On the Kardashians, Big Rich Atlanta, The Americans, and Somehow, As Always, Girls
I’ve recently come to truly abhor winter. For a while, I loved it, because everyone stayed indoors and left me alone. I could go for runs in Prospect Park and not see another living soul. Then, I started working from home, and now I’m alone all of the time. One obstacle — other people — was removed, leaving behind an even greater obstacle — myself — and lately I find myself even more unhappy than I’ve ever been before.
In the summer, at least, I could spend large swaths of time outdoors. In Valentino Park in Red Hook, reading. Or at the Brooklyn Bridge Pool. Now, the waterfront of Red Hook smells like open sewage, and the Brooklyn Bridge pool has been dismantled.
The weather has been so fucking wacko that I’m afraid to leave the house, because I’m never dressed properly. I thought it was supposed to be 50 degrees yesterday so I wore a dress and a leather jacket. WRONG. It was 50 degrees with 40 mph winds, and I was almost stripped of the skin off my bones.
Last week, it was literally too cold to go outside. And this upcoming week promises only to be slightly warmer. Without any reason to leave, I am trapped here. Which is why I feel justified watching as much television as I can find on Project Free TV, my new illegal download site.
You can find almost anything on Project Free TV. Movies. Fringe, the program starring Joshua Jackson. Community, which I am ripping through like it’s a bong and I have the lung capacity to smoke from it. Which I don’t, by the way. Occasionally I fall asleep while it’s streaming on my lap.
What you cannot find is any reality television. In fact, without cable, I don’t watch any reality television at all. Which is why, when I want to watch reality television, I have to go to my friend Shark Mobczak’s house. I think I’m using “which” a lot in this post, but I don’t have time to go back and fix that.
After Shark Mobczak and I devoured a “grandfather hour” pepperoni pizza at Rubirossa — we ate there at 5pm — we headed back to his apartment. Shark is decidedly a television junkie. A lot of people waste their time in bars. Or in yoga class. Or at work. Mark wastes a lot of time planning how he can fit in all of his programs on his DVR. Sundays, he told me, are “only for professionals.”
We started the night watching “The Americans,” a program starring Felicity and some guy I think plays a gay brother on another show. In other words, Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys. I have a lot of trouble looking at Keri Russell and not thinking “Ben Noel Dean & Deluca,” but she looks hot as an older women — less bad hair decisions, and more flaunting her tiny little body.
The program is about Russian sleeper spies implanted in a suburb of Washington DC. It’s this season’s “middle-brow intellectual” offering. I know I’m going to like it a lot eventually, but in my starved state, it didn’t pull me nearly as much as the next show, “Big Rich Atlanta.”
Big Rich Atlanta is a spin off of its cousin, “Big Rich Texas,” which is definitely one of the trashiest shows on television. Basically, it’s like Real Housewives only for lesser people. If that’s even possible. Let’s just say the Real Housewives look like Jackie Kennedy in comparison to these drunk ho-bag bitches.
I think the premise is that the characters have to be mother-daughter teams. The mothers look better than the daughters because they’ve had so much plastic surgery; the daughters are slightly bloated from too much alcohol consumption, and unerringly stupid. Shark absolutely loves this show because everyone is so mean to each other.
Last night, for instance, the only single character on the show, Ashlee, who is 27 but looks somewhere between 115-120 in cryogenic years, forced a nineteen year old girl to tell a seventeen year old girl she was fat during “pageant training.” Then, while the 17 year old blubbered and sobbed, she told her that she was just a flower pot getting in the way, and should leave immediately.
I think both Mark and I get some enjoyment out of these reality stars playing terrible people. Because the shows are so obviously staged — and the characters so willingly cast — you don’t feel bad watching them rip each other apart. At the end of the day, you know they need the money because they bought a McMansion after getting divorced and can’t afford to upkeep it and the four Range Rovers they have parked in the garage. You also know that no one has any respect for them anyway — no reputations are being damaged in the making.
It’s like watching a bunch of rhinoceroses wearing tutus in an open air cage at the zoo. They don’t stand for anything — they merely entertain. You can say to yourself, “poor creatures,” and then go eat a fucking ice cream and forget about the whole thing.
Just to take a second to mention Girls, which I find to be increasingly abhorrent. The characters on Girls are equally bad people as the Big Rich Texas Girls, if not worse — in the last episode, Hannah bought coke from a recovering junkie, and then had the audacity to feel annoyed at him for following her, rather than to feel sympathy that she, by getting him to buy drugs, also might have gotten hooked back on heroin. The worst thing to happen on Big Rich Atlanta is that one sister invites the other sister’s social enemy over for margaritas.
On second thought, the characters on Girls are far, far worse people, and they’re not doing it for money. They’re doing it for higher purposes — “art.” I’m starting to think about Adorno and the Holocaust here, and that’s not a good sign. I’m also failing to make the good point festering in my head — I’ll save that for another time. Back, for now, to reality tv.
Anyway, so Big Rich Atlanta ended, and we tried to figure out what to watch next. I knew that I wanted to watch “Kourtney and Kim Take Miami,” but Mark’s not that into the Kardashians. “No way,” he said, before I could even mention it. After waving between “Ice Loves Coco,” and the beast Kimora Lee Simmons reality television show, we were confused. What was the greater of two evils? “Kardashians,” I told Mark.
He acquiesced.
But we couldn’t find it anywhere. Not on Entertainment Channel 1012. Not on any live television. The Kardashians have so effectively figured out how to make money that the only way we could watch the program was if we bought it for $2.99 on iTunes. Which, of course, we did.
Now, I don’t know why I like the Kardashians. I’m going to start by making the shameful confession that I love Kim Kardashians style. She’s like Beyonce without any of the tinge of scariness. Beyonce has a professional tape her for 16 hours a day; Kim Kardashian leaves it up to the people.
I admit that not much happens in any given Kardashian television show. Maybe someone gets drunk. Maybe someone says something behind someone else’s back. It’s kind of almost innocent, wholesome, sitcom kind of fun.
Kim Kardashian hardly drinks. Her older sister, Kourtney, is a devoted mother. Their younger sister, Khloe, is kind of a beast, but she makes funny jokes.
It appeals to the young child in me who liked playing Barbies in the attic — only instead of Barbies, it’s a bunch of Armenians with gigantic asses wearing dressed-up sweatpants running around on my television screen.
I’m not even going to recount the show. All I can say is that Kanye West bought Kim a miniature white Persian cat, which spent most of the show pooping on the carpet and getting lost. “Oh my god, that poor cat,” Mark scowled as he ripped out clumps of his hair. “I cannot believe these bitches.”
But underneath the sarcastic tones, I noticed a hint of softness, and knew that he would be forever hooked on the Kardashians, just like me. Or at least he would be when he had nothing else to watch on TV.
