Kicking Off Our Regrets Of The Decade: 'Skating With Celebrities'

I am not really a believer in "guilty pleasures," in the sense that if a thing is pleasant, I don't see why you'd feel guilty (unless someone is kicking a dog or something, in which case it is the fact that you find it a "pleasure" that is the problem). But that doesn't mean I never have regrets. And as the oughts or zeroes or what have you draw to a close*, I thought I'd take a look at some of my greatest regrets of the decade, beginning with the 2006 competitive reality show Skating With Celebrities.

In fairness to myself, I watched Skating With Celebrities because I had a writing assignment. So technically, it was for work. But when I look back over the last ten years and think, "That will not mark a high point in our cultural history," I think of this show. Perhaps I cannot regret personally something I was being paid to absorb, but I regret it for all of us. I regret it for mankind.

Bruce Jenner gets into uniform, after the jump.

 

The sole season of Skating With Celebrities aired on Fox in 2006. You would be forgiven for not knowing this, since nearly all traces of it have been vaporized. Unlike the vast majority of similar silly shows, this one is very hard to locate on YouTube. For the moment, here's one of the few clips I've been able to scrape up, featuring Jillian Barberie of Good Day L.A. (and football broadcasts, and lots of other things) with her partner, professional skater John Zimmerman.

Now, the problem with showing you that clip is that Barberie was the ringer. She was the good skater in a field that included Todd Bridges, Dave Coulier, Kristy Swanson, Debbie (now "Deborah") Gibson, and — best of all — Bruce Jenner.

The highlight was a moment in which Bruce Jenner and his partner — Tai Babilonia! — performed an extremely literal interpretation of "Up Where We Belong," the love theme from An Officer And A Gentleman. As you establish this image in your head, I want you to think of Bruce Jenner, not really much of a skater, who talked constantly about his bad knees, in a figure skating costume that took the form of a white Navy uniform. After a significant amount of hunting, I did find one photo proving that I did not conjure this performance in a fevered haze.

Just for fun, let's throw in the fact that the winning couple, Swanson and her partner Lloyd Eisler, turned out to be having an affair, despite his extremely pregnant wife. Swanson and Eisler are now married, but it seems oddly fitting that this show should have a gross tabloid component, in case the sight of Dave Coulier and Nancy Kerrigan skating around to "Get Up Off That Thing" wasn't enough to make you surrender your humanity membership card.

It's a wonder it only lasted one season, isn't it?

*Before you e-mail me, let us clear this up: The period from 2000-2009 is a decade. A decade is a period of ten years. If I said, "the 201st decade of the Gregorian Calendar," then we could get into a charmingly nerdy argument about how there was no Year Zero, so the first decade went from 1 to 10, and the second decade went from 11 to 20, and so on and so forth, so the 201st decade would go from 2001 to 2010. A decade, however, is any period of ten years — ask the dictionary — and the decade to which we refer at this point is the ten-year period from 2000 to 2009. I know you will e-mail me anyway. You know who you are. But consider this your warning that it will change nothing.