In the old days, the career path for a certain brand of celebrity, the kind who is more than a flash in the pan but less than a national treasure, had these three steps: Be a big star for a while; spend a few years on Hollywood Squares; fade to obscurity.
Trouble was, there are only nine squares on Hollywood Squares, which left a lot of celebrities with no decent second act after their fame had peaked. Then reality television was invented, opening seemingly unlimited opportunities to follow a slight variation in the traditional path: Be a big star for a while; embarrass yourself on a reality-TV show; fade to obscurity.
But there might be a more respectable alternative, one in which a celebrity can do something other than make fun of his own irrelevance. In separate reality shows being introduced today, Steven Seagal and Jesse Ventura hope to blaze that trail.
Seagal, who merged his martial-arts background with a nebulous acting style to become a steady box-office draw in such violent films as Hard to Kill (1990) and Under Siege (1992), lets us in on his under-the-radar second job in A&E's Steven Seagal: Lawman. It's a basic ride-along cop show, but one of the cops is Seagal, who, it turns out, has been a reserve deputy in Jefferson Parish, La., for about 20 years.
And Ventura, who with stints as a Navy Seal, a professional wrestler and the governor of Minnesota may already have the most eclectic resume in America, tries on an investigative hat (of sorts) in TruTV's Conspiracy Theory, in which he seeks the truth about secretive government programs, what "really" happened on Sept. 11 and more.
So are Seagal and Ventura leading a trend? Rob Sharenow, the senior vice president for programming at A&E, said that his network likes the idea of this type of reality show (or "real-life" TV, as he calls it).
"There is a whole class of celebrity reality shows where they literally cast people," he said, "where they just gather a bunch of celebrities who are looking to participate in a reality show. The things that we're drawn to are about real people who are doing something extraordinary or who are extraordinary people who are going to expose their lives for a reason."
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