We Don’t Need Another Villain

May I have the strength to not watch Part II of the Real Housewives of New York reunion tomorrow night.

Yes, I am a fan of reality TV. Let me rephrase that, I am a fan of good reality TV. I didn’t watch Flavor of Love, Rock of Love, Whatever of Love nor any Real World episodes since the season Puck got kicked out of the San Francisco house. I don’t watch dating competitions, cooking competitions, shows that exploit people’s mental illnesses or any kind of show where the survivalist host puts any kind of “food” in their mouth that can’t be ordered off of any menu found in the continental United States.

That said, I do however love American Idol, The Glee Project, Mob Wives, 19 Kids and Counting, Kate Plus 8, Bethenny Ever After, the glorious Real Housewives of New Jersey and pretty much any show airing at any time on HGTV (Antonio Ballatore, I’m talkin’ to you!)

Somehow though, from time-to-time, I find myself stuck in a moment of lost remote wandering and the channel of my television will stop on something horrifying depicting a woman, not knowing she was pregnant, giving birth in a commode. Or little girls, who barely just learned to walk, now shimmying in heels onstage in painted face wearing fringed flapper dresses. Or, in the most soul-sucking of occasions, I’ll get trapped in a state of lazy remote controlling and witness any other Real Housewives franchise other than the New Jersey edition. (The New Jersey ladies are excluded from this. Those Manzos are class acts!)

It appears that someone at the Bravo TV network thinks that we, as an audience, love to watch women fight. And, by “fight” I mean not just your everyday bickering, but also dirty name-calling, weave yanking, constant etiquette-correcting (Countess… ), airing-of-dirty-laundry other than one’s own and tossing off accusations of infidelity as casually as one would recite their grocery list.

No, no, no! My TV time is precious to me! The majority of the world, I’d like to think, also uses their TV time to relax after a long day. Everyday life has enough drama in it. Who wants to spend their down-time drawing themselves into even more of it? There’s a reason that a show that started out being titled 16 Kids and Counting lasted long enough to have to change its title to 19 Kids and Counting. Those Duggars are drama-free! It’s relaxing and inspiring to watch them doing good deeds in their long skirts. No hair-pulling there!

But, back to last Monday night’s vortex into which I could not free myself. I can’t even recap it, it was such a train wreck! There was something going on with blondes vs. brunettes, more manner-correcting from the Countess, lots of screaming, eye-rolling and gnashing of teeth.  But, mostly it was just an hour-and-a-half of women in screeching voices talking over one another so you couldn’t understand a word of what anyone was saying.

So much so that the host even, in a moment of losing his cool, shouted “Stop talking over each other! I can’t understand you!” [More screeching] “Shut up, I have to ask you more questions!” [More screeching at an increased degree of elevation] “Shut up!” [Screech screech] “SHUT THE F*** UP!!!” I kid you not. You can Google it if you want, I’m not going to find the link for you because I don’t want to get sucked back in. (And, P.S., this host is also the producer of this show.)  I was frozen in a state of shock and awe and couldn’t turn it off. I went to bed that night with a headache that, a week later, has still left stiletto-prints on my brain.

I need to find a book or something to distract me tomorrow night. Maybe we can unplug the cable for just one day. Mondays are exhausting as it is, my thumb may be tired and not able to control the changer with proper gusto.

There is one thing that would make my plight a lot easier… television producers (Andy Cohen): We don’t need another villain. We need every charitable Duggar and wise-cracking Manzo to have their own spin-off. We need infants, not in make-up or floating in toilets, but cooing. (Perhaps like a small-screen version of the movie Babies.)  We need programming that will lessen the frequency of my Tylenol purchases. And, what else? Well, those kittens on that Animal Planet show are pretty cute too.