It’s basically a given that whatever Harvard students do, they do it intensely. Strangely enough, this even goes for wasting time, as I discovered in an airport security line last May: “The longest I’ve ever slept is about 30 hours,” I heard an obviously exhausted undergrad behind me boast. “But I could probably go longer now.”

All talk of going longer aside, I made it my mission after arriving home in August for a month of vacation to test my endurance and skill not only in sleep, but also in something very closely related: mindless sedentary activity.

As surely as there are good and bad ways to arbitrarily drop the names of obscure social theorists in section, or to insert an obviously faulty counterargument into an essay that has no thesis, there is a correct way to waste time, and it involves reality television.

You see, with reality TV, just one mind-numbing day of sitting on the couch nursing a bag of Tostitos feels like weeks and weeks of climbing mountains, being forced to consume strange creatures, and going on oddly conceived dates with unattractive people. It’s like ten vacations in one, and, best of all, you don’t have to do any of the work yourself!

And though you may have missed these gems this summer, they’re sure to be back soon. So next time you get a chance, be sure to sit back, relax, and savor the joy that is watching other people…

…Tear apart their curtains and rummage through garbage in hopes of creating the next big trend.

Carry on, “Project Runway.” Bravo’s fashion design competition gave all of us a new reason to live every Wednesday night and even seems to have inspired a few Harvard students to stow their innumerable pairs of sweatpants in favor of donning something slightly more chic. True, about 65% of the dialogue is the same in every episode (“In fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day you’re out”). But in the case of Heidi Klum’s lines, it’s at least delivered with varying degrees of both German accent and melodrama.

…Vie with each other to seduce a washed-out ’90s rapper.

There are few reality shows that are genuinely ridiculous enough that there’s no need to make fun of them. VH1’s “Flavor of Love” is one of these select few.

It aspires to be a dating competition in the style of “The Bachelor”—what it realizes is a giant, prolonged orgy for Flavor Flav, formerly of Public Enemy, with 20 women whom he calls by nicknames like Bubblez, Hoopz, and Miss Latin because his drug use has led to memory loss.



…Tun a state-of-the-art Beverly Hills gym while coping with lovers who sometimes throw glass at them:

Who doesn’t love Jackie, the openly gay trainer at the center of Bravo’s “Workout?” She’s cute, she’s witty, and sometimes, at the very end of an episode, she even manages to deliver a meaningful lesson about the ways that eating healthily and exercising regularly can transform our lives.

But don’t let that scare you away—your motivation to do anything vaguely physical will give out after you, like me, realize you can’t do more than eight push-ups in a row.



…Perform full choreographed routines to “Sexy Back”:

Whether we were once the young girl who dreamt about growing up to be a ballerina before realizing she would prefer to keep her toes intact, or the nerdy teenage boy who grinded up to his high school crush only to be turned away, we have all made failed efforts at attractively moving our bodies to music.

Perhaps this single fact explains the success of Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance”: there’s so much schadenfreude to draw from when they, like us, get caught with two left feet. Also, unlike the majority of competition shows, it manages to stay exciting all the way through, from the first freak-filled auditions to the finals.



…invest plenty of time and a record amount of money in a new kind of hybrid voyeur-house drama/talent competition show only to have its first episode draw the second-smallest audience of any premiere of any show on a major network. Ever:

ABC really messed up with “The One,” which was supposed to change reality TV as we know it. At least it puts in perspective your failure to do anything with your free time besides idly clutch at the remote.



—Reviewer Marianne F. Kaletzky can be reached at kaletzky@fas.harvard.edu.