You can only take Love & Hip Hop Atlanta so seriously. Though ostensibly part of the candid reality television genre, it is at its alternately withered and overflowing heart a soap opera filled with a cast of fair-to-decent improv performers. "It's fake till it's real," is how my friend Derrence put it to me this weekend. Between spikes of seemingly uncontrollable emotional intensity, the show's vicious tentpoles, Love & Hip Hop Atlanta generally feels artificial and staged, as though the conversations we see have already been rehearsed at least a few times.