'Chasing Farrah' is one very weird experience

Published: Monday, March 21, 2005 3:31 p.m. MST
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If you choose to go "Chasing Farrah" along with our friends at TV Land, you're in for a very weird ride.

Which, quite frankly, comes as no surprise. After all, Farrah Fawcett — the one-time "Charlie's Angel" who went on to do some fine work in projects like "The Burning Bed" and "Extremities" — has, in recent years, been famous mostly for being famous. And for being weird.

Which is the point of the TV Land reality series, which has a camera crew follow Fawcett as she lives her life. Although the one person who doesn't seem to realize that it's about how weird she is is Fawcett herself.

"It was a chance for me to go, 'OK. See. I'm not crazy,' " she recently told TV critics.

At least in the first couple of episodes, that doesn't come through loud and clear. At best, the jury is still out on the whole craziness thing.

Fawcett would have us believe that her whacked-out, disoriented and possibly chemically strange behavior during an appearance on the "Late Show with David Letterman" back in 1997 was all an act. She tries to explain it away again on "Chasing Farrah."

But, while she sometimes seems lucid and relatively intelligent on her reality series, at other times she seems no less strange than she was with Letterman.

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Like the moment when boyfriend Ryan O'Neal mentions that, if he had it to do over again, he probably wouldn't have gone bungee jumping. And Fawcett comes back with, "I never would smoke crack or bungee jump."

OK . . .

Perhaps the strangest thing about "Chasing Farrah" is that Farrah spends a lot of time bemoaning the fact that her life is so public. That she can't go anywhere without being mobbed by fans and chased by photographers.

So, naturally, she fights this by agreeing to be followed by cameras and have her life turned into a TV show.

"I want to do something and not repeat myself, so I see the challenge which feeds my creativity," Fawcett told TV critics in an interview session that was, well, hard to make heads or tails of afterward, what with all the start-and-stop, incomplete sentences and replies that had little to do with the questions. "And otherwise, I'm perfectly happy to stay at home, do my art, cook. I mean, I'm a very normal person. I am. But even when I try to live my normal life, I'm never alone. So why not have these people follow me because people follow me anyway?"

This despite the fact that Fawcett, both in the interview and on the show, expresses strong distaste for reality shows in general. And never admits that maybe — just maybe — agreeing to do the show has something to do with the 58-year-old actress' desire to revive her flagging career.

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TV Land

Farrah Fawcett is followed by television cameras.

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