Insert painfully unfunny "Not Home Alone anymore" joke ... here. In just about the saddest child star gone wrong news I've ever heard, word on the street is has it that an apparently cash-strapped Macaulay Culkin has signed on to join Anna Nicole Smith and Dennis Rodman in a British "celebrity" version of reality hellhole, Big Brother. As if the very fact that Culkin has, at 25, already given up on legitimate success wasn't bad enough, a source involved with the production of the show told a British tabloid that Culkin was primarily asked to be on the show in the hopes that he'd dish the dirt on his sometime best friend ... yes, that's right ... Michael Jackson.

"This is a great coup for us," the source told the Daily Star. "Because of his friendship with Michael Jackson, you're almost getting two for the price of one." It gets worse: the Channel 4 source admits that the network was "desperate to bag Macaulay because we want some big name Americans who will be controversial and have a chequered history...But more importantly he has been privy to Jacko's private world at Neverland."

When D-listers debase themselves on reality television, I'm usually the first to point and laugh (oh, how I crave a Season Two of Breaking Bonaduce). But just a couple of years ago, when he was starring in Party Monster and Saved!, it looked like Macaulay had a decent shot at a merit-based comeback. How did he get from there, to selling out Michael Jackson on trash British television? The mind reels.