At this, the end of the spring television season, it seems that it might be time to go ahead and own up to something.

I am all about the good television. There’s nothing better than TV that makes you whip out the Beckett or Dickens comparisons, or TV that seems transcendent of the form and leaves you gasping for appropriate superlatives. That sort of television is why I do what I do.

I also watch The Real Housewives of New York City. I have seen bits and pieces of all of the Real Housewives franchises, actually, but have been watching this season of RHNYC with increasing astonishment? Horror? Fascination? Dismay? Disgust? …Pleasure? Well, clearly, since I kept watching it week after week. These things can be said about many, many reality shows, and I don’t necessarily want to think about that phenomenon more broadly right now, but I do want to think a little about why this specific season of RHNYC has been extra specially bonkers.

It’s been clear that this season of the show has attained truly impressive levels of insanity, and that it’s come from a few different sources. Several intense feuds have helped keep everyone at a high pitch of emotional angst, thanks to the perpetually shifting allegiances and weeks-old betrayals that often flare up again in the presence of new insults. Each woman has some motivating trauma in their personal lives that has helped keep them at each other’s throats, and however scripted the vacations, parties, lunches, and chance meet-ups may be, the real ire these women feel for each other has been quite convincing. The biggest feud has been between Jill and Bethenny, whose ongoing rancor splits the group into teams and sparked further drama between Alex and Jill, LuAnn and Bethenny, Ramona and Jill, and basically every permutation thereof. In addition to all of that, Kelley’s apparent breakdown fueled many episodes worth of anger, speculation and finally, resigned concern for her mental health (an angle which the women have agreed is best but which the show refuses to deal with).

Within the last several years, television has begun to capitalize on the pleasure of watching a show that’s hard to follow, which can be said about everything from Lost to The Wire to Private Practice. After a season like this, there’s no question that Real Housewives has become as crazy and complex a multi-plot soap as any scripted show. Why is Alex mad at Jill again? Oh right, there was that thing Jill said about Alex’s kids at that department store party, which calls back to some snide comments Luann made in season one. What has made this show so much more complicated to follow as a viewer is that half of what fuels these intricate, constantly shifting relationships happens outside the perspective of the show. The editors do as best they can to show us how one comment at a party creates a rippling impression that someone dislikes someone else, but so far, the Real Housewives franchises have had to work around the drama created when one woman says something to a tabloid about someone else, or leaks private information to a blogger, or makes a snide comment on twitter. It’s hard to depict every aspect of these women’s anger toward each other, but even harder when the things that make the most drama aren’t even on the table.

This is what has made season three of RHNYC so remarkably bizarre. The fame of being reality show stars has fully coalesced with the process of being on a reality show. Unlike The Hills, which chose to just ignore the fact that its subjects were now also celebrities, RHNYC often tries but fails to draw the same boundaries. Much of what fueled the Bethenny/Jill feud was probably Jill’s anger that Bethenny is getting her own reality show, but that goes unmentioned. At the same time, there was no way to show how angry Bethenny was at Jill without mentioning that Bethenny’s pregnancy was somehow leaked to the gossip blogs. So this whole season, in addition to being all the typical nuttiness and jealous, was also a mess of slowly disintegrating borders between reality and the reality show.

I’m not going to try to claim that what resulted was in any way classy (much though Countess DeLesseps may disagree) or dignified, but I’m also not going to claim that I didn’t watch it. And in admitting that I watched, I have to also admit I found it bizarre, upsetting, and entertaining.

The cover story of this weekend’s New York Times Sunday Magazine is a piece by Michael Pollan about the decline of cooking in America. Pollan writes about premade and microwaveable meals, he discusses the role of cooking in the history of humanity, and he points out the relationship between cooking meals at home and good health. Where much of his work has then gone on to explore the production side of food (where it comes from, what’s actually in it, big agriculture, etc.) the focus of this argument is about another significant aspect of food culture in America: food television.

Pollan first describes some of the history of food on television, beginning with Julia Child, and then he goes on to speculate about the changing role of programming on The Food Network. He points out that the average American spends 27 minutes a day on food preparation, but that millions spend more than twice that time watching food shows like Top Chef, Chopped, or The Next Food Network Star. “What this suggests,” Pollan writes, “is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking for themselves – an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.” What’s up with cooking, he wonders, and in a related query, what’s up with television?

The full article has many answers to this question, and I highly recommend spending the time to read the whole thing. In all his queasily detailed descriptions of flame-licked beef of gooey doughnuts crammed into mouths, I was surprised Pollan didn’t fall back on one of the well-known truisms of food television – that it is, in its style, cinematography, and format, nearly identical to pornography. Pollan laments the absence of sensuality and pleasure in televised descriptions of food preparation, and while I absolutely agree that convenience and speed have become a much higher priority than pride in manual labor, there’s certainly no dearth of sensuality on Guy’s Big Bite. (Because seriously? That sounds like a film you can’t rent until you’re 18.)

Pollan argues that our pleasure in food has been redirected away from preparation and onto the experience of consumption. We watch Guy Fieri shovel fried clams into his mouth without ever imagining making them ourselves. We marvel as Iron Chefs dash around Kitchen Stadium, a culinary battleground that even further distances their cooking from our own kitchens. Still, I wonder whether the whole story is that easy when Food Network also features Ina Garten grinning with pleasure as she covers her hands with flour to knead dough and Alton Brown jokily explaining how easy it is to cook a duck. Sure, some food television is worse than others, but not every show focuses solely on images of French fries tumbling into open mouths.

Doughnut money shot

It may not be that food television is inherently pushing us away from food preparation (after all, it’s not as though pornography is generally considered to dissuade us from sex). No, it’s television that pushes us away. Food television is, after all, one of the original incarnations of reality television. With the success of a broader range of shows that feature “real” people doing “real” things (American Idol, Survivor, Big Brother, Biggest Loser and countless others), food reality has grown to match its successful competitors. It has to be a contest. It has to be real, but not so real that the audience is bored. Reality television is allowed to speak directly to us – Lose weight! Don’t be a pregnant sixteen year-old! Vote for your favorite contestant! – but we are always the audience. We’re not going to go out and learn how to ballroom dance, so the closest we come to participating is to text in our vote or order something in a restaurant because we saw Giada make it.

Michael Pollan is, of course, absolutely right about food television and our relationship with it. Anything televised is a spectator sport. But he doesn’t address the place where I think future generations of people will learn how to cook, the place where participation is expected, the place where preparation is discussed and amended in great, painstaking detail. Whence the internet, Michael Pollan? Where did the food blogs go? I certainly can’t argue that the state of American cooking isn’t dire, or that food television isn’t a contributing factor, but while food blogs are a growing, popular presence on the internet, I still see a glimmer of hope.

Yeah, screw television! Internet rocks!

Wait, where am I? How did I get to this place?! I didn’t mean it, I take it back! Sort of!

As per comment suggestion, I’m watching Slings and Arrows, so no worries. Next week will be back to the standard “television is awesome!” party line.

I haven’t yet posted about reality programming, largely because my personal preference is always more in the scripted drama line. However entertaining reality shows can be, I’ve yet to see one as good – as intelligent, thoughtful, surprising, beautiful, well-written, or provocative – as more traditional scripted programming. It’s not as though I don’t watch reality shows. I spent three full days a few months ago catching up on the entire Real Housewives of New York oeuvre, and it was awesome, but I wasn’t proud. And I could be posting tonight about any of the many respectable, critically acclaimed shows I have watched this summer, shows like Deadwood that completely astonished me. But in all honesty, I’ve spent several hours out of the last twenty-four watching Toddlers and Tiaras.

Eden Wood doesn't want more lipstick than she's already wearing

If you’re not familiar with this bastion of child exploitation, Toddlers and Tiaras follows several spoiled children and their insane mothers as they participate in pageant competitions. The first episode of the new second season aired last night on TLC, and it was nothing short of a masterpiece of trainwreck television. I was repulsed, I was disgusted, I kept watching. There are plenty of stern words to be aimed at the individual participants, who included one mother who dressed her four-year-old daughter in a Vegas showgirls costume, and another woman who blatantly favored one of her twin daughters over the other. The first season was similar in format, but occasionally featured girls like Meaghan, who made a bet with her mother that if she won the pageant, she would be allowed to visit a snake farm. (You rock, Meaghan). Now, though, Toddlers and Tiaras has learned from our national fascination with the borderline/dangerous parenting featured on TLC’s current bread and butter show Jon and Kate + 8. Behold:

Mom talking about BreAnne smiles, Mom talking about AshLynn grimaces

“BreAnne does look a lot like mommy, and [is] probably the prettiest out of the five. And then AshLynn, she’s really skinny, and a little bit larger nosed than BreAnne. She’s very timid, she’s very reserved, she usually takes the backseat when it comes to BreAnne. BreAnne stands out because BreAnne is out-going and fun and full of life and AshLynn is just AshLynn.”

My initial impulse would be to say that it’s far more upsetting that an entire industry exists to teach girls how to be judged on their beauty than it is to make a television show about that industry. And yet, that’s clearly not the case here. While these babies grin and twirl, the camera clearly focuses most intently when they weep and scream. Rivalries, temper tantrums, and pouting (or as one pageant mom calls them, “diva moments”) take precedence over self-confidence and happiness. Even worse, much of the focus is on the excess necessary to participate in the “glitz” pageants, and the camera delights in closeups on fake eyelashes, hairpieces, crinoline, and tanning booths. It’s pleasant to read this attention as an indictment of those unnatural, preternaturally mature kindergarteners, but it’s also too easy. Just as on Rock of Love, screen time is the reward for bad behavior. I fear the Meaghans of the world will no longer have a place on this show, and I’m sorry about that, but not surprised.

Me too, Meaghan. Me too.