Oh, this is so very wrong that it begs sharing, you guys.

I’m watching The View.  (cue gasping audience)

Today, Kathy Griffin is guesting and honestly she is –apart from the Baba Wawa machine– the only coherent and exciting person to watch.  Elisabeth Hasselbeck?  She’s boring and uh, you know… uh… you know… example?  She just said "male genitalia" in this pained and apologetic way.  You can call them penises too and they won’t censure you, Lizard-breath.
And Joy Behar?  She’s not funny.  Seriously, she is just not funny.
Baba?  She loves to name-drop around her minions and pretend that she is a so much bigger shit than she is.  Which is weird, because what are they gonna do?  Disagree with the boss?

The funny thing –er…. the actual funny thing of this whole miserable little panel, really– is that they are relishing their talk about Paris Hilton checking herself into the LA County jail last night after the MTV Movie Awards. She checked herself in without a photo-op.  For once let’s not drag it out with this stupid girl, shall we?

Oh Lordy.  Someone tell Joy Behar that calling herself a "comedian" is like saying that Joan Rivers still looks "human."  Seriously.

_______

I didn’t set out to watch "The View" this morning, incidentally.   Please!  If I had actually set out to watch it, I would have made sure to actually know,

a) when it was actually on (right after my Martha?  Seriously?)
b) and what channel it was on (I honestly had no idea it was on ABC)

Plus, I think that if I’d set out to see the show, I would have made sure I’d watched while my behated Rosie O’Donnell was still on, so I could spew some hatred at the screen.

All that happened was that I couldn’t reach the remote control when Herr Meow drifted off to sleep during his nap.  I’d been successfully going back and forth between "Sesame Street" and "Martha"  but then the remote slipped off and it was a momentous happening.

Honestly, though, who on earth seriously watches this show?  *reaches for remote, presses "Guide" button*

Ooh.  I had been wondering when "Ellen" was on!  I’m suddenly struck by the fact that of all these morning shows, the only one I know for sure is on at eleven is "Tyra" and even then I seldom watch it (I did catch the one where the doctor confirmed her boobs were real, however).  iVillage live?  Are you serious?  Can’t people just go to the website?

Double ooh: an ad for "Hell’s Kitchen."  Now THAT is a fun show– I love seeing everyone fall to blubbering pieces after being sooooo confident, and more than anything I love seeing Gordon Ramsay yelling at everyone but slowly transforming from evil fire-breathing monster to nice and paternal mentor when people win challenges.  Plus, the show makes me hungry and deeply disturbed about food all at once.  Irresistible.

Regroup:  daytime TV is weird, but I guess it’s not that different at its core from our current nighttime tv.  More than anything, it strikes me as interesting that we view reality tv as such a recent phenomenon, when all these daytime shows –which have been going on for much longer– are nothing but a live version of the same thing.  Sure, you can’t quite compare following the lives of seven strangers as they stop being polite and start getting real with a whole bunch of freaks going at each others’ throats on Donahue, but surely you can see that both shows allow you a seemingly unedited glimpse into people behaving naughtily?

I guess we just love to be voyeurs of other people’s lives –whether we watch conversations or interviews or live talk shows where people who are thoroughly inept at living go to discuss their problems (and seemingly, also to reveal them to unsuspecting friends and family), or we watch competitions where people who vie for new lives while also including gratuitous footage of their lives and interactions.  It doesn’t matter: it all accomplishes the same goal and satisfies our fetish.  Daytime television used to be the domain of bored housewives, but the truth is that more people than we think do watch– and for those who couldn’t, there had to be a way to reformat the same addictive unscripted plotlines to make them more appealing (dignified?) for the evening.  And the end result is that we crave that format more and more– it’s like gossip but in three-dee.

Alrighty.  Tyler Florence’s tacos are making me way too hungry so I need to go raid the fridge.
But if you feel like it, tell me what bad-for-you shows you enjoy so I can watch them too.  Or, alternately, so I can point at you and giggle.

04 Jun This entry was published on June 4, 2007 at 12:20 pm and is filed under News of the World, Pop Culture. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.