Review: VH1's 'Twinning'

There are a lot of primetime time slots to program every week and with a couple of hundred channels to fill, there are bound to be a lot of television shows that have a striking resemblance to programs already on the air. And that's fine in theory. Not every new TV show needs to be groundbreaking. Particularly in the genre of competition programs, where there are just so many ways you can have contestants fight it out to win the season. But to be creatively successful, any new program needs to at least tweak the familiar formula a bit. Surprise the viewers with a new twist or at least cast contestants that fall outside the normal choices for a cable competition reality series.

One show that opted to be a Frankenstein-like mash-up of every bad choice in the genre is the new VH1 series "Twinning." It is a tired, predictable entry in a genre that VH1 and its sister networks in the Viacom universe have managed to completely ruin.

The "gimmick" of the show is that while it is a competition, all the contestants are sets of twins. So twelve sets of twins compete for the prize of....yes....$222,222.22. See how they did that? It's all twos. At the beginning of the competition, the twins are split up, with the two groups of twins separated and living in two side-by-side "Big Brother"-knock off living spaces. Each week the teams compete for prizes and advantages, before the contestants pit two groups of twins to go head-to-head in a "Twin-off." The winner duo stays in the competition and the losers go home "with nothing but their twin."

While the twin gimmick has its moments, the novelty is undercut by the casting. For whatever reasons, the producers decided to cast the same stereotypes you'd find on any VH1/MTV reality series. They just happen to have a twin. There are the loud and flamboyant African-American sisters, the brash New Yorkers, the painfully dumb, hot blondes, etc. The most interesting set of twins turn out to be the ones that least fit the genre stereotype. Skyler and Spencer are chubby, awkward Eagle Scouts who, as VH1's promo materials note are "honest-to-goodness virgins." The two are by far the most "real" of any of the twin sets and their awkwardness and connection are the only things worth watching in the show.

"Twinnings" is by no means the worst reality TV show I've ever seen, but it's as bad as the bottom 10 percent of the genre. The network has done a great job creating some distinctive programming, but this show is just another hapless entry in an already tired genre of cable TV.