Over the Christmas break in New York, I did one of my favorite things in the whole world: I watched a lot of TV in my pajamas without moving for 24 hours. Even though I love Europe, I crave American pop culture whenever I’m back in the US.

So I spent a lot of time watching MTV, VH1, Bravo and a few other cable stations. With the remote in my hand, I came to appreciate just how much reality TV dominates US air waves, and with good reason: You can’t make this stuff up! Following in reverse order is a list of my top 5 US reality shows. If you can buy them on iTunes or find them on emule, I highly recommend that you do so. A lot of them are now available via streaming directly from the various channels’ websites, so you can get them for free if you are willing to deal with a few commercial breaks.

5. The Real Housewives of Orange County: When I lived in the US, Bravo was the high-brow arts and entertainment channel focused on wealthy people who love the arts. But after the success of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” (five gay guys help a clueless straight guy become “fabulous!“), it’s still focused on wealthy people, but with a generous bit of reality trash thrown in. Hence, “The Real Housewives of Orange County”. Orange County is one of the richest neighborhoods in the US state of California, so the show focuses on pretty silly rich woman looking for love and/or more money. It’s quite literally meant to be the reality TV version of Desperate Housewives, but after three seasons, the formula is getting a little bit tired. Reality TV begins to suck when it’s clear that the participants are exaggerating their reactions or, even worse, acting. I like seeing crazy people being crazy. Fake celebrities acting crazy to maintain their fake celebrity is not quite as interesting.

4. Project Runway: A simple formula now in its 4th season. A beautiful and appealing hostess who doesn’t get in the way (Heidi Klum). Successful designers as judges, including Donna Karan, Michael Kors and Nina Garcia (Elle magazine fashion director). And 15 young designers representing various demographics. The three finalists get to present their work on the runway at New York Fashion Week before real celebrities and the international fashion scene. The winner also gets an editorial spread in ELLE and $100.000 to start his/her own fashion line. So it’s a real competition with a meaningful prize for people whose main goal in life is larger than being a reality TV star. That realness is what makes the competition intense. And the fact that fashionistas tend to be bitchy and catty also help to keep the real-life drama factor way up! (Full episodes are available on Bravo’s website. Below is just an excerpt that I found on YouTube.)

3. Made: It’s MTV’s way of convincing teenagers that dreams really do come true if they work hard enough. The show tends to focus on issues important to teenagers but ripe with comedic possibilities — for example, the fat girl who wants to be prom queen, the Jewish nerdy kid who wants to rap like Jay Z, the cheerleader whose secret dream is to be like the skater kids, etc. Each kid who wants to get “made” reflects a high school prototype and is assigned a “trainer” who represents exactly what the teenager wants to become - a mentor/role model to show that the goal is possible. And the entire episode shows how no one believes that the kid can do it, how the kid also doubts herself, how the trainer kicks her ass, how she starts to falter before eventually fulfilling her goal through hard work and determination. It’s a great piece of propaganda to inspire kids to work hard and keep believing in themselves. And it’s funny along the way watching the nerds, cheerleaders and fat kids make fools of themselves in their attempts to fulfill their dreams. (MTV streams the full episodes from their website.)

2. A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila: No one in the offline world had any freaking clue who this girl was before this show. My sister had watched every episode and had read about Tila’s private life, but she had no clue why or how Tila was a “celebrity” with her own show, or why MTV had chosen to make her the host of their New Year’s Eve special. After a little bit of research on Wikipedia, I discovered that Tila is a former nude model whose claim to fame is that she has 2 million friends on MySpace. That’s it, folks. That bit of notoriety got her a recording contract and a television show on MTV. Now everyone knows her name. Fame. And the show itself added fuel to her whole Vietnamese Internet sex kitten image (the mix of subservience and sex goddess included) when Tila announced during the first episode that she was bisexual. So the twist on the traditional reality dating show format is that 16 boys and 16 girls had to convince her: i) which gender she preferred; and ii) of that gender, why he/she was the best candidate. She French-kissed and made out with pretty much each of the guys and girls, all the while claiming that she was really looking for love. She gave one finalist’s grandmother a lap dance, and then did a pole dance before the two finalists’ parents. She did this all without seeming like a slut, just like a nice girl looking to have “innocent” fun. The Vietnamese bisexual Britney Spears. Riveting TV indeed. (Full episodes are available on MTV online.)

1. I Love New York: For the record, it’s almost embarrassing to admit that I love this show. It is the most popular reality TV show in the US. The original idea was that Flavor Flav, one of the ugliest guys ever created and a former rapper with Public Enemy who was borderline homeless before the show began, would give a group of “lucky” women the chance to fight over him and possibly become his bride. The show was a runaway hit, as the girls were straight-up ghetto. These women were definitely not ladies, and their ghetto trashiness made help make the show a huge hit. Tila Tequila’s show is almost a direct copy of Flavor of Love, except with a bisexual sex-kitten twist. New York is the star of this spin-off, and she is hilarious. She is always smoking her Newports (cigarettes arguably found only in the inner cities of New York), has big fake breasts and is absolutely crazy. But she’s entertaining. There’s absolutely no way to get bored when watching I Love New York. It’s obviously somewhat staged (did anyone really think New York would end up with a “small person” who didn’t even reach her left breast?), but there’s enough real craziness there to make it worth it.

I love Hollywood movies. To me, movies are a country’s modern-day parables. A good movie teaches me as much as about myself as the Sunday School lessons that I learned growing up. When a movie touches you, it’s because it reflects a larger truth or a more universal yearning that a talented director and group of actors have captured. And it seems that the current focus of modern Hollywood is on helping its audience — particularly, the white American male — understand his place in a modern world in which life is tough, and sexuality, gender, race and religion are not quite as simple as they once were.

Being American, I guess it was inevitable that I’d love Hollywood. When I was younger, I always thought I’d end up working there. Not as an actor, but as an entertainment lawyer. That was until I went to Los Angeles for a summer to work in Sullivan & Cromwell’s (a major Wall Street law firm) LA office and realised that even though Hollywood movies can move the spirit, LA itself is spiritually dead. Your value is determined by your proximity to A-list stars, many of whom are the products of plastic surgery and a loss of perspective. Not at all like the heroes that they play in the movies.

But I still love Hollywood movies, even though my European friends make fun of me for it. Many of them refuse to go to the movies with me.

So this past week — the middle of August is one of the deadest periods in Spain’s calendar — I’ve been watching a lot of them, sometimes by myself. Here’s a partial list of what I’ve been watching.

Blood Diamond (on DVD): Great movie. Leonardo DiCaprio is the modern-day prodigal son, an amoral, self-centred diamond smuggler who learns how to love from an African fisherman who will do anything to reunite his family, which has been torn apart by the Civil War in Sierra Leone. The rebels are atrocious, cutting off people’s hands to keep them from voting, brainwashing children to convert them into a brutal child-army and enslaving able-bodied men to work in diamond fields. It’s the sale of diamonds as wedding rings to European and American women that funds the rebels’ efforts, but the rest of the world ignores the issue until DiCaprio, initially lured by the desire to sell a priceless pink diamond, helps a beautiful journalist to get the information that she needs to write the story that will embarrass world leaders into initiating reform.

Take-home messages:

• even if you’ve been a total shit all of your life, it’s never to late to reform and do the right thing; and
• Africa (thanks to Angelina Jolie, Madonna, DiCaprio, Forrest Whitaker, Bono and a few other stars) is the new focus of left-leaning actors who want to use their star power to make the world a better place.

The Last King of Scotland (on DVD): Forrest Whitaker won the Oscar for this one, beating out Leonardo DiCaprio, who was nominated for Blood Diamond. He humanizes Idi Amin, the strange and brutal Ugandan dictator. But this isn’t his story. It’s really about Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, a fictional, young Scottish doctor who travels to Uganda to help the poor but ends up becoming Amin’s personal physician. Garrigan has just graduated from medical school, but he feels that he’s too much in his father’s shadow. (His father is also a doctor.) So he takes out the globe, spins it around and decides to go to wherever his finger stops it. He ends up going to the second place, because (if I remember correctly) the first place was Canada, and he vetoed fate’s first decision. Although the lead character here isn’t American, the issue is the same — a young man trying to find his place in the world, getting attracted by the glitz and glamour associated with an African dictator (a seemingly counter-intuitive proposition), and then eventually realizing that he needs to do the right thing — which is getting out the story of African atrocities to his primarily white European and American colleagues.

It’s interesting to note that in both “African” movies, the central contribution of the white protagonists is to give up personal gain and spread the message about the atrocities taking place in Africa. This is the principal message that Hollywood wants to send to its main audience, and I think that it’s a good one.

That being said, the more politically incorrect and ultimately more important question of why black Africans seem to have a penchant for savagely mutilating and enslaving each other is neatly avoided. After all, the take-home message is meant for the movie’s target audience, which is white (i.e., not black African), and no Hollywood exec wants to be accused of racism by highlighting delicate racial issues.

The Bourne Ultimatum (in theatres): Loved it. It was the best of the three Bourne movies so far. I loved the first one, liked the second one, and was blown away by the third one. We’re interested in Bourne, because he is the best. He looks like a normal guy (it’s Matt Damon), but he has supernatural physical abilities and he never gives up on his mission. In search of his identity and his humanity, it’s a metaphor for the lost sense of self suffered by the modern male in a metro-sexual, pop-psychology world. Men are taught to be strong and unemotional, but there’s a more recent trend to become more emotionally in touch with who we are and who we love. The interest in spies reflects our continuing concern with fighting terrorism, except that in America right now there’s a general distrust of the government (Hello GWB), and so the evil that Bourne fights against is less about foreign terrorists and more about the bad guys within the Department of Defense.

Take-home message: Life is a bitch and will throw you lots of obstacles, but if you kick ass in everything you do and never give up, you’ll survive. And by the way, try not to forget who you really are, and remember to love.

Regardless of the genre, American movies tend to be idealistic and moralistic, like Americans themselves. European movies tend to be more “realistic” and less morally judgmental. Life is tough for its protagonists as well, but there usually isn’t the stereotypically happy Hollywood ending, and the characters tend to be more emotionally complex.

I can see why some of my friends make fun of Hollywood movies.

But at the end of the day, it’s kind of like religion. It might not always make sense, and some of the stories might seem laughable, but it’s better to believe in something than to be cynical and not believe in anything at all.

Life really is tough. That much, everyone seems to agree on.

But hope and cheesy ideals sometimes help to make it a little more bearable.

As is true of most good Americans, I love cheesy American pop culture and entertainment. When I first came to Spain, I thought it was so weird that most Spanish families only had one television set for the whole family, and in fact, a lot of families didn’t have cable/satellite tv. In my humble, middle-class family, each of us had our own television set with our own cable box. And eventually we each got our own VCRs as well. My parents reasoned that it was the best way to avoid fights over which program to watch. Family time has a very different meaning in the US.

So when I first came to Europe, one of the things that I missed most was being able to keep up with my favorite television shows, and in general, with US pop culture. I left the US for London in 2000, when Sex and the City was at the height of its popularity, and a lot of my friends would make references that I could no longer appreciate. I started to feel like an outsider (apart from the whole Bush-winning-the-election thing) and was annoyed that British TV was about 2 seasons behind. Then, of course, there were shows like the Oscars, the Grammy’s, the BET Awards and the American Music Awards on which my favorite recording artists would appear and/or perform.

My friends and family would send me “care-packages” full of magazines and video cassettes on which they’d recorded all of my favorite series, but it was an imperfect solution. I’d often have to pray that the US video format would be compatible with my UK VCR. Sometimes it was. Often it wasn’t. And then there was always something that they couldn’t record for whatever reason. My friends would be talking about the performances, shows and appearances, and I would feel like a stranger in my own country. How many Europeans can appreciate who Oprah Winfrey is, or that most people my age grew up watching her on TV, or that Tom Cruise, Beyonce and Julia Roberts regularly go to her show to chat about their lives, and that everyone talks about it the day after?

I couldn’t ask my family and friends to record every American program and send it me, could I?

So it was great when I found out that I could read most of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal online. They keep me pretty up-to-date about politics, business and arts in the US. Then there are blogs like “Young, Black and Fabulous” and TMZ that tell me all about the trouble that my favorite celebrities are getting into, and give me the inside scoop into what is really going on in their deliciously troubled lives. Then I can go to Billboard.com and get a sense as to the music that’s popular in the US. I can then use a combination of iTunes and alternative downloading services to create CDs and play the music on my iPod (when it’s working).

That’s cool in terms of music and news generally, but until very recently, I hadn’t been able to see performances or television shows that I like. MTV and BET now show some of their awards shows and music videos online. It’s great, because now I don’t even have to watch all of the boring stuff like the speeches and artist introductions. I can go directly to the performers that I like and watch them perform.

YouTube was great for a while, but then Viacom and other media groups started threatening to sue them over copyrighted content. YouTube was cute as a start-up, but once Google got involved, the traditional media companies realised that a lot of money was at stake and that they didn’t want Google to make money off of their content. All of a sudden everyone was creating its own video player (and threatening to sue YouTube/Google if favourable revenue-sharing agreements could not be reached).

Too bad for YouTube, but better for me, because when I went home last Xmas, I discovered that ABC (one of the main television stations in the US) now allows me to watch some of my favorite television programs like Desperate Housewives and Heroes via their website. So when I am in the US, one of the first things that I do is watch all of my favorite shows via the Internet. One of the primary disadvantages of being an expat — alienation from your home culture — had found a technological solution. (Throw in cheap SKYPE calls, messenger and email, and the problem almost disappears.) Most of these video-on-demand services offered by the television networks aren’t available outside of the US and don’t cover the full repertoire of shows, which means that I have to rely on Canal+, which does a good job but isn’t always up-to-date (and shows lots of repeats).

This background info explains why it was great to read in the Wall Street Journal that the BBC launched its “iPlayer” (the name for its video-on-demand service) last week, which goes one step beyond what the US companies are willing to do. Or as the WSJ puts it, the BBC has “made most of its shows available to download over the Internet, free of charge, in what may be the boldest online broadcasting push by a large television network.” This means that people who enjoy British TV programs can catch some of their favorite shows online, free of charge, subject only to having to watch a couple of commercials. They can watch TV at their convenience, wherever they are, whenever they want.

I was also happy to see the BBC’s cautious approach to launching its iPlayer (click on the link and look under “videos”). The BBC has been testing the product since late 2006 with about 15,000 volunteers and notes that they are in no rush to get too many viewers right now, because they still want to focus on solving any early technical problems that might have resulted from a more general launch. This conservative approach to launching has resulted in early positive reviews, with London’s Evening Standard newspaper concluding that the iPlayer’s video quality was “surprisingly good” (according to the WSJ).

As I have stated consistently on my blog, I firmly believe that companies should not launch their products until the can proudly stand behind them. If the product doesn’t convince you, how will it convince a busy consumer already using other services?

Anyway, it was also interesting to see the BBC’s rationale for this move. Most major media players are losing customers (and revenues), as newspaper readers and television viewers move online, or away from the traditional offline formats. The Internet is completely disrupting traditional media businesses, from newspapers, to television, to music, to movies, and the traditional media companies with a little bit of vision (or hindsight, as the case might be) are reacting to their declining audiences by increasing their online presence. Mark Thompson, BBC’s director general, explains the BBC’s rationale much better than I can: “It is at least as big a redefinition of what TV can be, what radio can be, and what broadcasting can be, as colour Television was 40 years ago.”

As anyone who reads this blog must know, I am a huge Beyonce fan. I think that she has an amazing work ethic wrapped up in a superstar package (extremely beautiful, great voice, great performer, wonderful at transmitting emotions while performing and singing, etc.) while still being humble and accessible. And, of course, she is famous for doing complicated dance routines in superhigh stilleto heels.

Nonetheless, even I had to admit that I found this video — and the analysis on CNN — hilarious, not because I like seeing my favorite star fall, but because I think it’s amazing the way that she got up and just kept on giving an amazing performance. No break. No pause. No time to check for injuries. No obvious embarrassment. Single-minded focus and determination. The show must go on, literally.

The best review of the fall that I’ve read is on a blog that I read religiously called “Young, Black and Fabulous”, which tracks all that’s happening in black entertainment in the US. I’ll have to translate the post from black slang into plain English, but the best part of the review is the following: “I’m just trippin’ that this chick bounced the hell back up like her weave was an invincible air mattress and kept the party goin’ without missing nan a beat. Her recovery game is on point. I know that mess had her dazed and confused…. Concert goers say she had a bloody knee and sat down to do the next set, but continued the rest of the concert full out. . . . These other chicks in the game still aint got nothing on B. ”

Translation into plain English: “I’m so surprised (tripping) that this young lady was able to recover so quickly from her fall as if her fake hair extensions were some sort of invincible air mattress that softened her fall. She continued to dance and party without missing a beat. Her ability to recover is amazing. I know that the fall left her stunned. . . . Concert goers say she had a bloody knee and sat down to do the next set, but otherwise she continued to perform at the highest level as if nothing had happened. . . . Beyonce is still the best pop diva out there.”

It reminds me a lot of my favorite episode of “Sex and the City”, “The Real Me”, when Carrie gets invited to be a model for a day, and she falls flat on her face in front of everyone because she’s wearing “hooker heels” and had been drinking too much Veuve Cliquot to calm her nerves. She gets up in front of the entire audience only dressed in jeweled underwear trying to give her best sexy looks and then takes a huge fall. For a moment, you see her trying to decide if she will just get off the stage and drink her sorrows away, or finish the show. She decides to finish the show, and the audience goes wild for her obvious courage and determination. And then she ends up being the star of the fashion show because of her chutzpah.

The voice-over then sums up her motivation. Carrie had wanted to be a model, but her stumble proved that she was just a normal person. Someone real. And “when real people fall, they get right back up and keep on walking”. I think Beyonce, a big Sex and the City fan, has obviously taken this message to heart.

I’ve been getting into a new series called Heroes that’s getting a lot of attention in the US. It’s like XMen but without the costumes. The idea is that these mutants are a bunch of ordinary people that discover that they have superpowers, and they need to get together to save the world from destruction.

One of my favourite characters is Peter Petrelli. When you meet him, you realise that he’s the kind of guy that puts everyone else’s needs before his. He works as a male nurse and seems focused on helping anyone who needs him. His older brother, Nathan, is the over-achieving, selfish, polished politician who their mother describes as the alpha male. Whereas Peter seems like he can hardly pay the bills, Nathan can literally fly.

At one point in an early episode, Nathan and Peter’s mother tells Peter that he needs to stop letting Nathan walk all over him, and that, in general, he needs to start putting himself first. That if he doesn’t take care of himself, no one else will. That he needs to be a little bit more selfish. In her words, “when you put everyone else first, you end up last.” It’s an interesting variation of the common “good guys finish last” theme.

Being a comic book story where the “loser” guys always have alter egos that are powerful superheroes, we soon discover that Peter is, in fact, one of the most powerful mutants on the show. He’s an empath, which means that his profound empathetic abilities allow him to coopt the powers of any other superhero just by thinking about the person. And the show hints that at some point Peter becomes the leader of the world, or at least of the mutants–kind of like Charles Xavier in the Xmen.

The show is really cool, but the line stuck with me, as last week we were negotiating with a business angel about his entry into the shareholding of Goa Internet Services. At the same time, my business partner and I had to make some important strategic decisions about the company’s future. And in such situations I always find myself wondering what’s the best strategy: Cold-blooded lawyer? Or friendly salesperson? Good cop? Or bad cop? Peter? Or Nathan? A lot depends on your negotiating power in a particular situation and on who the other party is. Probably a mixture of the two strategies is the best bet. The key is that you have to be able to read the situation. You need to be a bit of an empath, I suppose.

But if there’s anything I’ve learned over the last three years of being an entrepreneur it’s that, in business, you need to put yourself and your business first. It’s great if we can all end up friends, but that can’t be the priority. A business is not a social club. Sometimes you need to fire really nice people. Sometimes business partners end up not being complementary. And sometimes your best/most powerful ally is someone with whom you’d rather not have dinner. Learn to compromise, but never forget that your utmost priority is to protect your interests. Because you can be sure that the other party–whether your employees, your business partners, the banks, your investors, the government,etc.–are all putting their interests ahead of yours. And a lot of “friends” tend to disappear once the going gets tough. Good guys might turn out to be superheroes in comic books, but the real world is a bit more complicated. Be a little bit selfish. Think about yourself and your business first. And get it in writing if you can.