Guilty pleasure confession

I have a lot of guilty pleasures, far more than would fit in a single blog entry of any reasonable length. Tonight, though, marks the beginning of this season of one of them, so I thought I'd confess it here: I like the Spike TV reality show, The Ultimate Fighter (TUF).

The show's premise is simple: Put 16 mixed-martial-arts fighters, eight in each of two weight classes, in a house for about two months. Have them train in teams, and at the end of each show have two of them fight. The winner advances in the contest; the loser has to stay in the house and train but is out of the running. The prize is a "three-year, six-figure UFC contract," which I assume means a guarantee of $33K a year for three years, for each of the weight-class winners. The show takes you up to the final fight, which airs later (in this case, in June) in a live event.

The producers create a certain amount of havoc, of course, by the way they structure the house: no TV, no books, no entertainment--but plenty of booze. As you might imagine, the testerone- and alcohol- and violence-fueled atmosphere leads to a lot of bad behavior, which I'm sure Spike sees as good television.

I watch the show for the training sequences and, most of all, the fights, but I do watch it. I like it enough that I record it each week and view it as soon after the recording as I can. I record very few shows and watch almost no live TV, so for me this level of TV show following is quite unusual.

I don't consider watching MMA fights to be a guilty pleasure, by the way; I can make a case for that. This show, however, definitely makes me feel a little guilty.

Now, I can and would argue that TUF is far less of a vice than most reality TV shows. A certain female I will not name is quite a huge fan of America's Next Top Model (ANTM), an example of a far less worthy guilty pleasure. She would argue that ANTM is the bomb, but she's wrong, pure and simple.

That said, if at the end of each episode of ANTM two of the model wannabes would put on five-ounce gloves, get into a cage, and whup the tar out of each other in the pursuit of a contract, the show's ratings would surely skyrocket--and I might give it a look-see.