The show, hosted by Mario Lopez (aka ACSL8R), pairs fans with the celebrities they claim to hate. After ten years of covering a Smallville fandom that spent most of its time hating on one actress or another, it’d be fun to see what happens when the celebrity is paired with their hater.
I’ve now seen a screener of H8R, and, although the concept is there, “celebrity” is a fairly loose term. I don’t follow reality TV, which means that even though I’d heard of The Jersey Shore’s “Snooki,” I had no clue who Jake Pavelka was and after seeing this show, I probably would have been a hater too. The promo reel shown earlier this year had Snooki and Kim Kardashian – I’m assuming the Kim episode airs later – but again, I’d rather see actual celebrities rather than the manufactured reality-TV people.
That said. The first segment, which had Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi paired with her “hater,” was actually a lot of fun. It helped that the guy they picked who wasn’t a fan was actually really funny, but also, underneath the big hair and orange tan, Snooki seems like a sweet girl – at least in how she was portrayed on the show. There was some good banter between hater and hatee. My only complaint – and I felt this with the second segment as well – is that the segment was rushed. It seemed like – spoiler alert! – Snooki won over the family way too easily and I would have liked to have seen more of that happening.
The second segment, beyond feeling really staged with a hater who seemed like her lines were written for her, teamed a hater with The Bachelor’s Jake Pavelka. I follow a lot of TV, but perhaps thankfully, like I said, I had no idea who this guy was, nor did I really care. But what I did notice is he seemed really fake, superficial, and shallow… basically everything that the “hater” said about him in the first place. If there was a “Douchebag Jar” in any TV show beyond FOX’s The New Girl, Jake would be putting money into it for almost everything he says. If the goal of this show was to make the hater and the non-fan like each other, it failed here. If I wasn’t watching it for review I may have tuned out at this point.
Still, I like the concept of H8R. You can’t expect it to be a high concept or anything “deep” but if done well, it could be a lot of fun… I just hope they start having real celebrities before it’s all done. Yeah, we’ll probably never get a “Democrat with Sarah Palin” episode, “Chloe fan with Erica Durance,” or “anyone over 30 with George Lucas,” but it sure would be nice to try. Does Mario Lopez still have Screech’s phone number? That’s a start. Either way, the show premieres at 8 tonight. See what you think, and hope, with me, that future episodes are more like the Snooki segment and less like the Pavelka one. I don’t think it’s horrible… but it could be something a lot more than what it is, and it could even be quite entertaining.
