the small screen: Castaway Machiavellian Richard Hatch, Agrippina wannabe New York, and professional dream-crusher Simon Cowell are the first examples that leap to mind. But BGC 2's Tanisha is a monster. The difference being that villains are intrinsically evil, while monsters are neither good nor evil in much the same way cancer cells are neither good nor evil. So Tanisha is a monster in the truest, Homeric, sense of the word: a mindless, shambling beast, prowling along some desolate ancient coastline, shouting, "Pop off!" and hurling boulders at passing triremes. Charybdis and Scylla didn't have anything personal against all those sailors they killed, just as the Minotaur didn't eat all of those young people because it was conflicted: it was just doing what Minotaurs do. Hell, the Frankenstein monster just wanted to see if that little girl would float (An interesting parallel: both the Frankenstein monster and Tanisha speak a broken, monosyllabic variant of English).
