Popular Reality TV

Emmanuel Kelly, an Iraqi orphan whose limbs were damaged by chemical warfare, wowed Australia’s X Factor ’s judges with his performance last night, but he was, unbelievably, rejected from both Australia’s Got Talent and X Factor last year. His audition of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” which is below, resulted in a standing ovation but isn’t quite one of those now near-cliche auditions where someone who looks like an unlikely singer and has a disproportionately amazing voice. But what is surprising is that it took him this long to find his way to television because of both his story and his talent. (One of the judges said, “compared to the other people here, regardless of your story, you have a beautiful gift.”) The Telegraph reports that he “auditioned for Australia’s Got Talent last year but did not make it on to the show,” while the AAP reports that he “auditioned for last year’s [X Factor] show but failed to make it through.” View the original article here

Dancing with the Stars’ effort to recruit more high-profile celebrities for its 13th season this fall hit a roadblock, when high-profile, A-lister and The Monkees star Davy Jones rejected the show’s offer to appear. During a press conference yesterday for his upcoming December PBS special called “60s Pop Rock: My Music,” Davy Jones said, as part of one of his long, rambling answers, “If I want to go out there and compete … maybe there was a phone call a couple days ago to go on Dancing with the Stars. If they would have called me three years ago, I would have said yes. What am I dancing against, a boxer and a baseball player? Do you know what I mean? I’m a song and dance man, you know.” I don’t know what that means, really, but I do know that he’s a hilarious character (“I’ve got two hands. I’m a laborer. I fix my own roof.”), prompting me to suggest he should get his own show, and a friend to start soliciting Davy Jones reality show names like this . View the original article here

Brad Womack returns to ABC tonight to try to find love again, and will face the two women he rejected (Jenni Croft and DeAnna Pappas), an event that turned him into a villain but saved The Bachelor by making it relevant and interesting again. The man who producers first approached about fronting the 15th season, The Bachelorette runner-up Chris Lambton, says he rejected the show and a mid-six-figure paycheck because he didn’t like the way he was portrayed—as a nice guy, an interesting twist on a reality TV cast member blaming the editing for making them look worse than they actually were. The Boston Globe profiles Chris , and reports that Chris “didn’t like how ‘The Bachelorette’ had portrayed him, as an always-sweet, good-guy character known to fans as ‘Chris L.’ He felt that ABC focused too much on the death of his mother, Marjorie, who in 2008 succumbed to multiple system atrophy, a neurological disorder similar to ALS. He says the show didn’t focus on his years of teaching in New ...