Everybody Loves Zoidberg WOULD be a really good show. I love Zoidberg anyway.
I’ve seen a few episodes of MTV’s MADE recently, and I think that, of the makeover reality shows, it’s really the best. It’s a simple concept: high school kid has some dream of personal accomplishment, and MTV shows up and helps them achieve it in 10 weeks. It’s always something difficult, and out of character, and good. A very femme young woman who wants to learn to skateboard because she’s tired of being so deliberately useless. A chorus nerd who wants to join the hip-hop dance team. An out-of-shape whiner who wants to run a triathalon.
These kids are not passively being “made over” by MTV. Instead, they’re becoming self-made, re-creating themselves in a quintessentially American narrative of self-invention, performative identity, and achievement.
Did I already say this? I can’t remember. I saw an episode in Germany and that’s when I began thinking of how the music videos on EuroMTV are local, but the shows are all bratty US kids, and how Made was especially US-centric. On the other hand, every child dreams of achievement and change. That’s what it is to grow to adulthood, really. The self-invention thing may be a very American twist, but everybody dreams of becoming somebody else.
Secretly Ironic 
