'Whorified' Turns Teases and Tricks into Competition

Considering America’s love affair with fame-whores, actresses playing whores, scandals involving whores, and reality television, it’s curious that it took so long for a reality show featuring whores in competition (excluding VH1 celebrity dating shows, HBO’s Cat House, and Playboy channel dating shows) to come to comedic fruition.

This clever satire is the sliced bread of the reality world – some ideas are so appropriate, so seemingly obvious, that you’ll wonder why it took so long for comedy writers to pen it.

Whorified! The Search For America’s Next Top Whore is a parody which bills itself as an “edgy send-up of reality TV and its often irresponsible-seeming creators,” and (mostly) delivers on its promise. The premiere episodes are stellar, though competing story lines and angry characters somehow lessen the laughs as the subsequent episodes progress. Still, the series is indeed edgier and more cleverly written than most parodies of its kind.

Whorified is quick witted, lovingly ironic, and fast-paced. Rather than casting stones solely on the fame hungry contestants, this web series goes the extra mile by satirizing reality show producers and their seemingly ethics-free orbit. Ann Marie Lindbloom and Jeff Venables – creators of last year’s Two Peas In A Pod – wrote, directed, and produced the series.

Episodes one and two provide the biggest laughs and the most satisfying satire. “The Rules of the Game ” (episode one) begins with a production meeting between creators and crew and swiftly transitions to the hilarious audition videos. It’s pitch perfect, cunning, and uncomfortably funny. The contestants are the requisite fame hungry, naive sheep, and the producers the soul-less, tacky, hungry wolves. The producers’ utter lack of shame coupled with their disdain for their own crew and contestants is irresistible. Not only do these producers lack any moral code, they’re also unburdened with appearing even mildly pleasant.

In “There’s No Place Like Ho-Home ” (episode two) we meet the booming voiced host as he introduces the ladies to the decrepit home they’ll be living in while the intro to Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous plays. These women came to Hollywood for fame and fortune, but living in a run down whore-house is apparently far less tolerable than selling their bodies. Another highlight of episode two are their reactions to the cheap prizes they may receive if they win the show.

Frustratingly, after that, the narratives become less engaging and the laughs not as rampant, as competing story lines splinter off. But it’s not for lack of effort. Though the writing remains relatively strong, the reality show genre proves difficult to exaggerate for continual comedic effect. Pimps, johns, special guest stars, and TV development execs are skewered mercilessly as the series depicts their desperation, which sadly doesn’t seem markedly different from that of actual reality shows. There are the requisite screaming matches, cat fights, desperate pleas, bullies, cheating contestants, and compromised morals, elements which regularly occur on a “normal” reality shows.

Though Whorified struggles at times to top “real” reality whores, it still manages to serve up an explicit and cruel-ly funny look at why sex sells.

Check it out at Whorified.com.