Since a manned mission to Mars would, using current technology, take roughly 520 days, both NASA and the ESA have planned simulated missions to test their astronauts' ability to live in tight quarters for extended periods of time. Six NASA astronauts recently completed a 105-day mock mission, and a 520-day simulation is in the works. The ESA, in a joint effort with the Russian Academy of Science's Institute for Medical-Biological Problems, is also planning a 100-day lock-in, offering astronauts who survive the experience a reality show-eque incentive of $20,000 each.

Luke McKinney of the Daily Galaxy thinks the ESA has missed a valuable opportunity to increase interest in the space program by treating its astronauts like island castaways:

With all the recent work by space agencies to raise their profile in the public eye, especially in a world with people asking "Why should we spend money on this when nobody has any?" You literally don't need to add anything - the experiment will be full of cameras anyway, you've got volunteers from three different countries (Russian, Germany and France), you just need to connect it to the TV and it'll start making money. Also, elimination rounds and "voting people off" is a lot more interesting with spaceships and airlocks.

It's a cute idea, but the biggest obstacle the NASA astronauts faced in their 105 days of isolation wasn't back-biting, strategizing, or romantic entanglements — it was boredom. And the sorts of antics that fuel reality television aren't exactly conducive to a successful space mission. Still, perhaps this is the golden opportunity for some enterprising reality TV exec: finding a way to break up the monotony of space travel without sabotaging the mission, and somehow keeping audiences coming back week after week.

Manned Mission-to-Mars Simulation: The Ultimate Reality TV Show [Daily Galaxy]

Running Man — as in the show the movie is about* — is the wrong kind of reality TV. Oh, and there's one more problem, too:

To the best of my knowledge, no one has seriously proposed remaking The Running Man. I made that up to get you to click. Sorry about that. That said, it's surely only a matter of time before someone does start mulling it over, so consider this a preemptive strike.

As I was saying, The Running Man highlights the wrong kind of reality TV. Audiences of the future would never go for it, if they're anything like audiences of today. Because while audiences of today do love Personal Triumph Over Overwhelming Odds (which The Running Man has in spades), as well as Terrible People Doing Awful Things (another of its hallmarks), and while they have no problem with, or even register any awareness of, Misleading Editing on the Part of a Show's Producers (on which the film's plot hinges), one thing they hate is People Getting Killed For Real.

This might not have been so clear in 1987, when The Running Man was released. Back then, it felt like half of primetime — Hunter, The Equalizer, Simon & Simon, Crockett and Tubbs, the Scarecrow, even Mrs. King — was packing steel, and if you followed that trend to its logical conclusion, it was easy to imagine widespread disregard for human life spilling over into the real world, too. Tack the TV listings to the wall today, though, and toss a dart at them, and odds are far better you'll hit a show about making soufflés than shooting bad guys. Heck, even the one faintly (and I stress that) sinister reality program, Survivor — well, is that still on? It is, apparently, but ratings-wise, it's no Dancing With the Stars.

So, no. If the most intense conflict that most viewers can handle now involves a group of people known as "cheftestants," we're not going to tune in to watch anyone get gunned down in cold blood, not any time soon. At the same time, it seems equally unlikely that Western civilization is going to stop declining. Here, then, are a few of the not so violent, but still sublimely asinine reality series I'm sure we'll see before God or His servant, the four-foot Cthulhu worm, are kind enough to put us out of our misery:

Scoring With the Spur Posse. What two elements of reality TV are more proven successes than (1) bringing back people who were famous a decade ago but aren't anymore and (2) sex? This show combines both.

Up for grabs is membership in that early-'90s version of the Rat Pack, the (reunited) Spur Posse. As one of the competing dudes, all you have to do is score more points than the other contestants by sleeping with more girls. Potential challenges include the Three-Way Challenge, the Friend's Sister Challenge, and the Convincing Her to Have Sex With All the Guys in the Posse, Too Challenge. Bonus points for cockblocking an opponent, and even more bonus points if you manage to score with the girl you blocked him from, bro. The second season, in which half the contestants are female (yes, they're trying to have sex with girls too), sees unprecedented ratings, and the unfiltered extra material available online earns record traffic for Spike TV's website.

Make Me a Topless Dancer. Are you pretty, but self-aware enough to know you're never going to be anywhere's next top model? Do you have too much dignity to be a Pussycat Doll? This is your show.

I can't think of any celebrity strippers, so who will host it? Probably Lindsay Lohan. The challenges here should be fairly clear-cut: learning to work the pole, selling the most private dances, smoothly removing a customer's belt and then fastening it around his neck like a collar, before leading him on all fours around the stage while spanking him. The heartbreak at the end of each episode, though, when one contestant is forced to turn in her Lucite platform heels to Lindsay and then is shown crying in the confessional booth about how she'll never be able to pay for med school now — devastating.

Flame Wars. Take ten Internet users. Stick them together in a house somewhere with a gorgeous climate and all sorts of places to visit and fun activities to take part in nearby.

Then give the contestants each their own computer and have teams employed by the producers (these teams will be posing as single, anonymous individuals, of course) start arguments with them on random message boards, about pretty much anything. Never let the contestants get the last word in, no matter how late it gets or how long the fight goes on. The first of the ten with the presence of mind and willpower to leave the house for at least an hour (and then not get sucked back into the fight when they come back) wins.

I Want to Be on a Reality Show. This, I think, is the inevitable omega point of reality television. As it currently stands, thousands — shit, possibly millions of people desperately want to be on reality shows so that they can be hairstylists, or fashion designers, or dancers, or comedians, or lose weight, or just get married.**

There's only so much TV time, though, so there'll have to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. Or rather, the chaff from the even chaffier. The winner gets to be on the program of his or her choice. The losers...

The losers get hunted by opera-singing Stalkers who shoot lightning at them, actually. America might never be ready to watch that happen on TV, but that doesn't mean we can't do it without the cameras.

Commenter Moff's real name is Josh Wimmer, and like Buzzsaw, he had to split. He can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

*I should probably note here that this essay is dealing exclusively with the movie version of The Running Man, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yes, I know the movie was a book first. Yes, it is a very good book. Yes, an actual movie version of the book would be awesome. You should write a blog post about it.

**In fairness, this was how I met Mrs. Moff, although the show in question was The Ultimate Fighter.

The craziness goes through the entire season, it's pretty amazing. This week the girls did the grind all over Michael Rooker as a vampire, giving old man Rook a happy vampire lap dance and making me very uncomfortable. But it was worth it just to see the look on their faces when he walked out — they had no CLUE who this man was.

Another classic Scream Queen moment besides the constant bitching and moaning is when they all worked together to create a campy horror trailer in which the brown haired girl gets naked in front of that guy from Gilmore Girls (who also happens to be Gunn's brother) and talks like a man when she says "vagina."

If you're not watching this show, you're missing out. It's terrible, horrible trash, but it's amazing to realize that a group of guys that throw buckets of blood on people for a living look tame next to these women. I have no idea how these girls haven't been run out of town with the stuff that comes out of their lips.

In the last few years, psychiatrists began documenting cases of patients who reported a belief that they were being filmed for television entertainment. The patients differed in their experiences, but all believed that their lives had somehow been selected to participate in a show without their consent:

One man showed up at a federal building, asking for release from the reality show he was sure was being made of his life. Another was convinced his every move was secretly being filmed for a TV contest. A third believed everything - the news, his psychiatrists, the drugs they prescribed - was part of a phony, stage-set world with him as the involuntary star, like the 1998 movie "The Truman Show."

Although the syndrome, which some psychiatrists have unofficially named after the film, is related to classic paranoid and grandiose delusions, the pervasiveness of reality television in our culture may reinforce the delusion in many patients. Mental health professionals note that, when patients see shows featuring hidden cameras and invasive footage, it seems plausible that they could be on television themselves:

That's not to say reality shows make healthy people delusional, "but, at the very least, it seems possible to me that people who would become ill are becoming ill quicker or in a different way," Ian Gold [a philosophy and psychology professor at McGill University] said.

While many sufferers are intensely disturbed by their delusions (one physician reported a patient who threatened to kill himself if he couldn’t drop out of his imagined reality show), some find the idea of being on television appealing. The imagined total invasion of their privacy may be distressing, but a few actually take pride their supposed celebrity status.

[via Associated Press]

In the first episode, we watch the oddly mundane reactions that our reality TV crew have as the zombie plague starts spreading. At first, they're just seeing it broadcast on the news as "rioting," and because they're in their studio bubble nobody is quite sure what's going on. The main thing they're worried about is that their giant Big Brother Reunion special might get bumped for the news. There are a series of incredibly funny and dark scenes where we watch news reports about deadly mayhem spreading, and zombies start slaughtering people in the crowd outside the studio, while the clueless producers and hosts wail about getting airtime.

Once the zombies take over, though, the show really starts to move. Not because the zombies are fast — which they are, 28 Days Later-style — but because we zero in on what the point of this angry little series really is. Especially when the only people left alive are the reality TV stars on the locked set, slowly melting down as they realize Big Brother isn't watching them anymore. The only ones watching are growling, gore-soaked zombies. Fittingly, reality TV has become ground zero of the zombie invasion, as well as the one place that's already so zombified that it can withstand the rotting onslaught.

Written by Charlie Brooker, who worked on the utterly mental comedy series Brasseye, Dead Set is both genuinely terrifying as well as spot-on satire. It's also produced by E4, makers of Big Brother, who loaned out the sets for the guts-spattering. That the creators were able to use the Big Brother sets turns Dead Set into as much of a cogent allegory as George Romero's late 1970s Dawn of the Dead, famously filmed in a giant suburban mall.

Come to get a vicarious thrill out of watching vacuous reality TV starlets eaten alive, and stay for a social satire of media cannibal culture that cuts right to the bone.

Dead Set's five episodes will air nightly at 10 PM all this week in the UK. If you are in the UK, you can catch past episodes streaming on the show's website. Those of us who live elsewhere will have to wait for the DVD or watch it on the intertubes.

Official Dead Set Site [via E4]

Since I'm pretty sure that zombies don't exist yet, the show will most likely be fake (most likely) although it will probably make more sense than The Mole. America's Zombie is paired with VH1's new reality horror show, Scream Queens. The pilot for the show will begin shooting in June this year. Let's hope it's a success so we can find out what happens when zombies stop being polite and start eating brains.

[Shock Till You Drop]

While plenty of studies have already shown that friendships have become much more casual in an era of "friending" random people on MySpace, this new study takes that idea further. Its authors describe how reality TV and social networking sites feed into each other, creating a world where many people think of themselves and their friends less as real people and more like iconic celebrities. The researchers call this a shift toward having "mediated" selves, as if all social interactions take place via the media.

According to PhysOrg:

These heavy [reality TV] viewers also produced a significantly larger number of mediated selves and had a greater intimacy toward, and urge to interact with, the mediated social images of others.

All of these, say the researchers, are commonly considered celebrity behaviors . . .

"Promiscuous frienders may be reproducing the fame-seeking behavior that is modeled by reality TV characters," [researcher Michael] Stefanone says, adding that these behaviors are believed to reflect the systematic processing of messages and behaviors modeled within the [reality TV] genre.

But if you regard this study as picking up on an early stage in a greater social change regarding friendship, it's easy to see how the good kind of real-life promiscuity might be involved too. If we all begin to see ourselves as mediated people, as celebrities, we're less likely to need intimacy before taking the plunge into the sack. We'll imagine that we "know" somebody already because we've seen them online and so we don't need all those "take me out to coffee" preliminaries before getting busy.

We're All Stars Now [via PhysOrg]

Also, you can check out a PDF of the study.

Not only has he directed the upcoming The Mist, but he's also been a tad busy writing Fahrenheit 451, which he plans to direct, and doing things like penning part of Indiana Jones IV and producing the Andromeda Strain miniseries. He also some time last year to direct two episodes of The Shield, so when is he going to find the time, and what does he have planned for The Long Walk?

According to Darabont, it's a project that's been on the back burner for awhile, but so was The Mist, and you can go see that in theaters in just a few days. It sounds like his back burner is a bit more active than most people's furnaces.