I cannot even tell you how terrible Outsourced is. Despite my reservations, I felt it necessary for me to watch the first episode: I’ve been prematurely bashing it just because it took over Parks and Rec’s fall premiere slot, and although I feel the trailers were sufficiently off-putting, it does seem a little unfair to go around badmouthing something I’ve never even watched.

After watching the first episode of Outsourced, my primary concern now is that I did not voice my opinion vociferously enough. It manages to cross the barrier from being merely unfunny (admittedly, a cardinal sin for something that’s supposed to be a comedy), into being something that’s actively insulting. It’s like going through a checkout line at the grocery store, except when you hand the clerk your debit card, not only do you not get any food in return for your money, the clerk deducts $100 from your account and then punches you in the nose. In fact, in attempting to come up with an accurate portrayal of watching Outsourced, the best thing I could think of was my husband’s description of the experience of viewing Gone With The Wind, which he suggested was like “eating a candle that’s burning.” I suppose, however, that just illustrating my own reaction to the pilot is probably not enough to qualify this as a useful piece of writing, and so I turn now to why this show actually is so, so bad.

The Mid American Novelties call center

At best, Outsourced’s premise is ill advised. I’m not saying it would be impossible to make a funny show about an Indian call center for an American company, but the obstacles just seem so monumental as to bring the entire undertaking into question. Our protagonist (?) Todd is an attractive, white, all-American kinda guy who gets shipped off to India to manage the call center for the Mid American Novelties company, an organization that specializes in products like fake vomit, America’s #1 mugs, and, of course, Jingle Jugs, a set of women’s breasts mounted on a plaque that twitch in rhythm with Jingle Bells. This is the product Todd holds up in front of his call center and touts as the quintessential American product – sure, he says, no one needs it, but they can’t stop you from making it. The joke here is supposed to be “haha, the quintessential American product is a set of ridiculous novelty boobs that play Christmas carols,” and while that is a barrel of laughs, there are actually even less funny things going on underneath. As Todd holds the Jingle Jugs aloft, one of his employees instinctively reaches to make sure her sari is adequately covering her chest. So not only are Jingle Jugs funny, and the idea of them being an American product is funny, but the mere prospect of actual breasts is even funnier, and so is the idea that a woman would want to cover them up, particularly those crazy Indian women with their foreign ideas of modesty! Oh ho ho! What mirth!

The Jingle Jugs. So, so funny.

Really, the whole thing is built to be as insulting as possible, and manages to enact the racism it supposedly mocks at every turn. One of the classic opening bits is Todd’s introduction to the Indian office, where he goes around asking his employee’s names, only to find each one more incomprehensible or silly than the next. Todd either can’t hear or can’t understand these characters’ names, except for one guy with the name Manmeet, which Todd of course finds hysterical. Not only is Todd exempt from learning his employee’s names (because of course, they are absurd!), the viewer is also granted this exemption. No need to learn details about these people, dear American audience! They’re just here for you to laugh at. You know what else is funny? Indian food. Also Indian accents, Indian ignorance of American customs, and Indian religions.

I do have to be fair, though, there is one thing about Outsourced that made me laugh. Right at the end of the episode, I realized that the cans of soda have been changed to a fake brand, and the props that look like cans of RC cola actually read “PC.” I’ll admit it. I snorted out loud.

NBC kicked off its new, post-The Jay Leno Show programming last night by interrupting the closing Olympic ceremonies for Jerry Seinfeld’s new show The Marriage Ref.

Tom Papa, host of The Marriage Ref

I’m going to have to go ahead and out myself right now as previously holding out some hope that The Marriage Ref could be funny. The concept, at its most stripped down and simple, is actually sort of interesting. Real life couples re-live some knockdown drag-out fight, and then a panel of celebrity guests weigh in on who’s right. Inevitably in the course of discussing the couple, the celebrities reveal something about themselves and their own marital experiences, hidden inside the chortling and wink-winking. It combines the voyeuristic impulses of shows like Wife Swap and SuperNanny with our culture-wide fascination in repeating the “celebrities are just like us!” revelation over and over again. There’s also a pleasantly optimistic undercurrent to the whole thing, at least in theory – these fights are awful, repetitive, and silly, but they’re not going to be the end of this marriage.

In practice, it turns out, The Marriage Ref is just terrible. The worst part of it all is the sports-themed framework, which attempts to box everything up into stupid, pre-packaged sporty segments like “The Call” and “The Play of the Day.” None of the sports metaphors aid the discussion, and instead, most interrupt the already stilted conversational flow. Natalie Morales’ “Just the Facts, Ma’am” is the most absurd of these, a pre-written bit where the host Tom Papa interrupts the celebrities to ask Natalie for more information on a certain topic, and then she reads out some statistics that are supposed to help the audience better understand a situation. The first couple’s fight is about a husband who wants to stuff and display his dead dog. Natalie informs us that about 1,000 Americans do this every year. No one knows what to say. Tom Papa is also a serious contributor to the show’s herky-jerky quality – Alec Baldwin is a pretty funny guy, so when Tom Papa interrupts him to give us a silly, mindless, clearly rehearsed bit, he comes off as a little kid being a pest at the grown-up table. “Hey, look at me! Look at me look at me look look look at meeeeeee!!” *Sticks a chopstick in his nose.*

Jerry Seinfeld is not laughing with you, sir. He is laughing at you.

Aside from these problems with the show’s execution, it’s clear there’s also a deep flaw in the concept of The Marriage Ref that I hadn’t really appreciated until seeing it. The entire idea here is that we, normal Americans, are offering ourselves up so that celebrities can judge us. While my initial impulse was that coming together to talk about marriage could have a humanizing effect on the celebrity panel, the reverse is actually true. The concept of the show relies on the inherent acceptance that celebrities are so much better than the normal couples that they can arbitrate their marriages based on a two-minute-long clip. And we will accept that judgment, because OMG Madonna! If The Marriage Ref is really sports-themed, then the couples are not really the opposing teams – the couple is the poor ping-pong ball that’s been offered up for the amusement of the celebrities to bat around and then discard. What could be more humiliating?

It’ll be interesting to see how the show performs, and whether the swift and terrible critical response seeps into popular perception. Right now it looks like NBC is going to have to find another lifeboat.

It’s been a while since I blogged about a new television show just because it was so unpleasant I had to share. Generally, I like to like things. This week, though, I stumbled over a new show that’s souring my whole afternoon, and so I’m sharing.

On paper, I can sort of see why Past Life is appealing. It’s a procedural format with the standard quirky lead characters, it’s got a healthy undercurrent of fantasy – or at least, mysticism – and a strong whiff of inoffensive spiritualism, complete with pseudo-scientific terminology. It’s Fringe without the horror/scifi genre atmospherics, Medium without the strong lead character and slowly developing confidence in clairvoyance, and Cold Case without the historical backgrounds. It’s a lot of “without”s, but with very few added elements to fill the resulting voids. This in itself is not that remarkable, and helps Past Life descend into the ranks of “meh” without distinguishing itself as especially poor. These things, however…

Past life regression trauma looks like this. Convicing, no?

1. The fantasy/pseudo-science is insultingly ill constructed. Reincarnation is the essential underpinning of Past Life, with the fictional premise that people can access their former selves through regression and those regressive traumas can be used to solve crimes committed in previous lives. The pilot episode begins with a teenage boy shaken into some disturbing memory of his past life, and then jumps straight into gumshoe, sort-through-the-case-files detection, with nary a hint of wonder or curiosity about, say… how reincarnation happens? Are you actually all those previous people, or do they just live in your brain with you? Why people aren’t constantly experiencing regression trauma, if reincarnation is real? I’m not saying fantasy always requires real-world explanations, but it needs to be detailed and internally coherent enough to at least create an illusion of plausibility. Also, how could a mother with a disturbed son happen across reincarnation as a possible explanation?

2. It’s narratively lazy. That plot I explained in the previous point – solving crimes through past life regressions – is not the most obvious procedural premise. You’d think it would require a reasonable amount of set-up, some healthy suspicion about the idea, at least a sense that its practitioners are mavericks intent on bucking the system. You’d be wrong. The pilot episode introduces a cop to the team of past life specialists, whose purpose is ostensibly to ask the audience’s questions, to be skeptical, to doubt. His doubting lasts approximately five minutes before the cop is swept away into the bland flood of reincarnated murder victims, completely shortcutting the whole world-building process.

The doubting cop, eagerly searching for reincarnated murder victims

Even worse, the procedural details are lazy! The show is set in New York City, and to identify the reincarnated murder victim, the detective picks up on the detail of a building with a red light on the top. He quickly points out could be almost anything in New York City… but only a few things in Washington, DC. Why Washington, DC? Who knows! Presumably, it could also be any of the millions of tall buildings across the world, but no! It’s the Washington Monument! Case solved!

3. Richard Schiff. Why is he in this show? I know this is primarily my own nostalgic love of The West Wing surfacing and unfairly coloring my criticism here, but Toby Ziegler, why on earth are you hanging out with these people who believe in reincarnation? He looks unconscionably erudite standing next to the two main leads, totally unbalancing the otherwise uninterrupted atmosphere of goofy spiritualism. Really, as bad as the rest of Past Life is, Richard Schiff was the nail in the coffin for me. Heh, coffin. ‘Cause, you know, they’re dead…

Seriously, that right there was the most entertaining part of watching Past Life.

After several tries on three separate occasions, I finally made it all the way through the Star Wars Holiday Special. I then spent at least the next hour curled up in a ball on the couch, whimpering in distress, and it took me a full hour more to recover any desire to live. That may seem like an excessive, over-the-top account of what happened, but trust me: I truly wish I were exaggerating. It is far and away the worst thing I have ever watched. I know we were harsh with Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas in the last post, but I think that was due in large part to a complaint with Mrs. Otter’s somewhat shrill singing voice. This is so far outside that, so horrendous and unspeakable that just writing this post is giving me post-traumatic stress.

Sure, I could give you details about why it’s so awful. The fact that the majority of it is in un-subtitled Wookie, that not a single joke lands, that any action scene is cut from footage from the first movie, that the climax involves a number of Wookies wandering around a cavern in enormous red Snuggies and howling softly to themselves…these items are all suggestive, but they do not approach an understanding of just how deeply it all goes wrong.

A little history: when the Star Wars Holiday Special first aired I was not alive, but apparently it was so instantly and universally reviled that it was pulled from the airways immediately thereafter, never again to be released for public viewing. The only reason we have access to it now is that a few VHS copies recorded from the initial airing have surfaced around the Internet. The best version I could find came with recently added Spanish subtitles, which actually added a whiff of coherence to the whole thing that I’m certain the original lacks. The general premise is that Chewbacca and Han are trying to make it back to Chewie’s home planet for Life Day, the Wookie version of Christmas. The Empire intrudes and creates some vague, non-determinate and never-defined barricade, which delays the Millennium Falcon for a while. Meanwhile, we watch Chewie’s family, including his wife Malla, his father Itchy, and his son Lumpy, as they worry about him in their weirdly seventies ranch-style tree house (because that is a much more interesting plot than evading an Imperial fleet). Luke, Leia, and the band Jefferson Starship all make appearances. Part of it is animated. Part of it is Bea Arthur singing in the Mos Eisley Cantina. None of it is watchable.

Bea Arthur plays a singing bartender. I really wish I didn't have to remember her this way.

What I find most remarkable about the Star Wars Holiday Special is that like many Christmas specials, it is built as a variety show, featuring a hard-to-make-it-home-for-Christmas plotline, a number of musical guests, a few surprise celebrity appearances, and an underlying cheesiness. It’s a format built on the idea that you can appeal to many different people through diversity, giving you a number of flavors and fictional experiences. And yet…it’s almost as if the variety in this instance makes each individual piece worse. Rather than relieving you by moving quickly from one thing to the next, it’s more of a frying pan/fire situation, where you are continually struck anew by how painful it all is. I haven’t even mentioned yet what actually happens in these little moments, which is almost always us looking at characters watching other things – for example, we watch Malla watch an entire Wookie cooking show while she follows along in her own kitchen. We watch Lumpy watch Harvey Korman show him how to put his new Life Day present together. We watch Chewie’s elderly father watch what appears to be Wookie soft-core porn, giving us both the uncomfortable sex fantasy and the accompanying Wookie groans of approval.

Harvey Korman proves that no instruction manual is funny, adult Wookie entertainment, and we watch Lumpy watching some psychedelic tumblers

It is nauseating. It is every bit as unbearable as I was led to expect. If you consider the addition of the cutesy young son and crotchety old father, the knockoff Christmas holiday, and the presence of Bea Arthur, it’s as though the Holiday Special jumps the shark several times in the course of two hours. On the plus side, I now have a new understanding of bad TV, a chasm of deep darkness I had never fully explored in the television landscape. On the downside…I can only hope I am able to recover.

Merry Christmas!

While trolling around lists of Christmas specials, I happened across something called Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, which I had never seen before but which apparently had Muppets in it. “Muppets,” I thought. “That’s gotta be at least a little interesting.” So I sat down with David and Laura and made them watch with me and comment while watching.

They hate me a little now.

First, a little plot summary, and then some images accompanied by our comments as we watched the special. Ma and Emmet Otter are living alone after the death of Pa Otter, and are struggling to make ends meet. They sing about how important it is to not have holes in their washtubs. They sing about how sad they are that Pa Otter died. Then, they discover that there’s a contest in town with a prize of $50 dollars, and both Ma and Emmet decide to enter so they can buy each other Christmas presents. In order to enter, though, Ma pawns their toolbox and Emmet has to put a hole in the washtub so he can play in the jug band. While both of their acts are good (Emmet, of course, plays in a Jug Band), they are ousted at the last moment by a seventies rock band called The Nightmare. Saddened, Ma and Emmet head home without either prize money or the tools of their trade. On the way, they realize their songs would work well together, and as they sing the newly combined song, the judge of the contest offers them a job singing at his restaurant. The End.

Laura: Oh man. That singing is not nice to listen to.

Kathryn:  Aww, look at their cute little hats though. Okay, wow, this is a song about bathing suits. Giant bathing suits.

Laura: I don’t think I could probably describe what is happening now.

Kathryn: Here it goes: two otters in a rowboat are singing about bathing suits.

David: “From the one bathing suit that your grandma otter wore …

Laura:  …it’s about the bathing suit his grandmother used to wear??

Laura: Oh god. This is way too depressing. I can’t handle this.

Kathryn: This is a recession-era Christmas special.

David: Oedipus otter?

Laura: Definitely.

David: “Sometimes you even sound like your paw.”

Kathryn:  Hehehe, “paw.”

Laura: Her skirts are flying up.

David: I thought she was going to go down that slide and land on top of her son.

Laura: Gross.

David: Kind of like those scenes in rom-coms when the two leads accidentally make physical contact.

Laura: Oh of course there’s a contest.

Kathryn: Of course it’s on Christmas Eve.

Laura: A JUG BAND CONTEST, perchance?

David: “Well it’s going to be a long night.” – truer words have ne’er been spoken. Now they’re just tossing puppets around.

Laura: Interesting choreography with puppets is very difficult.

David:  Kill me.

Laura: Why did you make us watch this, Kathryn?!?

Kathryn: I love you guys

Laura: The hoooligans!!

Kathryn: Oh man, they have fancy lights and seventies sparkle capes!

Laura: This is terrible.

Kathryn:  What?! WHAT?!

Laura: They shouldn’t be able to play, they’re from river bottom and not waterville.

Kathryn: And how could a snake possibly play a guitar?! I seriously do not understand how this band is in the same Christmas special as the jug band – they are two totally different paradigms.

Kathryn: The Nightmare Band won, and they have no tools and no washtub and they will starve to death. What will they do now?

David: Learn the true meaning of Christmas?

Laura: This is officially the most depressing thing i’ve ever seen.

David: I hope they fall through the ice and die.

David: Sweet and final hour? God this would have been a sweet hour if I hadn’t started this christmas special. I’m not getting this time back.

Laura:  Not ever ever.

David: I feel like I want it to be my final hour.

Kathryn: Wacka wacka.

My favorite television shows, and what for me are without question “the best” television shows, are complex and demanding. They often have disturbingly ambiguous protagonists or an enormous cast of characters, many simultaneous plotlines that require active attention on the viewer’s part, and use the opportunity of being on television to dissect and portray frustrating, upsetting, complicated issues in life. When I want to zone out and not think about, say, Russian Formalism and its impact on theories of the novel, those are not the shows I watch. I watch Law and Order.

Which is why it was especially disturbing to me to flip on the most recent episode of Law and Order: SVU (Law and Order: Sensationalist Victorian plotlines Updated so they have a lot more rape) and realize that it had leapt beyond its characteristically simplistic structure and was attempting to deal with two plots in the same episode. I know. I nearly fell off my couch. The show opted for one of the traditional methods of double plotting, which is to have one story be about work and one about someone’s personal life, but as the two stories grew uncomfortably close to each other, everything about the episode collapsed into a gelatinous, undifferentiated heap of angst-ridden teenagers and father issues.

As you can see, I have placed the image of Stabler in between his son Dickie and rape vicim Nikki to metaphorically represent the pain of being caught between two plots featuring characters with suspiciously rhyming names.

It went down like this: Detective Elliot Stabler’s teenaged son Dickie goes missing from school, and Stabler immediately assumes he’s been lured into misbehavior by his addict best friend Shane. Earlier that morning, Shane picks up Dickie before school and both of them happen to mention that they’ve seen salacious pictures of a classmate on the internet. Coincidentally, the girl in the pictures is a rape victim whose attacker was arrested by Stabler and his partner Olivia Benson, and his trial is happening this very day! So here we are: Dickie and Shane are missing, a rape trial is threatened by evidence that calls the victim’s character into question, and poor Detective Stabler is caught in the middle. Unsurprisingly, things unravel quite quickly. In order to keep both plots going, Stabler has to appear unconcerned about his son’s disappearance for enough time to work the rape case, but he also has to freak out and smash things together so we understand that he’s upset. Meanwhile, everyone in the precinct has to express worry about Stabler’s son, but not so much worry that they all stop looking for pictures on the internet and instead start searching for missing children. And despite the seeming connection in the beginning, because the rape victim goes to Dickie and Shane’s school, the two plots are actually completely unrelated! So we learn that Shane has been murdered and the rape victim attempts suicide in the same ten minute segment, and we’re supposed to care about both of them equally and simultaneously, but separately.

Are we so desensitized that we need both a dead teenager and a suicidal rape vicitim to make us feel concern? Apparently yes.

Turns out, the rape victim is okay and a crazy evil homeless man killed Shane, which is such a lazy, meaningless conclusion that you’ve got to wonder why they attempted the thing in the first place. A crazy random wacko with no remorse and a drug habit does not make a satisfying resolution, but it is weird enough to make the whole rape victim plotline seem completely inconsequential. I’m not sure what prompted the foray into multi-plot territory, but someone was self-aware enough to name the episode “Turmoil.” True enough.

I bring this all up partly because last night I spent forty-two minutes smacking myself on the forehead and repeating “What are they doing?!” and I felt like sharing. More importantly, it’s easy to forget how hard it actually is to write good television. When everything goes right on Mad Men or The Wire, it’s hard to imagine how wrong it all could have been. It’s also important to remember that just trying to make things more complicated doesn’t necessarily make anything better. And for all those lessons, Law and Order is here to remind you.

This week, NBC begins its new fall lineup, and however much Joel McHale has tried to make everyone pay attention to the premiere of his new comedy Community, the topic du jour is the new 10pm topical comedy talk show The Jay Leno Show. Did you miss the premiere last night? No worries, it’s on again tonight! And tomorrow night!

The Jay Leno Show - like The Tonight Show, but with chairs where the couches were

Sigh. I have nothing against Jay Leno. I have never found him particularly funny, but I know a lot of people do and that’s fine. My problems with The Jay Leno Show are bigger, more general issues.

For one, it’s not as though this show is filling any gap on network television. There are already plenty of shows where a man stands up, tells some jokes, plays some clips, interviews some celebrities, and looks generally uncomfortable while wearing a suit. We call them “late-night television shows.” Not only do they already exist on NBC’s major competitor networks, there’s already one on NBC! It’s called The Tonight Show – it’s pretty famous! Every weeknight, then, NBC is providing viewers with a form of programming already amply available, with the only added bonus being that it happens an hour and a half earlier. Sure, this doesn’t seem like a major objection. Television is full of programming that essentially copies more popular, effective shows (see, for example, every single crime procedural out there). But in the case of The Jay Leno Show, the process of replicating something already available is taking up a full hour of primetime network TV slots, Monday through Friday. Those five hours could have been five thoughtful dramas, or primetime soaps, or even stupid reality shows. From my perspective, that’s a loss.

Jay Leno did make Kanye cry, but in a month no one will remember why

My other significant reservation about the whole Jay Leno Show project is its focus on topicality. NBC is attempting to create DVR-proof programming by marketing The Jay Leno Show as being so current and of the moment that you will have to watch it every night at 10, and by the time you flip on your DVR the next day, you might as well just wait and watch the new one. (Whohoo, says NBC, we will force you to watch our advertising.) But topical television is throwaway television. For example, in last night’s episode, Kanye West talks to Jay Leno about his misbehavior during the weekend’s Video Music Awards, and describes his embarrassment over interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech. Leno introduces him by explaining Kanye wants to say a few things, and then they go through the entire interview without ever mentioning Taylor Swift’s full name or describing anything about what happened. A few months from now, that interview will be gibberish, based entirely around a reference no one even explains. It’s like producing a newspaper every night at 10pm, and it’s already out of date by the time it airs.

Topical works for programs like The Daily Show because the editorial content is separate from reporting on events, and Jon Stewart’s opinion about the Senate race may still be interesting a day later. While many people clearly find Leno hysterically funny, his humor strives to be as entirely devoid of personal opinion as possible. It works by distilling the accepted wisdom of the day and feeding it back to you with a silly sex joke. There’s not much point in watching someone repeat what everyone was thinking yesterday, even less what happened last week or last year. It’s unlikely that years from now, someone will come back to episodes of The Jay Leno Show and feel connected to them, or moved by their humor.

Obviously there are advantages to programming like The Jay Leno Show. For one, it’s much cheaper to produce than five separate hour-long shows. It’s generally inoffensive. Jay Leno seems like a cheerful, good-natured guy. Ultimately, though, The Jay Leno Show is lazy television, filling time where more thoughtful shows used to be, meant to be watched and then forgotten. Is that the most we can ask of media, of entertainment? Apparently for NBC on weeknights at 10pm, it is.

Last night I watched a show that is a strong contender for the single stupidest thing currently on television. Forget the religious debates of Secret Life of the American Teenager, forget the absurd mishmash of genres on Defying Gravity, forget the ethically ambiguous voyeurism of Jon and Kate Plus 8. Let’s just set all of that aside and boil a show down to its most crudely entertaining element. Let’s find a form of humor that is universal, impossible to mess up, and cheap to produce. Let’s make an entire show about watching people hurt themselves, and then make fun of them while they do it. That’s right, the premise of this show is to watch “ordinary Americans” run through an impossible, absurd-looking obstacle course, and then mock them as they crash and burn. Join me as I narrate this gallery of screenshots from last night’s episode of Wipeout.

“The epic competition begins right now, to see who will emerge victorious, and who will…Wipeout.” Spoiler alert: they will all wipeout.

The most reliably cringe-inducing segment of the course is without a doubt this one, the “Big Balls.” No one ever makes it across, so the goal is to fall without hurting yourself. Few people succeed.

THREE POUNDS OF LOVE!!

Although the course produces most of the humor, the participants are also sources of entertainment. The wackiest one last night was this guy, who was trying to win the money for his bunny rabbit Yams. When he was interviewed before running the course, he shouted “LOOK AT HIM! THREE POUNDS! THREE POUNDS OF LOVE!” While on the spinner, he talked into the camera about the proper care and feeding of rabbits. (“Rabbits are lagomorphs, you know what lagomorphs means?”) Jumping across the Big Balls, he yelled, “All right Yams, I love ya!” It was…weird. And he didn’t win.

This guy came in a close second for wackiness. He did an Irish jig every time he finished a challenge.

This guy won. But after all that, did he really win? Or do we all, viewers and participants alike, end this experience a little worse off than we started? Perhaps I’m missing the point. Maybe what’s going on here is actually a form of brilliance, a focused, concentrated work of hilarious humiliation, meant to make us question our own solipsistic understanding of the universe and the essential nihilism of human existence. If that were the case, then Wipeout would have to enter the canon of great works of human achievement, a post-modern globalized vision (it was adapted from Japanese game shows) of mankind as united by the ultimate fragility of our bodies and the central cruelty of our basest selves. Maybe it reminds us that we are all equal in the face of the unmerciful, undiscriminating Big Balls.

But I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure it’s just awful.

The standard critical line on last night’s premiere of the new show Defying Gravity seems to be that it’s a ridiculously canned retelling of Grey’s Anatomy, but with astronauts. Hot young new girl has drunken sex with mentor figure the night before becoming a candidate, a group of attractive people in a high pressure job struggle with interpersonal relationships, cheesy cliché-laden voice-overs. Yep, Grey’s Anatomy. Hey look, your clothes allow you to experience gravity on the spaceship, so when you take them off…

My only problem with pigeonholing Defying Gravity quite that simplistically is that there does seem to be a bit more going on here. In fact, there’s a lot more going on here: while the soap opera takes

Do Astronauts Dream of Naked Women? (Yes.)

place at one end of the spaceship, there appears to be an unknown extraterrestrial life form locked in Pod 4, and it’s actually running this six-year mission. Only the crew’s commander and select personnel back on earth know about it, but when the Antares gets to Venus, crazy stuff is going to happen. Right now, the unknown whatever it is in Pod 4 is just giving Hot Young Woman Astronaut and Damaged Mentor Male Astronaut bizarre dreams. Which leads us to yet another thing this show seems to be trying to do. The one-night stand between Hot Young Woman Astronaut and Damaged Mentor Male Astronaut back on earth made Hot Young Woman Astronaut into a hot young pregnant astronaut, but in the year 2048, abortion has been made illegal. Hot Young Woman Astronaut aborts the baby anyway, but now she and Damaged Mentor Male Astronaut are having the crazy dreams where she’s drifting, pregnant, into the vacuum of space. With some nice back light effect.

Okay, so far we’ve got Sex in Space, a mysterious alien puppeteer, and a healthy dose of bioethics. Next, let’s add some spirituality. ABC aired the first two episodes last night, and in the first one, Damaged Mentor Male Astronaut keeps asking everyone what their religion is and whether they believe in fate. (He asks a Hindu and a Buddhist, but so far we haven’t seen anyone answer, “I’m a Baptist. Deal with it!”) When mysterious alien puppeteer rigs the mission so that the Hindu Astronaut has a heart murmur and has to return back to earth, Hindu Astronaut freaks out and takes a space walk with a statue of Ganesha, the lord of obstacles. (This is another problem with unintelligent space shows: the ultimate terror is getting sucked into the vacuum, so every other episode features someone drifting off into space in a leaky suit.)

Gripping Ganesha while sitting comfortably on the space station, stuck on a tether with a leaky spacesuit

So, there’s Sex in Space, mysterious alien puppeteer, a Roe v. Wade debate, and some Eastern mysticism. This is starting to feel a little serious, so let’s make sure to include a few Astronaut jokes. For example, let’s have an astronaut describe her experiment on fertilizing rabbit eggs in space and talk about the determination of sperm, and then let’s do a cut to astronauts in swimsuits. Heh. Swimmers.

"Look at that determination!" "Today we'll be testing your basic swim skills."

My problem isn’t that Defying Gravity is what Dan Fienberg dubbed “Grey’s Astronomy” – if it were just that show, that would be one thing. It would probably be bad and boring, but at least it would be coherent. Instead, Defying Gravity seems to be attempting to build its own science fiction mythology while also doing political and religious commentary, while also doing Funny Sex in Space. Battlestar Galactica could rub its tummy and pat its head at the same time, but Defying Gravity is nowhere near smart enough for that. The show comes off as a confusing tonal mishmash, where the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. If it wants to succeed, Defying Gravity needs to hold off figuring out how to defy gravity and focus on defying my bullshit meter.

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.