While Anna wraps up her redistricting brouhaha recap from last night, start your day with this: yet another story comparing Dallas to New Jersey when it comes to our burgeoning reality TV scene. The Los Angeles Times, taking note of such shows as Bravo's Most Eligible Dallas and Style's Big Rich Texas and Logo's last-night-premiering The A-List: Dallas, went there in August. But this one's special: It's actually from New Jersey -- The Star-Ledger of Newark, to be precise, whose Amy Kuperinsky goes to great lengths to compare and contrast Most Eligible's Courtney Kerr (you say so) to Jersey Shore's Snooki. And, of course, Dallas to Joizy.
Christopher Willey, head of East Coast development and production for Logo, says that until now, Texas has been "underexploited" when it comes to reality TV. He attributes the delay to the fact that it's more expensive to haul a production crew to Texas than to set a show close to New York or Los Angeles, where most television production companies are based.Which doesn't even take into account the next-gen Dallas, which starts shooting here any day now, much to the delight of Brits. After the jump, the cast of A-List Dallas -- which debuted last night amongst allegations that one of the cast members faked a "gay-on-gay hate crime" -- plays Dallas trivia. Awesome.
"The people we found in Dallas were fresh," says Willey, who adds the network also considered Austin as a possible location.
"Texas in particular has its own mentality," he says. "They don't think of themselves as Southerners as much as they think of themselves as Texans."
Hmmm, sounds familiar. After all -- are we Northerners, or are we Jerseyans? Exactly.