The time has come for me to confess all the terrible television I have been watching lately. With the return of cable to my life, this was bound to happen. Are you watching any of these shows, too? Will you commiserate?

Taking the Stage

I have a great excuse for watching this MTV reality show about kids in a performing-arts high school – a truly great excuse, just wait for it. I, you see, am a patron of the arts. Just try to impugn me for that, bitches!

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The Hills & The City

I have been meaning to write a “Guilty Pleasure Confessions” post about The Hills for so long. I have such a post saved in my drafts, in fact, and it has been there for, like, three seasons. I watched Laguna Beach back in the day, I’ve been watching The Hills since Season 1 (How could L.C. not take the job in Paris, HOW I ASK YOU), and now I am even watching The City. Yes, I am the specific kind of jackass who watches all of these shows.

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America’s Next Top Model

I have one thing to say about this show: TYRA.

Wait, let me add another thing: NIGEL.

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Make Me a Supermodel

This is absolutely the poor man’s ANTM – it’s a little glossier and a little more inscrutable, but the awesomeness of Tyra, Nigel, and Miss J is only sadly mimicked by the less-than-awesomeness of Tyson (boring), Nicole (totally luuded out), and the posse of ridiculous judges. The only one I don’t want to kill is Catherine Malandrino, who is wonderful in all respects. As for the models? I don’t even remember who any of them are from one week to the next. Why am I watching this again? Oh right. I will watch basically any of these Bravo reality shows. I am the one person in America who watched Top Design.

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The Real Housewives of New York City

Oh my dog, you guys, this show is great! I didn’t catch on to the Housewives phenomenon in time to board the train to the O.C.; the Atlanta show aired while I was without cable; but the N.Y.C. show, in all its awesomeness, makes up for all that I’ve missed in the other franchises. Jill Zarin is probably my favorite, but Bethenny and the Countess LuAnn DeLesseps come in a close second/third. Oh, and if you are watching this, could you please just back me up on one thing: Kelly Bensimon. Is she evil incarnate, or what? A CASH BAR at her own party! THE HELL.

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Harper’s Island

Exhibit A toward proving that I will watch absolutely any mystery or detective show no matter how bad it is. This is a truly terrible show: gruesome and violent and illogical in its storytelling, peopled with ridiculously inconsistent characters played by mostly terrible actors. This show has exactly two redeeming factors: Christopher Gorham and scenery of the Pacific Northwest.

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Castle

Exhibit B toward proving my love for and determination in watching all manner of terrible detective shows. This particular gem is based on a ridiculous premise (no police department would ever allow a crime novelist with no police training to basically be partners with a homicide detective; I’M SORRY). Like Harper’s Island, the storytelling is embarrassingly bad: don’t even bother trying to follow the thread of an episode’s plot or of the murder investigation itself. No such thread will ever be found. Each episode is like a collage of ostensibly related scenes that basically either do nothing to move the plot forward or do too much too fast. The one beautifully consistent unifying factor? Nathan Fillion is in every scene. And there you go.

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Your turn. Confess! I know you’re watching some terrible TV out there, people. Help me feel less alone.

While in most of my life, I am a steely-eyed, iron-hearted machine, I do occasionally love a good bit of weep-inducing entertainment. I am not picky about the quality of this stuff, oh no; practically anything will do.

There was an era of Hallmark commercials in the mid-to-late 1990s that would get me all misty every time. Remember the one where the family thinks their grown-up son won’t be home for Christmas, but he surprises them all, sneaking into the house during a family Christmas-caroling session and joining in on the chorus of “O, Holy Night”? Or the one where the old lady across the street is all lonely, but the nice young lady brings her a heart-warming card that makes her forget all about how her husband is dead, her kids left home and don’t call, and she can barely make ends meet with her meager Social Security check? All because of the Hallmark card? That one?

Yeah, so, it doesn’t take much. Last night I got all teary eyed over the finale of The Biggest Loser: Couples. Just seeing how all those really, really fat people struggled so hard, with the running and the weight lifting and the endless plates of chicken breast and steamed broccoli, oh woe, it makes me feel all sniffly.

See how fat they all were?

And then they go and get all thin, see, like so:

There is the emotionally evocative music, and the bursting through life-sized photos of their old selves, and the re-affirming of their commitments not to die of fatness before their kids grow up, and oh, man, it just gets a person to feelin’ misty. I must be about to have my Special Ladies’ Time or something.

Anyway, for other examples of this genre, please see also:

• Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, where poor people whose lives are all a-shambles are given new fabulous houses with glorious furnishings and walk-in closets and swimming pools, oh my!
• What Not to Wear, where shabby dressers are brought to New York where they get fashion advice from the fly Clinton and Stacy and get a $5,000 budget for a new wardrobe.
• There are even some non-reality shows that will fit the bill, such as Men in Trees, which has the additional benefit of starring James Tupper as the ruggedly-handsome-in-cable-knit Jack, a favorite TVBF of mine.
• Of course, there are also all of the animal rescue shows on Animal Planet, where sick, abused, neglected, or otherwise endangered pets are rescued and (hopefully) given new homes. Oh, man, though, are those shows brutal! Bitches, do not watch these unless you want to start dripping snot all over those nice throw pillows you just bought from IKEA. Er, not that this has happened to me, just hypothetically speaking, see.

And on that note, I am off for some wine, chocolate, and kleenex.

Dance shows aren’t actually the guiltiest of my guilty pleasures — after all, dancing is an art, so I can always think of myself as a Patron of the Arts every time I gleefully settle in for an episode of So You Think You Can Dance. Let’s face it, though: I mostly like the cute, cute boys and the breakdancing. I am afraid I can neither confirm nor deny rumors that after the show ends I recreate the breakdancing performances in my kitchen. I don’t even know where you would have heard such a thing anyway.

The goofy-ass costumes are a lot of fun, too.

Suffering the absence of SYTYCD since the last season ended in the summer, I was thrilled at the premiere of Bravo’s new dance show, Step It Up And Dance, last week. While Fox’s SYTYCD is made on the model of American Idol (which I flatly fucking refuse to watch), purporting to choose not the best dancer at the end of the season, but rather “America’s Favorite Dancer,” Bravo’s SIUAD is the sister show to Project Runway, Top Chef, and Top Design (um, all of which I watch religiously), meaning that it is decided by the panel of judges rather than America’s vote.

As might be expected on a Bravo show, they are not afraid of The Gays. While the judges on SYTYCD are always pushing the (clearly gay) male dancers to butch it up, and none of them are even really allowed to mention their sexuality, the guys on the Bravo shows are out and proud. Bravo, I say! The weird undercurrent of homophobia on the Fox shows has always made me uncomfortable.

Well, let’s not get too serious here! It is a dance show, which means it is completely impossible to take seriously. After all, they had Mel B., a.k.a. Scary Spice, as a guest judge last week. There is nothing serious about that. The audience was treated to the excited squeals of an 18-year-old B-Girl who has been watching the Spice Girls “her whole life.” For one thing, holy Hell I am old; for another thing, spice up your life!

Oh, Big Brother. Sigh.

This is honestly one of the absolute worst shows on television, and yet every summer (And now winter! Why must they poison the entire year?) I tune in and suffer through the entire season, struggling to find a contestant to root for who isn’t a stagnant, squelching, ass swamp.

The contestants typically range from guys who think they are hotter and more charming than they actually are,

to guys who think their personalities are better, wackier, or funnier than they are,

to really dumb, really slutty girls with really big, really fake boobs.

As generally horrible as all of these people are, at least I can say with some degree of confidence that none of them is as awful as the soi-disant “Evel Dick” of last season, about whom the only positive thing I can say is that at least he did not murder any families. That we SAW.

This season, while there isn’t anyone so utterly repugnant in the cast, there also isn’t anyone remotely likable, really, and in spite of that I still manage to catch ALL THREE episodes per week. Why? I suppose a small part of me must hate myself. On the other hand, I can sleep in all day, neglect my scholarly projects, eat nothing but junk food and drink nothing but whiskey, steal the Social Security checks out of an elderly neighbor’s mailbox, and build a collection of dead babies in my refrigerator, and STILL have a whole new cast of people to feel superior to every season! WIN!