I tried to watch the first episode of The A-List: Dallas, LOGO TV’s new “Housewives with Balls” series, but my boyfriend fell asleep halfway through. I have to say, I don’t blame him. The first 30 minutes was incredibly boring and repetitive. But the show has a much bigger problem than being boring: they don’t have a star, by which I mean they don’t have a single attractive person in the cast.

Being a “star” has one main requirement in my mind: you have to be nice to look at. Or at least easy to look at. These guys are passable, but none of them is any more attractive than 20 other guys I would see if I went to any gay bar in Austin, even on a slow night. The show apparently lost its most handsome cast member sometime between the show’s announcement and the debut of episode one, so it seems that they scrambled to cast somebody else as the “Reichen” (Lemkuhl) of the group. And that would be Levi Crocker. The guy seems like a genuinely nice guy with bad taste in clothing and a loose grasp of the principles of marketing (check out his Inchwear website for a laugh—it’s nothing but clothes that say “hang left” or “10 inches”—and the website is laughably primitive to boot). Sadly, while Levi Crocker is probably the most handsome of the remaining cast members, he is about ten years away from becoming Jamie Farr.

The rest of the cast? Well, I can honestly say that the one that I was determined to hate, the gay Christian Republican (I can’t remember his name), was the most appealing of the bunch. Don’t get me wrong…I still hate him. I just hate him less than the rest of these tw*ts. James, the drunken drama queen with an overgrowth of gum tissue, is a vacuous non-entity. The woman barely registers (and whose friend is she supposed to be anyway?) The black guy seemed harmless enough at the beginning, even going so far as to tell Levi that he wasn’t going to talk behind somebody’s back, only to then turn around and talk about Levi as soon as he stepped out of the room to use the restroom. And did I leave somebody out? Oh, yeah, the hair guy. He is an oddball. He looks like he just crawled out of bed in his wrinkly wife beater shirt, but he’s supposed to be rich or something? This was the one who was added at the last minute, after the attractive guy didn’t work out. And it’s clear that the rest of the cast barely knows who he is.

When I say that a star needs to be attractive, I’m talking about in that “movie star” way. I’m fully aware that a person can be a good (or even great) actor without being attractive. I mean look at John Turturro or Paul Giamatti or John C. Reilly. All of them horribly ugly dudes, but they are usually quite good actors (although John Turturro’s performance in Transformers almost cancelled out every bit of good will he’d built up over the years). These guys are not easy to look at, but they have *something* that sets them apart and makes them interesting. The cast of The A-List: Dallas? They are unattractive on top of being annoying. The A-List: New York is full of attractive people (by which I mean, of course, that they are people you’d want to sleep with). Reichen, Mike Ruiz, Rodiney Santiago, and Austin Armacost are all handsome men. I’ve been to Dallas and I KNOW that Dallas has many attractive men, so I am truly baffled how the producers of this show could go to Dallas and come up with THIS cast. Was it cast by straight men? Were they trying to make Texans look bad by choosing revolting characters?

OK, to be fair, I got it wrong earlier; when I looked it up again, I realized the hair guy was not the last-minute addition. That was the gay Republican. In case you’re interested, here’s the cast:
The Cowboy Hat: Levi Crocker; he thinks he’s not a stereotype.
The Black Guy: Phillip Willis; embraces the stereotype.
The Hair: Chase Hutchinson; he actually seems like the most interesting person, probably because he seems the least “A-List” of all of them.
The Woman: Ashley Kelly; sweet girl who doesn’t understand why she’s here.
The Drunk: James Doyle; will not age well; in fact…is not aging well.
The Republican: Taylor Garrett; seems like fun despite his delusions.
The One that Got Away: Beau Bumpas; announced in the original cast, he apparently realized this train was a wreck and bailed; replaced by Taylor.

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