MENTALI-T!: “If you want to polish your relationship and make it glisten/All you really have to do is learn to listen!”

Each week T receives a letter from some distressed member of his public — a besieged mom, say, or someone working at a dysfunctional car dealership. “Dear Mr T, my husband is a big lazy slob . . . ” As he silently reads it, lips moving, we mark a deepening of the famous frown (now so thickly seamed into the T forehead it resembles a fleshy fleur-de-lis) and then it’s on with the red jogging suit and into action. Accountabili-T! Positive Mentali-T! Respect for your momma! And fine, blustery poetry: “If you want to polish your relationship and make it glisten/All you really have to do is learn to listen!” As reali-T, it’s all a bit low voltage, but I happen to enjoy it enormously when Mr T jabs his index finger at the camera and shouts, “If you just tuned in, what’s wrong with you, fool?! Show me some respect!’

The kids enrolled in Ice-T’s Rap School, over on VH1, they want respect too. Eighth-graders from poncy York Prep, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, they’re being drilled in hype, flow, attitude, etc. by the man who once rapped, “I’m a nigga on the trigger, madder than a pitbull/Just layin for a reason to pull . . . ” Race/class tensions are meat and drink to reality TV, of course, but the premise here (hip-hop hard man tutors posh kids) seemed too crude at first. Episode by episode, however, Rap School has become quite special: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with big fat sneakers. Ice, speaking always in a bitterly emphatic gangsta monotone, as if giving instructions during a stick-up, is a warm, engaged tutor, and his students are on a voyage of self-discovery. Shy heavyweight Mary (“Missy M”) is rapping through her difficulties with soft-voiced determination: “My name is Missy M and I got problems in my life/But hey, look at me, I’m doin’ alright . . .” Carrot-topped Dodge (“Dodge City”), meanwhile, is going hoarse on the freestyle, dangerously liberated: “Yo, Ice-T’s teaching in prep school! And that ain’t cool! But he’s so washed up he hasn’t had a hit for 10 years! . . . Wait, am I allowed to insult Ice-T?”

Season two of Meerkat Manor ended last Friday over on Animal Planet, and the final episode, ominously titled “The Quiet Fields,” had it all: dynastic uproar, infanticide, circling eagles, sunset streaming like a wound. How I will miss these heavily surveilled desert ferrets. Flower and Mozart, now there’s a real bitch of a mother/daughter relationship: all season the ticklish question has been which of these two females, in the interest of her own brood, is going to be obliged to eat the other’s children. This time Flower pulled a fast one: while her daughter was busy giving birth underground, she and the rest of the gang simply up-and-relocated to another burrow a mile away. After a while Mozart popped her head out, expecting perhaps some post-natal congratulations. Her fretful, entreating face turned this way and that: nobody there.

Meanwhile the mongoose warlord Hannibal, with his chewed eye socket, was leading his commandos on a raid: through the autumnal scrub of the Kalahari they went in a bouncing, stiff-legged canter, avidly purposeful, tails up like antennae. And when they came upon Mozart’s burrow, and her fresh litter huddled blind and defenseless, it turned into a scene from Blood Meridian. Dust boiled at the burrow’s mouth; the music altered from its usual jaunty pizzicati to churns of discord and sub-tribal drumming. “This is nature at its rawest,” narrator Sean Astin somberly informed us.

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Nature at its rawest was also on display in Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team (CMT), where the rookie girls were receiving their “media training.” Beneath scouring lights, through the white grille of her Texan teeth, entertainment reporter Sandie Newton asked things like, “Do you make yourself available to players?” (DCC Director Kelli Finglass looked on. “The frosty eye shadow doesn’t work,” she told one sweating interviewee, with a leer of triumph, “and you can always use extra powder.”) Over at TLC’s The Monastery, meanwhile, Tom the alcoholic comedy writer got all pissed off when Brother Joseph Gabriel suggested that his marriage, not having been sanctified under the proper Catholic conditions, might be “sacramentally irregular.”

Next week: family therapy on House of Carters, Ice-T shepherds his neophyte crew through an opening slot for Public Enemy, The Monastery and Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are concluded, and I share with you (if you’re very good) my concept for the best reality show ever. Don’t go away.