Those of you who lamented the bottom of the barrel being scraped by Crowned: The Mother of All Pageants should probably avoid Pussycat Dolls Presents: Girlicious, a show that is at best a lateral move across the barrel and arguably even deeper into what critics loathe about the reality genre. Pussycat Dolls Presents: The Search For the Next Doll was a surprise hit for The CW last year, but as the ratings for latest installments of Beauty & The Geek and America's Next Top Model illustrate, sometimes enough is enough with these types of concepts and it's hard to imagine that some fans of Next Doll won't laugh their way through Girlicious. Just the name is enough to warrant eye-rolling from critics of the reality genre. If they caught more than five minutes of it, they might never watch TV again.

Having said all of that, if you know what to expect with Girlicious, it might actually be the guilty pleasure you're looking for to lament the return of scripted programming now that the strike has ended. Just don't say we didn't warn you.

Girlicious is the name of the 3-girl band that will eventually spring to life from the new CW reality show. Clearly inspired by her success with The Pussycat Dolls, Robin Antin is using reality TV to try and create the next pop sensation. Girlicious is most interesting as a look behind the scenes into how some of today's pop princesses are built. It wasn't that long ago when people were bemoaning the idea of a corporation creating a group just for chart success without much musical basis for existing. Now it's completely acceptable. Girlicious lifts the curtain and makes it clear that short shorts and dance moves are much more important than songwriting or even the ability to sing. But, once again, when those issues are laid aside and you just enjoy Girlicious as purely a guilty pleasure, it has its charms.

Like most reality shows, it's the people of Girlicious, not the game or the concept, that makes it worth your time. As you might imagine with a show that has the words "Pussycat," "Dolls," and "Girl" in the title, it's all about the personalities of the ladies. In the first episode, Girlicious introduces us to the fifteen final contestants, from whom the three dancer/singers will be chosen. Audiences and the judges are introduced to over a dozen aspiring performers with issues that include weight fluctuation, rhythm problems, inability to project, generally bad dancing, and even a ruptured cyst. In fact, (as if we need to tell you) it's pretty clear that the fifteen ladies were chosen largely for how good they would be for TV, not necessarily based purely on talent. The music world has always been a popularity contest and the Girlicious beauties have been told they were most likely to succeed for years.

In the first episode, the fifteen girls are broken into five groups of three and asked to perform songs of legendary girl groups like The Go-Gos, The Supremes, and, of course, The Pussycat Dolls. They're choreographed and vocally trained and sent out, but not before performing karaoke in front of Nelly Furtado. Yeah, we warned you it was a weird show. At the end, three girls, although not all from the some group, are shown the door and the competition really starts with the final twelve. Like the pop that Girlicious will someday produce, the show is purely for reality fans with a low threshold for guilty pleasures, but don't be surprised if you find yourself humming along.