Perfect teammates: Bonds, reality TV

AFTER seeing Barry Bonds up close in the visitors’ clubhouse as he was getting ready for a game at Dodger Stadium recently, I couldn’t help but think that the San Francisco Giant slugger looks more like a Hollywood heavy than a baseball player. With his gleaming shaved head and giant biceps and upper body, Bonds has the cartoonish air of a computer-enhanced movie villain who should be battling Hugh Jackman in “X-Men,” not menacing a Dodger pitcher.

When the comic Robert Wuhl saw Bonds jogging out of the dugout onto the playing field, he sized him up perfectly. “Hey,” he quipped. “It’s Darth Vader!”

With Bonds’ home-run total ascending at the same time that his reputation has been ravaged by the allegations of rampant steroid use in the new book “Game of Shadows,” the public’s love-hate fascination with his exploits has been channeled into “Bonds on Bonds.” The weekly reality show, which airs Tuesday nights on ESPN2, offers backstage glimpses of the slugger doing such things as reading aloud a GQ story about the 10 most hated athletes (he’s incredulous that he finished behind Terrell Owens) to trying to get someone to fix a busted pipe under his fish tank (“911, brother,” he says gruffly over the phone. “You guys get to my house ASAP.”)

So far, the show’s ratings have been somewhat lackluster. The reviews have been withering. The Chicago Sun-Times’ Jay Mariotti said the show represents Bonds’ “lame attempt to persuade the public to buy into Barry’s pity party.” Our sports columnist Mike Penner called it “checkbook journalism,” wondering “how much of the story is being left on the cutting-room floor by the production company working in association with Bonds?”

The producer under siege, Mike Tollin, is a Hollywood veteran, having made, with his partner Brian Robbins, a string of inspirational sports movies, including “Coach Carter,” “Hardball,” “Radio” and “Varsity Blues.” But Bonds’ bad rep has rubbed off on Tollin, who’s been getting thrashed in the sports pages, not only for having a questionable partnership with his subject -- Tollin-Robbins shares any profits from the show with Bonds -- but for offering Bonds a friendly platform to rehab his image.

Sitting in the Giants’ dugout before one of their games here, Tollin defended his company’s relationship with Bonds, saying that although Bonds gets to review the tapes of each episode, his input has been “almost nonexistent.” He says the only shot Bonds asked to have taken out was a brief sequence involving his personal chef.

“We’ve never had discussions about shots having to do with steroids or his antagonistic relationship with the media,” Tollin says. “We had shots of a reporter saying Barry was still using [human growth hormones]. We had fans saying he should be kicked out of baseball. So I have to ask -- if Barry was controlling the content, why would he be allowing all that into the story?”

The other question many people have asked is: Who’s using whom? The show’s first episode concluded with a scene in which Bonds becomes so despondent over the media’s sniping that he begins to weep, giant tears (everything about Bonds being bigger-than-life) spilling down his cheeks. But was that genuine self-pity or simply a shrewd audition for Bonds’ next career? The slugger has often said that he’d like to get into the entertainment racket when his playing days are over.

Or is “Bonds on Bonds” simply another example of the runaway narcissism that has enveloped our culture? For what makes the series especially intriguing is how in sync it seems with a whole generation of reality shows whose subjects wallow in a queasy combination of shameless exhibitionism and bottomless self-absorption.

There’s nothing new about narcissism, only the fact that it has migrated in the last few decades from the lunatic fringe to the mainstream. In 1979, when Christopher Lasch published “The Culture of Narcissism,” he observed that a variety of crazed serial killers and presidential assassins exhibited an “obsession with celebrity and a desire to achieve it” at all costs. Today it’s just a good career move. Nearly 30 years before the arrival of “The Simple Life” or “Newlyweds” (as in Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson) or “America’s Next Top Model,” Lasch anticipated our fascination with reality shows that offer a largely phony version of reality, writing that “our sense of reality appears to rest, curiously enough, on our willingness to be taken in by the staged illusion of reality.”

If Lasch were only still alive, Fox and E! would be fighting to sign him up to a production deal.

Everywhere you turn today, there’s a reality show or documentary offering the spotlight to a continuing parade of childlike narcissists. MTV’s “The Real World,” a pioneer in the art of youth culture navel-gazing, cast a skeletal blond named Paula Meronek as a cast member this season knowing she was battling bulimia, depression and a drinking problem, all on full display during many episodes of the show. We even see her visiting a psychologist, paid for by the show’s producers, who recently told the New York Times -- by way of rationalization for exploiting her problems -- “Because she was so self-aware and because she had off and on thought about doing something about them, we came to the conclusion that it was OK to put her in this show.”

MTV also celebrates the elaborate instant gratification of wealthy young teens on its high-rated series “My Super Sweet 16,” where coddled rich kids outdo one another with their $200,000 parties and narcissistic antics -- one girl had her two poodles dyed pink so they’d match her party dress. Documentaries have gotten into the act as well, as best exemplified by the eye-popping 2004 film “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” which showed the popular metal band at its self-absorbed worst, engaged in endless encounter sessions with a guru-style therapist as the wealthy rock stars tried to conquer their addictions and personality clashes.

Perhaps the apogee of the genre is A&E;’s new show “Oh, Baby ... Now What?” which follows the misadventures of a photogenic young couple whose claim to fame is that they are woefully unprepared to be parents. At 23, Sara, the female lead, is ready for the Narcissist Olympics. As she prepares to give birth at home, she explains why she doesn’t want any of her boyfriend’s pals around.

“I really want it to be about my journey through the laboring process. I have to be selective of who I have in my house when I go through this. I don’t want Pauly or Meghan there.... “ But as for a camera crew of total strangers showing the birth to total strangers around the world -- boy howdy!

When the hapless couple leave their 6-week-old baby out in the sun so long that its face erupts in blisters and eyes swell shut, daddy Brad is so unhinged that he goes for a drive by himself, weeping -- Barry Bonds style -- to the camera, before deciding to rush the child to the emergency room, explaining later, “No way I was going to put my faith in aloe vera gel.”

If there was any doubt that these characters snugly fit into today’s zeitgeist, when Robert Lloyd reviewed the first episode of “Baby” in these pages, he described the couple as “cranky, petulant, self-involved, immature and insistent on their version of the facts,” which is, of course, a dead-on description of Barry Bonds’ behavior in his show. It’s especially depressing to see Bonds whine about the media every week, blaming them for all his problems, when you compare him with Hank Aaron, the owner of baseball’s all-time home run record and a heroic figure brought to life in “Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream,” a wonderful documentary Tollin made a decade ago.

The difference between Aaron and Bonds is the difference between an era in which you had real enemies to fight -- as Aaron approached Babe Ruth’s long-standing home run record, he was deluged with racist hate mail and death threats -- and an era like today, in which most celebrities and reality TV stars’ biggest enemy is themselves. It’s why, in the Metallica documentary, “Baby” and the current “Real World,” the characters always end up talking to a therapist -- the problems lie within their fragile, fame-famished psyches.

In “Bonds on Bonds,” Tollin’s camera crew serves as therapist. Surely it’s no coincidence that the slugger is almost always reclining, as if on a shrink’s couch, when he endlessly complains about being persecuted by the media. Tollin doesn’t dispute the narcissist tag for Bonds. “If you’re used to dealing with movie stars, there’s nothing eye-opening about Barry’s behavior. We’ve done lots of movies with people who are used to being the center of attention.”

Of course, in movies, being the center of attention largely occurs off-stage, with assistants being dispatched to procure extra-foam lattes; when the camera is rolling, the actor tends to play a more complex character.

But in reality TV, being the center of attention is the whole enchilada. Bonds may be a future Hall of Famer while Brad and Sara are woe-is-me wannabes, but to millions of young viewers who soak up these shows, the stars aren’t laughed off as coddled crybabies. After enough time in the spotlight, they start to look like role models.

“The Big Picture” appears Tuesdays in Calendar. Questions or criticism can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.