Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, The Hills
Do you dream of designing frocks on Project Runway? Finding romance on Flavor of Love? Or bunking in the Big Brother house? Now there's a school to learn how to land a gig on reality TV. At the New York Reality TV School, which just wrapped its second session, students learn how to audition, create an on-air persona and parlay 15 minutes of fame into a career.
The school, which claims to be the only educational institution of its ilk, is the brainchild of actor/coach Robert Galinsky. "It doesn't matter if you're going on vacation or on a job interview, you go prepared. Same with reality TV," Galinsky says. "If you want to get on one of those shows, you should be as prepared as possible."
To that end, 29 students ponied up $139 for a three-hour class, where they were critiqued on practice auditions for actual upcoming reality shows like You Owe Me Money, Pimp My Halfway House and Bully's Revenge. They endured "emotional con
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Bitsie Tulloch, quarterlife
Get ready for the future of TV, because it's here. On Nov. 11, a new drama series, quarterlife, premieres on MySpace. Why should you care? Because for one thing, it's the brainchild of Emmy-winning writers-producers Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick (thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, Once and Again). And it's being touted as the first "network-quality" series created specifically for the Web. Whether or not the show takes off, it's a sign that the times are changing. And with the Writers Guild strike in full swing, more Hollywood scribes may find a creative outlet, like Herskovitz and Zwick, by writing directly for the Internet
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Meerkat Manor
Are you a furry friend of Animal Planet's Meerkat Manor (new episodes air Friday at 8 and 8:30 pm/ET)? If so, these burning questions and expert answers are for you!
Who names the meerkats, and what criteria do they use to come up with the names?
The Cambridge University researchers named most of the meerkats as a way to tell them apart, and assigned some names based on personalities, as with heroic Shakespeare. Others got their names a bit more randomly. "They just run out of names sometimes," says Meerkat Manor executive producer Mick Kaczorowski. "So you see some of them [named after] spices, some [named after] theatrical stars, and then they'll just start naming them something starting with 'St.' In Season 3, I know there's a new group that's coming forward that starts with 'St.'"
Why has the show become such a viewer favorite?
Because of those cute little faces, and story lines that ri
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