Skip This Trip to Paradise

The tagline of FOX's new reality television series, "Forever Eden," attempts to entice its audience by promising a "reality show without an end." Unfortunately, this statement is only half true; although the hour-long show feels like it will never end, its inability to be even remotely entertaining makes cancellation seem inevitable.

In the defense of "Eden," at least the show's premise diverges from the rut of reality dating shows in which television programming seems to be trapped. The pitch: eleven players with better-than-average looks and bodies leave their families and friends to meet and stay in paradise ... indefinitely. Each participant is given four coins worth $1,000 for every week that he is able to stay on the show. Banishment from Eden strips the contestant of half of his collected fortune, while a voluntary decision to leave costs them all of their earnings.

Every week, one of the contestants is banished and replaced by someone that has been watching the show back in the real world (with the added requirement that they are also unrealistically beautiful, lest the balance of paradise is upset by someone who is unpleasant to look at). At least in other reality shows, the audience is given enough time to invest emotion in the characters, whether it it's positive or negative; "Eden" barely introduces new players before one of them is banished.

The writers have successfully cooked up numerous challenges such as "males choose the most undesirable female" to "females choose the most desirable male" in order to ensure a relentless cycle of sex and conflict. In the eloquent summation of one of the contestants: "This is drama, dawg!"

Although the never-ending plot twists make it difficult to predict who is next to get the boot, whatever intellectual stimulation is used trying to guess what will happen next is counterbalanced by the mind-numbing stupidity of the players' themselves.

Mary, the "former" sports club manager from Utah, pulls a Julie from "Real World: New Orleans" and immediately declares, "I've never seen so many black people in my whole entire life ... I was like, wow this is cool!"

Unlike Julie, who over the course of the season comes to realize how na‹ve she is and grow in character, Mary compounds her own ignorance with such statements as, "How did your toes get black like that? Did you get something on them? Oh my God, are your toes just dark like that? I've never seen a black man's feet before!" She is then promptly kicked off the show, leaving the viewers at home to scramble and try to recover whatever brain cells were lost from hearing this woman speak.

And although Mary is unforgivably ignorant, every comment about her from the men exacerbates the situation by focusing on her enormous breasts and sex appeal: Jordan confesses that Mary may be "racist and ignorant, but I still might have sex with her," while Matt proclaims, "She's like looking at a piece of paper, with very large plastic breasts."

The real drama kicks in after a day or two of lounging around by the pool when the men have to select the woman whom they find to be the least desirable. They then have to place a laughably oversized, hormone-injected green apple on the chosen woman's pillow and see what drama will follow. I'll save you two hours of your life and summarize: Mary ends up being deemed "least desirable," and in true reality-show fashion must stand in front of the group while the men humiliate her.

Then the tables are turned: Mary is told that she gets to choose which man will be banished; Mary butt-kissing promptly ensues. Finally, both Mary and Craig, the brawny and brainless fitness trainer, are eliminated in a "shocking double-banishment." "It's just, like, a part of us, like, totally just like left," Brooke says, shedding a tear over the intense two-day relationships she had developed with the banished contestants. The remaining group then proceeds to get drunk off of champagne, play truth-or-dare, and wind up in each other's beds.

"Eden" is the ultimate cheesy drama, complete with repeated echoing voiceovers and sepia-toned flashbacks. The show relies on the flashback technique to fill time so often that it feels like watching everything in the episode twice.

If melodramatic scenes of elimination couched between discussions over who can dread their chest hair are your idea of a good time, then plop yourself in front of the tube on Thursday nights at 9 and tune into "Forever Eden." But you'd better act quickly: FOX may soon realize that it picked a rotten apple and give this series what it deserves: banishment.