unny how things work. I never used to watch TV, and especially not any trash TV. Not since I was about 11 and living in Texas and was briefly amused by the antics of pro wrestling. In fact, for many years while working on the D2 site, I found it almost inconceivable that one of my co-workers freely admitted to enjoying a regular televised dose of the Jerry Springer show. How could an otherwise intelligent, liberal, and enlightened woman sit through that sort of mental garbage?

Nothing occurred to change my opinion about that sort of television programming until I came to live with Malaya in July of 2003, and discovered that she occasionally watched some of Jerry, and Maury, and other reality shows (Survivor, The Amazing Race) as well. At first I kept my distance, paying them no attention and working on my computer with my headphones on while Malaya was watching a show on tape (to speed up the viewing process and avoid commercials; not to save it forever) but I gradually grew more accepting, and put up with the crappy shows mostly to sit beside Malaya with my arm around her shoulders and Dusty on my lap.

Over the year I've been here (as of July 2004) I've come not quite full circle, since I'd never bother watching the shows on my own, but I don't exactly mind watching them when they're on tape and Malaya's watching them. After all, they're full of good blog material and human case studies that I can adapt to my work. Or something like that.

More recent additions to this page are added on top.

September 6, 2003

A shocking reader mail, commenting on my recent blog in which I commented on the Jerry Springer show.

And the best is yet to come : the French television (I’m Belgian – but since there’s only 2 official channels, everybody here has cable tv) has adapted the Jerry Springer show but has replaced volunteers with actors… It’s not even “real-tv” anymore, let’s call it surreal-tv…

Yes, actors recreating Jerry Springer guest performances. Didn't they see the opening scene in Austin Powers 2? I don't think this sort of thing would really work, honestly.  The absurdly over played reactions of real people on hicksploitation shows like Jerry works, in a sick sort of way.  Actors doing that would appear to be camping it up ridiculously, and would be unbelievable.  Probably. Or so it seems to me.

May 15, 2004

Speaking of trash TV, here's a portion of a longer mail from Elsha-of-IEL. This email included a My First Time entry, which I've just added under May 5th, if you'd care to check it out as well.

Stupid TV shows!

crappy TV shows are always funny to watch even though it's so stupid :D not so much for the show itself than for the people and just the ridiculousness of it all. normally I'd never be caught dead watching reality TV or most game shows and the battle dome rubbish or anything else stupid, but if I come across it while surfing channels I'll occasionally watch it for a while until I get sick of it and tell myself "wtpudge new channel plz." 99% of it is so obviously a publicity stunt and is sounds so scripted that it's extremely difficult to believe the network when they claim the shows aren't scripted.

Springer in particular annoys and amuses me greatly on several levels. firstly, the annoying bits. all the knobbers who appear on the show are all just looking to be on TV and to let off steam about something that really doesn't mean anything to them. not to mention all the "oh so angsty relationship problems we have" and the ridiculous people who go on to scream "look at me look at me" to the US of A are all laughably insensitive and ungenuine in a lot of their sayings. sure they get pissed when they get into fights (or try to as the security people run around preventing people's heads from being removed from shoulders), but if they -really- cared about said relationships, they'd do it in private, not in front of millions of viewers (who also don't give a rat's ass about the couple(s)/people on the show either). not to mention Jerry tries to be all sympathetic but all he does is make snarky and (sometimes) funny comments.

I've blogged about Jerry Springer a couple of times, and I'll hit it again at some point, with some sort of "sum it all up in one entry" attempt. I'm not sure what there is to sum up really, but there's so much about those shows to comment on that I can hardly resist mining the lode. My comment from the September 5, 2003 blog amused me though, when I just read it again while trying to find the blog in which I admitted to watching Jerry and Maury some now, since Malaya gets a sick, vampirific sort of amusement from the human suffering depicted on them.

I must admit that I've come to somewhat enjoy some aspects of Jerry Springer, since Malaya enjoys watching it in short bursts just to see the idiots scream at each other.  I'll blog about it and the other hicksploitation type shows some day.  1) I am astonished that people continually volunteer to go on those shows when they simply have to know they'll end up humiliated, and 2) I can't believe the level of white trash (of every race) that Jerry's producers somehow bus in from West Virginia.

Those shows are a guilty pleasure. No one likes to admit that they watch them, and yet many of us do. I'd never seen Jerry before I moved up here last year, and thought myself well above enjoying that sort of spectacle... until I begin watching, and found it pretty damn funny. Or at least amusing, in a, "Please God tell me that everyone isn't that stupid!" sort of way.

I too suspect that a lot of the stuff on Jerry is fake. Perhaps not entirely fake; I don't think they're hiring actors and telling them what to say. But the people on there often play their issues up, acting more upset or shocked or crazy than they really are. Hey, it's entertainment and a spectacle, and it pushes the ratings when fists fly and boobies pop out. At least I assume that's what many people are watching it for.

I personally see no point in pixeled out boobies, and I don't get a thrill watching inbred idiots try to punch each other through show bouncers. What I do enjoy is the human element. People acting so stupidly, in such animalistic fashion, and so venally. It's like a crash course in abnormal human psychology, or at least unpleasant human psychology. People you never want to meet fighting with people you can hardly believe are smart enough to remember to keep breathing on their own.

The themes are repeated endless too. Confessing cheaters are on at least twice a week, and after watching 30 or 40 such shows, you can basically predict every action in advance. I'd say that at least 98% of the cheaters on there do it entirely due to opportunity. It's always the bf/gf's best friend, or sister, or mom, or something like that. It seems like a greater betrayal, but it's really all about opportunity. They get to know each other entirely because of the person they're cheating on, they're in the same area, etc. It's all about ease of execution. I swear that at least half the unrelated cheaters are roommates, and the story is almost always something like, "I took you in when you had nowhere else to go, and this is how you repay me!"

Yes, yes it is.

One other element that never fails to amuse me is the physical attractiveness/ego inverse proportion law. By this I mean that the uglier, fatter, more toothless, etc, a person is, the more likely they are to have absolutely no shame about their appearance, and even a sort of pride in it. Of the people on Jerry who get naked, at least 75% are people you didn't even enjoy looking at in clothing. I couldn't watch Jerry uncensored, since quite often the pixeled out boobies or butt are a mercy, being as the pixels cover cottage cheesy thighs the circumference of a truck tire, bellies with more rolls of fat than a gravy factory, etc.

At least every other show some woman who weighs more than Malaya, me, Dusty, Jinx, and several of our kitchen appliances added together will trot out wearing nothing but straining short shorts and a mismatched bra, and I'll spend the segment looking at the cat I'm petting, or the side of Malaya's face, all the while praying that someone will hurry up and insult her looks, thus motivating her to whip off her top and/or pants, so that the pixels will come in and save my eyes from permanent retinal damage.

It even holds true for merely fat people on the show. The fatter they are, the more pride they take in being grotesque. Skinny guys take off their shirts once in a while. Really fat guys, C-cup type guys, take off their shirts and run around madly just about every other show, glorying in the attention your average "almost fit but not quite dedicated enough to his sit up regime" guy wouldn't have the balls to.  it's true for the ugly and fat women too. There's inevitably a 240 pound woman who gets insulted by someone in the audience, and immediately starts wagging her boobies or butt around and yelling, "You just wish you had this kind of beauty!"

I suppose if there's just no way you're ever going to lose weight and conform to normal standards of beauty, you need to take pride in whatever you can manage to take pride in. And if you've got 42DD breasts, find a man who is hung up over breasts, and make him happy and yourself feel loved. Plus you can keep on eating all the fried chicken and snacky cakes you want. And when you're on the Jerry show, and some relatively skinny chick in the crowd calls you a "big fat slut" wave your boobies around and insult her 34Bs, even while you know that you could trade bras with her if you were somehow able to lose the 150 pounds you've gained since you were 17.

It's not the healthiest way to preserve your self esteem, but it seems to get a lot of people by.

I'll blog more about Jerry someday, and I haven't even scratched the surface of the Maury show, which has almost as much weird stuff as Jerry, though it's all encased in a much more civilized facade. They don't encourage the guests to fight, after all. Just destroy each other emotionally, following a sort of reverse "sticks and stones" homily.  The second best segment on Maury? Putting suspected cheaters on a lie detector test, or entrapping them with a sexy decoy, on hidden camera. The best segment on Maury? Paternity tests, which invariably end in furious/heartbroken men, and rejoicing/horrified women. The best ones, in Malaya's opinion and mine, are when the test reveals that the bitchy, harpy, "You gots to take care of yo baby!" woman, who is "150% sure" the guy is the father... actually cheated on him and got knocked up by some other guy.

Nothing on TV (Aside from the Lakers back up point guard hitting a .4 last second fadeaway jumper to crush San Antonio's little hopes and dreams.) is as satisfying as seeing a nagging, lying, witch get exposed for the cheating whore she really is, after she's just spent five minutes chewing her ex-boyfriend a new asshole for daring to cheat on her.  Although it's quite a bit of fun to see some guy deny deny deny that he knocked up a girl, only to get shot down by the paternity test. Especially when one guy has like 3 women on the same show, and you can see his heart sinking as he realizes his new monthly child support payments are going to run about 250% of his current income.

September 5, 2003

And lest you think I'm defending Jackass, I am not.  I can't stand that sort of "we're idiots." entertainment.  The mere fact that it exists depresses me. Jackass, amateur fist fights, Jerry Springer, pro wrestling, and so on. But the fact that people try to blame everything while avoiding personal responsibility for anything depresses me even more.

And just to complete the circle of hypocrisy, I must admit that I've come to somewhat enjoy some aspects of Jerry Springer, since Malaya enjoys watching it in short bursts just to see the idiots scream at each other.  I'll blog about it and the other hicksploitation type shows some day.  1) I am astonished that people continually volunteer to go on those shows when they simply have to know they'll end up humiliated, and 2) I can't believe the level of white trash (of every race) that Jerry's producers somehow bus in from West Virginia.  And yes, it will be one of my rantier and snarkier blogs... ever.

July 13, 2002

TV Guide has named their 50 worst shows of all time, after they announced their 50 best some months ago.  The worst show ever, according to them, is The Jerry Springer show, and I'd have a hard time arguing that.  I certainly would never watch it, and the fact that those sorts of human bear-baiting programs are televised, much less watched, just depresses me.

The full list can be seen in this article on Yahoo, and looking at the list, I can't recall ever watching any show on it more than maybe once, other than the Howard Stern E show, which I see very occasionally. (I don't get E here, with my basic cable, or I'd probably watch it once a week.)  I've not heard of most of them at all, which I imagine is to my good fortune. 

I've not heard of most of them, fortunately.  Hogan's Heroes is at #5, which I think is dubious.  I mean sure it was stupid, sort of a live action cartoon with writing of the Scooby Doo level, and no doubt insulting to anyone who actually had any interaction with Nazis in WWII, but aren't there 4 or 5 sitcoms every season that are even worse?  I speculate that TV Guide just wanted to have at least one show that was on for a while and people would remember.

I don't watch much TV, but a couple of exclusions leaped immediately to mind.  The Morton Downey Jr. show for one, I used to see parts of that when it was on late night, and I can't imagine that Jerry Springer was worse.  I mean the whole point of the Morton Downey show was that the host was a complete asshole and would just find guests to scream at, trying to provoke them to fight him or each other.   His main schtick was to blow smoke into people's faces and be an aggressively annoying asshole smoker.  The fact that he recently died of cancer is strong evidence for karma and/or a just god, but I'm still not convinced.

The Rush Limbaugh show was another one I think they would have listed but for fear of appearing liberal, as the media lives in constant fear of being labeled.  The show got zero ratings and was gone in about a year, despite Rush supposedly being this huge radio sensation at the time.  Even if you liked the guy and agreed with his PoV, the show as death.  He just sat at a desk and bloviated, just like on the radio, beating the same few horses into a slurry goo.  The Howard Stern TV show is taken from his radio show, but there's a useful visual element, what with strippers or celebrities or pranks or video of Stuttering John interviewing some dimwitted celebrity.  Rush's show was just a rehash of his radio show, in a TV studio, with a live audience.  So it was the hot water bottle-faced Limbaugh lecturing a bunch of grimly-clapping acolytes, with no guests, no jokes, nothing you couldn't hear on the radio already.  I found it totally pointless, and the studio audience was the creepiest in the history of TV.  Even worse than when Arsenio used to have those hordes of Beach Mtv rejects doing that woofing thing.  Rush's audience always looked like a focus group from an accounting convention; lots of poorly/formally-dressed plump white people, who did nothing but sit and stare, until Rush said something brilliant and witty like "Hillary is a bitch." at which time they'd all break into wild applause while staring as their leader with the furious intensity of true believers.  It was actively scary.

The facts that 1) Rush Limbaugh lost 50 pounds and looks worse than he did fat, and 2) that he's gone stone deaf and can't hear his own show, are even stronger evidence of a working karma system on earth.  I still don't buy it though.

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