It's hard to sit through five minutes of that "Maui Fever" MTV piece of garbage without rolling your eyes, breaking out in a rash and scrambling for the remote. It's awful, but it's not even good/bad in that way that makes watching bad TV fun, like say, "Armed and Famous" or "Celebrity Fit Club." It's just bad.

Bad, and sadly reflective of real life on Maui.

What? Did somebody dare say Maui is home and haven to young blond people looking for a cheap drink and fast fun? Consider it said.

What Maui were you thinking of? The one that doesn't exist anymore or the one only wishfully imagined in homesick Hawaiian songs?

The worst part of "Maui Fever" is not that it doesn't portray real life on Maui; rather, that it does. A part of it, at least. Certainly not everyone on the Valley Island lives that way, but some do. Many more aspire to that tawny, tipsy life all the time.

That's what you get for selling Maui as a playground for carefree adventurers. For the brochures touting "Maui is for Lovers." For building stacks and stacks and towers and towers of cheap concrete vacation rentals. For teaching generations of Maui students the way to prosperity was finding your little niche in the tourist industry, be it carving ice sculptures for hotel weddings or vacuuming the sand out of rental cars.

When you sell something, you don't get to keep it anymore. Maui has been sold.

There are "locals" who have appeared on the show — mostly shirtless, on the beach, drinking beer and playing ukulele and, oftentimes, shot at an angle so that their heads are cut off. Nice touch. Anonymous natives. Every Hollywood project since "South Pacific" needs those. Yuck.

But why this anger now? Certainly there have been other TV and movie projects that have made Hawai'i in general or Maui in particular look worse.

Perhaps the "Maui Fever" fervor marks the awakening of a new generation. Kids who grew up plugged in to the world collective, who adapted early to such odd concepts as calling strangers who stumble on your online ego page "friends" might be dismayed to find out that, when the cameras come to your town, they search out a life that doesn't resemble yours. The older generation gave up the "eh, that's not how it is here" fight long ago.

Maybe the hardest truth is that nobody outside of these parts really cares about REAL real life on Maui. Who wants a show about the tent city around Kahului Harbor, or working for the state and living with three kids and the in-laws in one of those look-alike houses in new Waikapu, or sitting in traffic every morning in the commute from Pukalani to MCC?

Reality bites, and sometimes, even worse, it gnaws away.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.