Apparently Donnie Wahlberg is the new king of reality television. Less than 24 hours after he announced that A&E is making a show about the Wahlberg family restaurant, Wahlburgers, TV Guide put out a press release saying that he will be executive producing a new show for their network about celebrity cruises, the first of which will feature his group, New Kids on the Block. From the release:
Rock The Boat: New Kids On The Block: Obsessed fans take the vacation of a lifetime when they board a cruise for a weeklong party on the high-seas with America’s favorite bands. The first group to headline this all-new series franchise is New Kids on the Block (NKOTB), one of the hottest bands in music history.
The existence of this show raises some questions. Like, for example, “Who the hell would want to go on a cruise with New Kids on the Block?,” and “Why would they want to do that?,” and “Even if you, personally, wanted to go on a cruise with New Kids on the Block, why would you want to be trapped on a boat with hundreds of other weirdos who wanted to go on a cruise with New Kids on the Block?” I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have answers to any of those. The best I can offer you is this passage from Drew Magary’s GQ piece about going on the Kid Rock cruise:
By the time I get up to the pool deck to watch Rock’s opening show, the party has started without me. There are enormous sunburned men with motion-sickness patches behind their ears shouting out, “I’m on a boat, motherf*cker!” Two women are carrying around an inflatable man with a giant dong sticking out. There are games of flip cup and cornhole in progress. There are joints being fired up all over the place. There are buckets upon buckets of cold ones dotting the deck. There are drunk wives being dragged out of the crowd by their loving husbands. And there are people frolicking in the three hot tubs near the stage. A few of the bathers got into the tubs fully clothed, then began removing their wardrobe piece by wet piece.
Most of the people here are over 40, and jacked as they are to see their redneck hero take the stage, they seem even more excited to see one another. The close quarters and jam-packed days on a cruise make for intense friendships, ones that linger long after the cruise is over. “We have friends for twenty years that we never see anymore,” one lady tells me. “We just hang out with the cruise people now.” It’s a very familiar vibe, and that extends to Rock himself. No one on the ship calls him “Kid Rock.” He’s Bob or Bobby to everyone.
So maybe that’s it. Or maybe people just really want to watch Joey McIntyre perform Boyz II Men’s “Motownphilly.” Because that is what is happening in this eight-second YouTube video from this year’s excursion, and now I DESPERATELY WANT TO GO ON THIS STUPID CRUISE.
