NBC’s daytime hit, Starting Over won an Emmy for it’s Sophmore year as Daytime’s leading Reality TV show. The show, produced by Jonathon Murray sans Mary Bunim who passed away of Breast Cancer last season, is about women “Picked to live in a house, where reality stops and people starting getting real” or was that his show ‘The Real World’. Different names, same premise.

The similarities between Starting Over and Real World stop at the door, where the casts of both shows are picked to live in a house together and have their daily lives filmed for our entertainment purposes. With Real World, it’s all about booty calls and the cat fights as best represented by Real World Las Vegas, where one cast member, Trishelle, nearly worked her way through the house mates beds and those of all the club goers at the Ghost Bar above Palms Hotel where they lived. Oh, how we enjoy watching a train wreck!

In Starting Over, the women are picked to live in a house and work on some nagging emotional, mental or physical issue with the assistance of two world renowned Life Coaches, Rhonda Britten and Iyanla Vanzant assisted by Dr. Stan Katz, the resident psych made more famous by his testimony in the Michael Jackson molestation case.

Last season, we saw women from every walk of life deal with issues that many women face, from Sinae, the young college student facing a blinding diagnosis struggling to coming to terms with losing her sight, to Kim who wanted to learn to get along with women better.

Kim’s main issue was that she couldn’t figure out why women didn’t like her. Was it their jealousy of her Louis Vuitton bag that she nearly slept with every night and carried with her for breakfast each morning or her dashing good looks, often stuffed into Chanel suits at least two sizes too small. Kim, like Nyanza the season before, needed to starting living an authentic life not weighed by the expense of her purchases at the local mall and more based on who she was and how she treated others.

The cast that opened the second season of the show had a wide variety of problems to work on and even featured a few wantabe celebs such as, Towanda Braxton mostly known for the last name she shares with her more famous sister, Toni Braxton and Vanessa Alter, a gymnast that threw her career on the cusp of the Olympic trials. Through working a wide variety of lesson plans and activities created in the minds of the seemingly slightly demented Life Coaches, including one cast mate standing in a bird cage and another wearing a necklace made up of index cards of her faults for weeks at a time, the women break through the barriers that hold them in their present life stance and move towards becoming the women they want to be. Each cast member achieves a number of steps towards their goals before graduating, though some never make it that far.

Sommer, a cast mate that replaced Deborah in season two after a hasty self imposed departure, joined the show to come to terms with herself after weight loss surgery. What she didn’t bank on was sharing an intimate secret about an affair with a married man that subsequently lost his life in a driving accident and dealing with the other 5 women’s issues with ‘the other woman’. Sommers stay in the house was riddled with drama, some as petty as lost or stolen eye shadow and her ultimate faux pas of mingling with the production crew which cost her a stay in the house after both Life Coaches voted her out of the show at the Board of Review.

The Board of Review takes places every other week and involves two women being judged by a jury of their peers in the house and the life coaches on their progress. Rhonda Britten adds drama to the process by prefacing the meeting by saying, “One woman will graduate and another may be asked to leave the Starting Over house.”

While Starting Over isn’t for everyone, it does offer viewing more benefits than other Reality shows where eating a live bug is all you need to do to hit your mark. With Starting Over, the cast really does accomplish something and gives the viewer the opportunity to ride along and make some important life changes along with them.

Starting Over is on hiatus over the summer, but look for re-runs on NBC and TLC. Check your local listings. Stay tuned Reality TV fans as I will be including interviews from several former Starting Over house mates in the future, leading with Rain from Season one.