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Remember the days when B-list celebrities and flash-in-the-pan television and music stars were relegated to the stages of dinner theaters in Cleveland and traveling productions of “Grease”? Those seem like medieval times now, for semistars who once relied on supermarket openings to connect with their fans now have the benefit of that vast frontier of opportunity known as reality television. And they don’t even have to be able to sing “Beauty School Dropout” to score one of these gigs. They must simply give themselves over to a very New-Age-sounding career path you might call “being.”

Indeed, what the current plight of reality TV’s B-listers shows -- even more dramatically than any on-air couch-jumping by Tom Cruise, say -- is that celebrity is now more extreme sport than fine art. No longer the exclusive domain of the most talented, it demands more in the way of sheer guts than God-given abilities.

VH1’s hit show “The Surreal Life,” whose fifth season finished shooting recently, has been the ultimate semi-celebrity be-in since long before the likes of Cruise began asserting their off-screen essence with such alarming zeal. But this season, which airs beginning July 10 at 9 p.m., has the benefit of coinciding with the moment at which the rest of the culture has caught up with the show’s cracked vision of modern celebrityhood.

On a sunny Monday in late March, the cast of the fifth season gathered to simmer in its collective juices for 12 intense and often inebriated days and nights in a multimillion-dollar house in the Hollywood Hills. From the first moment of shooting, they found themselves at the mercy of crafty producers and a very surreal, carnival-themed house (think huge clown mouth encircling the door and an AstroTurf carpet). As they arrived, each reacted in his or her own way to the bizarre furnishings, shared bedrooms and the not-yet-regulated climate control, which made the house at least 80 degrees. It was a situation uncomfortable enough to make most of us glad we’re not famous. But if there’s a single quality shared by “Surreal Life” casts, it’s that nothing can make them wish they weren’t famous, not even a 12-day captivity in an overheated house with a bunch of strangers. Talk about commitment.

For those who need reminding, “The Surreal Life” is quasi-celebrityhood’s answer to “The Real World”; instead of filling a house with seven young people whose collective life experience could barely fill the first chapter of a college textbook, its more experienced, often hard-living cast makes the show feel like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” with Botox. Its four previous seasons have included evangelist Tammy Faye Messner, Vince Neil of Motley Crue, porn star Ron Jeremy and “Beverly Hills, 90210” actress Gabrielle Carteris. Unlikely friendships have been forged (Messner and Jeremy are now reportedly close friends), and the show has sparked its share of sexual intrigue. The bizarre third-season romance (or at least a strenuous effort to enact a romance) between actress-model Brigitte Nielsen and Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav spawned the spinoff show “Strange Love” and last season featured a flirtation between Christopher Knight (a.k.a. Peter Brady) and Adrianne Curry of “America’s Next Top Model.”

Stocking the room

As has been well reported by now, the new cast is yet another hodgepodge of larger-than-life personalities, including rapper Sandra Denton (a.k.a. “Pepa” of Salt ‘n’ Pepa), “the world’s first supermodel” Janice Dickinson (now known for being the meanest judge on “America’s Next Top Model”), extreme motocross athlete (and boyfriend of musician Pink) Carey Hart, actor Bronson Pinchot of the 1980s sitcom “Perfect Strangers,” “Apprentice” pariah Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth (who generally goes by her first name), British model Caprice Bourret (also a first-name-only celeb) and, representing the producers’ biggest coup, former baseball player Jose Canseco (who, incidentally, arrived late on the first day because of a parole meeting).

Back in mid-March, before the cast was announced, producers eagerly discussed the show but were nothing short of paranoid about leaking who’d be arriving at the house come shooting time. “Sometimes we have people booked and they find out someone else is going to be on the show and then they try to back out,” said executive producer and co-creator Mark Cronin, a former writer for “The Howard Stern Show.” “They can even be in the car on the way to the house and their manager will call and say ‘So-and-so’s gonna be there’ and then they don’t want to do it.”

The Hollywood offices of Cronin and Cris Abrego’s Mindring Productions are decorated with the Warhol-inspired portraits of former cast members that are the signature motif of the show. But in mid-March there were also index cards on the walls that had been turned around in anticipation of an outside visitor and giant sheets of paper covering up storyboards and cast descriptions. When it comes to making sure celebs don’t bail out, “The Surreal Life” doesn’t fool around. But once the cast is “loaded” (that’s reality-show jargon for getting them in the house), the power shifts heavily in favor of the producers.

“The house always wins,” Abrego said. “No matter what comes up or what problems they have, if they work it out on camera it’s going to be good for the show. Your biggest fear actually is that they get along too well.”

Since the cast rarely gets along too well and since it’s pretty much impossible to do anything off-camera, the house wins again and again. The production requires about 80 crew members, including five live camera operators who follow the cast members at all times. The house is equipped with 27 surveillance cameras, one of which is a robotic camera that can follow them onto the farthest reaches of the property if they try to sneak off for a cigarette (it can also zoom practically into the windows of a house on the other side of the canyon, which should be interesting news for the neighbors).

The control room is set up in the garage, just a few feet away from where the cast is eating and drinking and living the “reality” that is belied by the NASA-like setup on the other side of the wall. The producers say this is key to the show’s success because it’s easier to manipulate situations when they’re just a few feet away rather than watching from a satellite feed in the office. On the first day of shooting, a three-legged dog named Lucky, who’d been rescued from a shelter and cast as the house pet, was fired after repeatedly trying to escape the house and then rehired (which required several gentle shoves through the door) when the action in the living room grew lackluster.

“The on-site control room came out of ‘The Real World,’ ” according to Abrego, who is a veteran of that program as well as “Road Rules” and “The Next Action Star.” “The house itself is a character, so it’s pretty essential that everything take place here.”

What that means is that producers can conceivably be standing in the kitchen while cast members are sprawled out in the living room (there seems to be a lot of sprawling on “The Surreal Life,” which may be partly because of the steady flow of alcohol). On the day of the fifth-season load -- just 24 hours after the cast was officially announced -- Cronin and Abrego paced the driveway like expectant fathers.

“This part always makes me nervous,” Cronin said as he continually checked his watch and awaited updates as to when the first cast member would arrive. “You just want to get them all in the house.”

While most members of the fifth-season cast would be considered household names only in cases where the household revolves totally around TV, the condition of celebrityhood, along with help from almost Machiavellian producers, is what drives the show. It’s a relationship that’s as symbiotic as it is dysfunctional; the cast members will do just about anything to regain or upgrade their fame and the producers take full advantage of their willingness by asking them to do things most of us wouldn’t do even in the privacy of our untelevised homes. On the other hand, these people have been cast precisely because they would do these things in their everyday lives -- Curry allowed sushi to be eaten off of her naked body on the dining table, Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s shared the finer points of her involvement in the fetish community. By moving the cast members around like chess pieces, the producers can create stories that, to many viewers, are even more compelling than scripted stories.

“We literally make a big giant mess and then spend 12 days cleaning it up,” Cronin said. “And that creates a good story arc. Episode One starts as a complete mess and they already have problems with each other and there’s back story. By Day 2 they’ve already got opinions of each other and there’s conflict. And all of a sudden they have to do a play together or something and they’re not happy about that. So we keep throwing stuff at them but at the same time push them together, and by the end it always works out. The trick for us is to find real moments in this incredibly artificial situation. Can we strip these people of their phoniness and publicity and get them to a place where we find real friendships, real touching moments?”

First, define ‘reality’

Finding these moments requires a delicate combination of psychology and puppet mastery. And “touching moments” may be something of a relative term in the reality television world. The most memorable moment of the series was the much-discussed scene in which Verne Troyer (the 2-foot-8 actor best known as Mini Me in the Austin Powers films) got deliriously drunk, passed out, and later took off all his clothes, rode around naked on his scooter and urinated on his bedroom floor. As disturbing as this may have been to some viewers (though, granted, not terribly disturbing to the average “Surreal Life” viewer), the producers were nothing short of thrilled.

“To be honest, I’ve been there,” Cronin said. “I know Verne, and he lives kind of a rock star life. He’s just a hard-living guy. So I honestly think that’s just his thing.”

“The funny thing is, our show has so many crazy moments that we didn’t even get a call that night,” Abrego said.

“We get calls all the time from the night crew that people are fighting or tearing things up,” Cronin added. “Vanilla Ice tore down a wall and started rooting around in the art department. We heard about that, but not about Verne riding around naked.”

Though we don’t know all the specifics of fifth-season mayhem (though there have been plenty of rumors about brawls between Dickinson and Omarosa), the cast takes its share of excursions, such as a visit to a battered women’s shelter to build a playground (no comment on Canseco’s 1997 domestic violence conviction). While many of these are planned, others are decided over the course of shooting and designed to shape a sitcom-like story arc that will take them on what Cronin calls “the hero’s journey.”

It’s this strategy that has led to visits to nudist colonies, karaoke bars, churches, and even the “Sally Jessy Raphael” show. But for all its cattiness and psychological gamesmanship, “The Surreal Life” is not a competition, and that made it a hard sell in the beginning. The show spent its first season on the WB, where Cronin and Abrego ran into creative differences with network executives who wanted to take it in a more conventional direction by eliminating cast members over the 12 days. The home it eventually found on VH1 has proved to be a perfect fit, not least of all because of the way it accommodates the sensibilities of Gen-Xers who’ve aged out of MTV.

“VH1 is aimed at 30-year-olds,” said Brian Graden, president of entertainment at MTV Networks. “What attracted us to ‘The Surreal Life’ was that it was fun and redemptive in its tone in terms of the retro-celebrity. The show found a way to have fun with them but not ridicule or humiliate them.”

Granted, the term “retro-celebrity” may be to “has-been” what “pre-owned vehicle” is to “used car,” but according to casting director Kristin Prouty, the show’s success has allowed it to transcend the stigma of washed-up fame.

“We’re really getting past the ‘has-been’ thing,” said Prouty. “Some people want their fans to see more of them, and they’re not afraid to expose themselves. Some people are interesting characters who have been put in a bad light in the press and they come to show a different side of themselves. The show is so successful that people are coming to us. We’re getting to be way pickier about casting.”

Fourth-season cast member Wiedlin initially turned down the show but changed her mind when she caught an episode of Season 3 at a friend’s house. “I was completely mesmerized,” Wiedlin said. “I thought it was interesting how it takes people you haven’t seen for a while and puts them back in front of you.”

Still, as fascinating as “The Surreal Life” has proved to be with audiences, what’s more fascinating is why that is. On the surface, the show lacks structure, point of view and, in many cases, likable characters. But unlike most reality shows, where the drama comes from players who are either competing against one another or, in the case of “The Real World,” so larval in their emotional development that a missing hairbrush can send them crying into the confessional camera, “The Surreal Life” appeals to viewers simply because it’s a repository for the debris of celebrity fallout. Think of it as “Hollywood Squares” minus the hosts, contestants and game. Packed with people whose careers are often pale shadows of their personalities -- Can anyone name a movie Brigitte Nielsen has appeared in? -- the show has a clear message: being famous is not just about packaging your talent, it’s about packaging yourself.

A second shot at the spotlight

Take Christopher Knight, who became more or less the male lead of Season 4. He had battled his Brady-ness for years until “The Surreal Life” turned him -- rather bizarrely -- into the teen heartthrob he never was in the first place.

“He has a fan base of 15- to 18-year-old girls now,” Abrego said. “This is a guy who receives no royalties from ‘The Brady Bunch.’ He’s been investing in real estate and running a tattoo-removal company. Now he’s just taken off. We can’t even get ahold of him.”

Knight, who actually wasn’t that hard to get ahold of, said he managed to seize upon the calming aspects of a situation that’s scientifically engineered to drive anyone crazy. “It’s almost Zen-like,” Knight reported from his home in Redondo Beach. “It sets up parameters so you don’t have to think or make decisions. I’m pretty good at finding my inner space. I’m not really dogmatic with rituals. And because of that I was able to come out of it OK.”

Knight, 47, also came away with a girlfriend, Curry, the 22-year-old model whose crush on Knight became a major story arc. Curry went home with Knight directly after the shoot and while their romance hasn’t garnered a spinoff in the vein of “Strange Love,” Knight seems amused and resigned about the off-camera demands of maintaining a stardom that has been achieved not necessarily by talent but by appearing on reality television as oneself.

“We’re obviously playing the game a bit,” Knight said about the fourth-wall nature of his relationship with Curry. “Your personal life becomes the commodity. You become the commodity. I’ve always maintained that for someone to be successful on television, they have to be in newspapers. You have to see them in grocery stores. And that’s more true today than it was years ago. Maintaining a connection to an audience is what determines your next job.”

But what determines the qualities audiences connect to? As entire generations grow up watching reality television the way more seasoned viewers used to watch sitcoms, what are we learning about the connection between comedy and character? What does it say about our culture that so much of what we laugh at arises from genuine human foibles (and, in the case of “The Surreal Life,” almost constant drunkenness) rather than scripted humor and crafted story development?

There are fewer jobs for actors and writers now, and the popularity of shows such as “The Surreal Life” reminds us of the degree to which audiences have become the real tyrants of the industry. As hard as we laughed at the antics of Lucille Ball or Roseanne or Jerry Seinfeld, there was always a sobering comfort that these were actors who were going home at the end of the day to resume seminormal, antic-free lives. But on reality television, the circus tent never comes down. Stars must take their on-air personae with them into their daily lives or risk losing their audiences. As Motley Crue’s Neil counseled a nervous Wiedlin before she began her “Surreal Life” stint, “Just be yourself. Anything else, and you dig your own grave.”

Still, audiences can’t seem to get enough of the grave diggers. The price of fame, like everything else, is subject to inflation.

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Contact Meghan Daum at C[email protected].