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My So-Called Miserable Life As a MTV Reality Show Contestant
Before there was Reality TV, MTV had contests like “I Hate My Miserable Life!” When Denise Whitten called, she didn t expect to become famous for being miserable, which, after all, she really wasn’t.
By Glen Duffy Esquire
This article originally appeared in the February 1990 issue of Esquire. Get access to every Esquire story ever published at
. The idea to put Denise Whitten out of her misery began like most big ideas in New York, around a table, with hired heads trying to figure out what the rest of the country wanted deep in its deprived soul. An MTV “concept meeting” isn’t much different from other business meetings except that the hired heads have cuter hair and the first order of business is pizza. The pressure is the same. Sitting in this windowless room, gray except for the deific roc