Melrose Place, now that was a show. Kimberly taking her hair off, Michael trying to kill Sydney, Kimberly blowing up the whole Melrose Place... all awesome stuff. After a few Heather Locklear-inclusive (AKA Amanda Woodward/Blake/Parezi/McBride/Burns) seasons, the show was popular enough that they decided to move it from it's posh post-"90210" timeslot to Fox's Monday night lineup as the flagship show. And what was the advertising campaign? "Mondays are a bitch," of course.

One of the best things about Melrose Place vs. the rest of TV was that they weren't afraid to have characters that were bitches. Now, every character on a sitcom is likeable except for perhaps Larry David. And every regular character on a drama is a good guy as the bad guys change week-to-week. Who wants to play a bad guy? Which I guess is part of the reason why reality TV is the place to be. You can't pay an actor enough to be a bitch, so just dangle a few thousand in front of some co-ed and see them swipe and claw to get at it. And if they don't, you just have to edit it so it looks like they did.

This summer of reality TV has given us a few more bad guys to hate. Big Brother 4 brought us Allison and Jun, so-called "floaters" because they switched sides week-to-week depending on which alliance had power. Jun could have been a bitchy but likeable character much in the way Marcellas was last summer in Big Brother 3, bluntly analyzing each of the other contestants' faux pas, but after the first few weeks she stopped, evidently reverting to a less graceful Lisa (Big Brother 3) or a less insane Nicole (Big Brother 2). The real bitch of the house was Allison, who flirted with Nathan enough to get him to save her from elimination in Week 3 and then repaid him by breaking her alliance with him in Week 4. Even the boring, twitching, woman-hating Robert looked sympathetic compared to that bitch.

Zack has a laywer in him (but he claims to be straight)

Paradise Hotel also created its fair share of bitches. Perhaps breaking new ground in reality TV, all of the ex-contestants of the show were allowed back one week to return to Paradise and get revenge on the people that voted them off. The funny part was, everyone thought they were portrayed as heroic and their enemies were portrayed as bitches. Perhaps they were all stupid (they were), but it was quite a sight to see Zack (the "Michael Jordan of Paradise Hotel" according to ESPN the Magazine) return spouting

You know that movie Braveheart? You know how proud all those guys were of their country and how such a little country like Scotland could beat a big country like England? Well I'm proud to have that in me, and someone with Scottish and Italian blood like me doesn't take things lying down.

Paradise Hotel also breaks ground as perhaps the first reality game show where the rules are made up as the game progresses. This allows the producers to have full control over everything, including allowing Zack to get in a few more bitchy comments before he had to leave and allowing the heroic non-bitches more than ample leeway to survive and advance. Which I guess shows that—while smart, coniving bitches like Big Brother's Allison can thrive on reality shows—dumb bitches like Zack mostly present an easy target, just as in the soap operas reality TV is replacing.

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