Neil Strauss Auditions for Reality TV on MySpace

Neil Strauss has a sequel to The Game coming out soon, helpfully titled Rules of the Game. To promote it, he’s creating a series of videos for his MySpace page, featuring former ’90s sitcom stars David Faustino and and Corin Nemec. The first video seems to establish the pattern, in which Faustino and Nemec act out scenarios that address the principles Strauss lays out for picking up women, then Strauss comes on at the end and “assigns” viewers to videotape themselves working the same scenario, after which he’ll give a free one-on-one consultation to whichever participant he thinks made the best video.

You can watch the first segment at the end of this post; I’m not putting it on the GalleyCat homepage because the sight of David Faustino wearing a sexual aid strapped to his forehead is probably NSFW (unless we’ve got readers at CollegeHumor.com). Frankly, I think the whole premise is flawed. The video wants to convince us that Faustino, playing by Strauss’s rules, can impress women even while sporting a dildo than Nemec can just by being himself, but let’s face it: It’s the kid from Married With Children, which still gets shown in reruns someplace, versus the kid from Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, which doesn’t. Faustino’s still got a shred more recognizability working in his favor, even with, well, you know.

Isn’t this synergy between News Corp.‘s MySpace and HarperCollins divisions marvelous, though? If the writer’s strike doesn’t get resolved soon, this might even make it onto Fox in time for February sweeps. (And just think: If HarperCollins hadn’t fired her last year, Judith Regan would have her fingerprints all over the production!)

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