See how they fall

From 'Wipeout' to 'Two Coreys,' today's reality shows are turning failure into a form of success

VH1's "I Love Money" brings together favorite contestants form the network's other reality shows. (51 minds)

The obstacle course on ABC's "Wipeout," a long, slow celebration of the belly flop, is either the cruelest TV gimmick going or the best antidote for national depression.

Or both. How else, after all, to deal with a sense of doom than to turn spectacular failure into its own form of success?

In other words, it's little surprise that one of the summer's biggest hits - inspired partly by "Fear Factor," partly by the frenzied game shows of Japan - provides cartoon-scale slapstick for human-size good sports. Contestants fall off towering pedestals, careen into padded walls, clamber onto oversized rubber balls and flop ungracefully into muddy water. They roar like gladiators, even when it's hopeless. And it's pretty much hopeless. The games are calibrated for a failure rate of 90 percent.

It's embarrassment on such a grand scale that it has to be metaphorical. This is a bad-news era we find ourselves in, an age of rising gas prices and tumbling stocks and - yes, Phil Gramm - a sort of mental recession. Life in a troubled economy feels like a super-sober version of the show's "Dreadmill" challenge, which plunks contestants on a treadmill wearing scuba-diving flippers, dodging inflatable sea animals until they fall backward into foamy waters.

And on the eve of the Olympics, as we ready for examples of the triumph-over-adversity sports arc, "Wipeout" is a potent, timely contrast. It steals the trappings of a televised sports event, as announcers mimic the tones of play-by-play and a female reporter interviews battered contestants on the sidelines. But it erases most of the human component; we get the names of the "athletes," but generally tag them as types. The old guy. The soccer mom. The mama's boy.

On one level, it's depressing to see so many people lining up for nearly faceless humiliation, a chance to be one of the 24 contenders who is winnowed every week down to a single victor. Is the prize - $50,000 - worth the price? (It's better, at least, than the $1,000 you stand to win for eating the most and puking the least on G4's new contest, "Hurl.")

On the other hand, those "Wipeout" losers always pop up smiling, whether they've been battered by automated boxing gloves or knocked into the water by a spinning mechanical arm. Their weird, cheerful perseverance is its own kind of salve. Not only does it redeem us from the inherent meanness of watching, but it gives us a place to channel our own inadequacies. If the best we can manage in real life is to run in place, then perhaps this is the new, non-Olympian goal: Not winning so much as wiping off the mud and climbing on the course again.

In down times, after all, too much misery is hard to face; we want to empathize, but not necessarily to pity. During the Great Depression, movie attendance rose on the power of lighthearted, escapist entertainment, notes Steven Biel, a Harvard historian of the 1920s and '30s. Preston Sturges's 1941 film "Sullivan's Travels" told the story, Biel says. A movie director dreamed of making a drama of social import (it was called "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?"), but realized he could contribute more to humankind with a comedy.

Today's comic escapism seems especially linked to the notion of failure as success - the aim isn't to celebrate the victory so much as to soften the backslide. Watching the real and figurative pratfalls on "Wipeout" and other reality shows feels more satisfying than watching rich people suffer in the standard class-warfare soaps. Even when we look at the privileged these days, we're willing to be generous, as long as their suffering has a comic element. As payback for the continued entertainment she provides, we let Paris Hilton remain in the spotlight indefinitely.

And we revel in the fact that now, regular folks can take part in the parade, as long as they're willing to subject themselves to the same humiliation. The reality stars on VH1's "I Love Money," the raucous spinoff of the parody dating shows "Flavor of Love," "Rock of Love," and "I Love New York," have figured out the key to continued reality-show casting. It's not simply being good-looking and mildly venal, like Rob and Amber of "Survivor," "The Amazing Race," and a diminishing trail of Rob-and-Amber spinoffs. To get another gig, it now helps to play the unredeemable fool. And the most successful reality stars are wise enough to know the racket. Winning isn't about skill so much as managing your image.

What's most striking about these VH1 contestants, who have convened in a house in Mexico to compete for $250,000, is how professionally they go about looking pathetic. They dutifully take on challenges that are both over-the-top and below-the-belt; grabbing flying bills in a money booth, or dueling on beds suspended over water. They talk up their shortcomings with pride. The aging man dubbed "The Entertainer" flatly admits that he lives with his parents, who show up in flashbacks to henpeck. The blonde known as "Pumkin" announces that she's most famous for spitting on another contestant.

It's nothing personal; they don't even have to share their real names, though their efforts to parlay disgrace into real stardom has its challenges. Lee Marks, the exhibitionist Acton native known on the show as "Mr. Boston," posts a disclaimer on his MySpace page: "I've had multiple girls cancel dates with me because they really think I'm having sex with a different girl every night. Not true! . . . I really am a nice guy."

You get the sense, though, that he's really doing fine, given that his main goal is to stay on TV. And there's something almost-charming about watching him build a career on a foundation of self-loathing. If failure gets you this far, who needs actual success?

In the same way, the backslide has been a boon for Corey Feldman and Corey Haim, stars of the A&E celebreality show "The Two Coreys." Whether by design or by half-sad, half-happy accident, their series, now in its second season, has gotten noticeably darker. When it debuted in the summer of 2007, it was billed as a lighthearted, "Odd-Couple"-style romp. Haim moved in with his old '80s costar Feldman as they tried to resurrect their showbiz careers, largely by scoring cameos in a straight-to-DVD production of "Lost Boys 2."

But by the end of the season, the Coreys had stopped speaking. Haim slipped into drug abuse. And when the second season premiered this summer, the tone was wholly different. On the first day of filming, the two met in a diner and let loose a torrent of woes, ranting and wailing and confessing to being victims of molestation.

It all came with no prompting, says Rob Sharenow, A&E's senior vice president for non-fiction and alternative programming. And the dark mood forced producers to rethink the tone of the show - and to change the opening credit sequence, replacing a cartoonish riff on teen stardom with shots of the aging Coreys against a black background, musing on what could be salvaged. "I just don't know if you have the strength to overcome your own demons," Feldman says.

Still, there remains a touch of lightness to the whole affair, a sense that the Coreys know exactly what to do to make their failures entertaining. ("No one was coerced into doing this show," Sharenow says. "I think they understand that there is some core appeal to them as a team.") Thus, the friends go to a marriage counselor to work out their differences. One cries that "I just burned every bridge I had with Warner Brothers [expletive] Home Video!"

And at one point early in the season, Haim stands on a hotel balcony in LA and yells, "The kid's back, baby!" The camera pulls back to reveal that he's in one of those aging cylindrical towers that screams "dated." It's a symbol of false hopes and dashed expectations, tragic and comic at once. And it will probably win him the best prize of all: renewal.

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to boston.com/viewerdiscretion