Katie's Train Wreck TV: House of Carters
E! Network, Mondays at 9

by Katie Luscombe

 “He needs to start being nicer and have a heart. My heart is so big that for the last week I could feel it pounding through my chest. I've been grabbing my chest because my heart is pounding.”

      - Aaron Carter 

I don't know what it is about trashy blondes and reality TV shows, but they certainly prove to be a winning combination and E! really has a knack for pairing them up.  First, they gave us The Simple Life, then is was The Girls Next Door, and now, in what I hope is the next installment of part of a growing trend, House of Carters.

It all started when Nick Carter, 26, former frontrunner of the late 90s boy band the Backstreet Boys, and his younger brother, fame-mooching tween pop sensation Aaron, 18, decided that all of their years of emotional hardships from their public family baggage would be solved by bringing all five Carter kids to live in one house for the first time in 10 years -- a horrible idea rt if they ever again want to be seen as decent human beings.

The other not-yet-famous Carter siblings include Leslie, 20, an aspiring singer, and Angel. 18, a model, and the only brunette in the house.

Oh yeah, and then there is Bobbie Jean, or "B.J.," 24.  She's the lazy, overly emotional one that one no one cares about.  B.J. has no entertainment industry talents, but is apparently the "chef" of the house.  I'm pretty sure that she can't actually cook, but the rest of the siblings just tell her that she can so they can have some dinner, and so she appears to have her own family niche that includes something other than drunkenly stumbling around the house in ill-fitting sundresses and chain smoking the cigarette she lit on the stove while somehow managing to not set her hair on fire.

Nick, however, is the star of the show.  B.J. and her constant boozy tirade might be my favorite and all, but it kind of defeats her purpose to give her credit where credit is due.  Nick, along with the other kids, is a philosophical wonderchild and is always coming up with really deep, inspiring things to say about life and its hardships. He has the constant need to play Papa Bear, which accomplishes nothing except for pissing off the other siblings.  You could make a great drinking game by taking a sip every time he says, “You don’t respect me!” to Aaron and bullies him into a fistfight, ending in an apologetic, teary-eyed brotherly hug. Sometimes, he gets so worked up about things that I am almost convinced he is doing the show for the sake of his family and not for his career, which we all know is going nowhere fast.

It is a tad depressing that that these two tattood scuzzbags actually used to be heartthrobs.  Where is the teenage Nick I used to pine over as an awkward 11 year-old? Where is the Aaron that two-timed Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff before they started doing coke?

I may have no soul, but I sort of never, ever want the Carters to solve all of the problems that got them into this whole mess in the first place. It’s just not worth it to lose this kind of entertainment value.