Recently I got curious (bored out of my mind) and decided to watch the animated “reality show” called “Total Drama Island” and the show shocked me by being one of the worst things I have ever watched in my entire life. In my opinion the show failed on virtually every level a show can fail on, and how its premise of being an animated reality show fell completely flat.
Personally I was surprised to see how awful the show was, I did not think that a show that has lasted seven seasons could be so fundamentally broken. Maybe the later seasons are better, maybe its badness was first season awkwardness, but the fact it survived its first season without being cancelled is itself a miracle. And given how the show was set up and established I do not see how it could get better.
The show is set up as an animated reality show based upon Survivor, being animated you would think it would be a parody of reality shows, and that is where the problem is… It isn’t. The show does nothing to take advantage of the fact that it is animated, nothing about it is cartoony enough to warrant the format, but even if it was a live-action show it wouldn’t vary enough from any other reality show in order to have any sort of notoriety.
It fails at being a reality show, a parody of a reality show, and at being an animated show. So it instead relies on raunchy and gross-out humor, the characters say and do a lot of things that are very inappropriate for a kids show, although not full-adult its language and concepts seem more appropriate for a Teenage audience, but it seems to have been aimed at a child audience.
Inappropriate things include usage of minor swears such as damn and hell, the eating of bull testicles blatantly being called “bull testicles” with actual usage of the word testicles. Constant mean spirited stereotypes, including racial ones, and ones against the obese. On top of all of this there is nothing clever done with the gross-out humor at any time because the animation is not good enough to take advantage of that sort of humor.
It is honestly hard to find any redeeming factors the show has, and it may actually be actively harmful. The show tries to be a reality show and thus has few cartoony aspects, so when someone survives something they wouldn’t or gets hurt and survives it doesn’t feel warranted, and it may very well give children a bad idea of what is dangerous and what isn’t. At one point in the show a young woman (Izzy) is bitten repeatedly by a rattlesnake with no ill effects, yet earlier in the season someone succumbed to poisonous effects… so what is it? The show should have portrayed these sort of things all as realistic or all as not realistic, instead of picking and choosing for comedic effect (which failed because it wasn’t funny).
And the stereotypes, most characters adhere strictly too some stereotypes. The show seems to be under the impression that if people are different that you should hate them, and seems to actively encourage the viewer to hate them. One characters, the obese man named Owen, is portrayed as a loud, stupid, and mega strong fart machine that is a danger too himself and everyone around him. A few times in the show gay jokes are made where a character will remark on the handsomeness of another character and then basically proceed to say “im not gay” too his fellow “contestants”, homosexuality is acknowledged but only for the purposes of ridicule.
(there is also frequent animal abuse too, but I don’t want to get into that.)
Everything about the show is rotten, yet it survived, and it found an audience. Using every bit of logic I could scrape together I have yet to figure out who could watch this show and not hate it, the only answer I can think of is middle school aged people who refuse to watch reality shows but still want to feel mature. Honestly it is actually a legitimate audience to target, but this show does it so cynically and lazily that it is insulting too the senses.
If there is a god… may god have mercy on the the souls of the people who created this show.