TV shows we love to hate

“BIG RICH Texas”

Television may be a vast wasteland, as its dissers have sourly characterized it for decades, but a few shows are even more “wasted” than most. Topping our loopy list are—Japanese game shows!

They’re hysterically popular in Japan because they are produced with the hysterically anticolonial intent of making it foreign, white contestants look ridiculous and pathetic. And, if they get hurt in the process of being debased and shamed—so much the better!

The shows have become so popular that they’ve even been shown on US TV, and some American versions have been produced. Go figure!

‘Killer Karaoke’

Related to this weird TV program type is the similarly punitive and painful “singing” competition “Killer Karaoke.” The twist here is how good singers are subjected to all sorts of distractions, indignities and pains, and shock-inducing tactics to prevent them from completing a vocal performance!

Distractions include snakes, cacti, blinders, itching powder, flour and mustard baths and even jolts of electricity—all of which elicit shrieks of approval from a decidedly sadistic studio audience. Why do the contestants agree to subject themselves to such excruciating indignities? Well, a person’s got to eat!

‘Worst of’ card

Another, relatively newer, series of shows cynically play the “worst of” card in direct opposition to the more usual “best of” TV showcases that are all over the boob tube. For instance, in “The Worst Cooks of America,” really terrible and inedible dishes are whipped up by contestants obviously selected for their dismal lack of culinary skills. In fact, some of them look and behave like dullards who couldn’t even find work in a piggery!

Grim concept

A similarly grim program concept was the reality competition, “Man vs. Beast,” telecast a decade ago, which pitted supposedly athletic humans against their animal counterparts, like a boxing match between a man and a kangaroo!

Worst of all was the show’s brainstorm to whip up an airplane-pulling competition between an elephant—and a platoon of dwarves! When the program ran out of sad and sorry ideas like those, the plug was pulled—not a moment too soon!

Of late, TV producers have been coming up with programs, not about the rich and famous, but their sour and rancid “rude relations,” whom we can best typify as “the filthy rich and infamous.”

These cynical reality shows, like “Big Rich Texas” and “Real Housewives of New York City” (among other glitzy places), invite viewers to gawk at their beautiful but overage “stars,” women who have married very well, but haven’t acquired the genuine class and breeding that they think they have.

As a result, they pretend to love each other to bits, but are actually feuding and fighting practically all the time. Thus, they’re very easy for viewers to despise and look down on!

So, if they’re all that rich and spoiled by their septuagenarian sugar daddies or husbands, why do all these women agree to be savaged by the show and made such vicious fun of? Because they crave attention at any cost, and there’s nothing like reality TV to give them that—in humongous, malodorous, orgiastic heaps!