The worst shows I'm loving

Now, more than ever, I believe it is important to discuss low-quality art and art-adjacent activities. Watching flop TV is not time wasted, and articulating what sucks about it benefits your soul and lymphatic system. At the same time, thinking critically about why something is bad and why you like it anyway is just as valuable as saying why a good thing is good. In striking this balance, you can become God’s perfect hater.

Similar to when I brave a rancid thing of kale at the back of the fridge, I get great joy from cracking open something vile and sharing the whiffs of our culture that keep me coming back. Smell these:

The Morning Show is Riverdale for people who think they have taste. It’s also one of those shows where everyone on it is so famous that you just call the characters by the actor’s name.

These people are jumping a new shark every week, having sex in an array of implausible permutations (sometimes with the selfsame shark), and ripping their plots, still writhing in the throes of asphyxiation, straight from the headlines.

Can you guess which of the following things have occurred on this show?

1. Steve Carell gets Me Too’d

2. Jennifer Aniston helps an Olympic fencer defect from their home country

3. Reese Witherspoon is implicated in the January 6 insurrection

4. Marion Cotillard helps a nonbinary youth get gender-affirming care

5. A giant AI image of Greta Lee declares “DEI IS DEAD”

6. Billy Crudup watches his mom do physician-assisted suicide in her backyard

7. Jennifer Aniston gets COVID and livestreams it

8. Reese Witherspoon goes to space

9. Steve Carell drives his car off a cliff and dies, as a result of getting Me Too’d

10. Marion Cotillard works at a television company

Answers in this footnote1.

The Morning Show is bad because it takes itself 200% more seriously than Succession and with writing that’s 70% worse. At some point during each episode, I thrash on my couch and yell how much I “hate this fucking show.”

Yet every week, I am gagged by its audacity, Apple-beige tinge,2 and sheer star power. I won’t go so far as to say The Morning Show knows what it’s doing, but its maximal approach to storytelling means that at least some of its big swings don’t miss.

The Floor is the CDC’s mass rehabilitation experiment for the cognitive decline caused by repeat COVID infections. If you’re unfamiliar, the game generally goes like this:

1. You stand on a square on The Floor.

2. Host Rob Lowe activates The Randomizer, which chooses a contestant from The Floor.

3. You ascend from The Floor to the main stage. (The game is not played on the titular Floor.)

4. You go head-to-head with another contestant to… name images on a screen. I shit you not, some rounds literally go like this:

   Image:

   

   Contestant 1: BOAT.

   Image:

   

   Contestant 2: CAR.

   Image:

   

   Contestant 1: GOLF GUY. GOLF ROD. UH. ACK. UM. [Their timer is getting closer and closer to 0.] UH. PASS. [Their timer goes down 5 seconds as a penalty for passing.]

5. If you outlast your opponent, you gain their Pieces of Territory (a.k.a. their square(s) on The Floor) and inherit their category of expertise.3 Your opponent goes home in disgrace.

6. You can then choose to Challenge another contestant, which means playing a new round in that person’s category of expertise, or go back to the floor and wait to be Challenged.

There are like 10 other rules and power-ups, but that’s the gist. You’re trying to gain the most Pieces of Territory by naming images more quickly than your opponent. And as a viewer at home, you’re playing along too, thus practicing things like name recall and telling time.

In addition to my collective cognitive therapy theory, I also believe the current season of The Floor is a psyop to prepare Americans for the possibility of civil war. For reasons not yet confirmed, this season has a theme of “AMERICA DUELS.” Previous seasons were unthemed.

The idea now is that… every contestant is from a US state? And is battling each other? Both of which were true in previous seasons.

American flags now appear throughout the game’s background and transition graphics. No state flags, which would make more sense for the concept of a state showdown. Rob Lowe also keeps saying we’re “dueling it out for national glory.”

Then, when the last representative from a state gets defeated, their state disappears from the Big Map, and Rob Lowe leads the audience in saying goodbye to that state.

We’re trying to strengthen the union while becoming OK with the idea of Utah maybe going dark one day.

This show is bad, because how we got here is troubling. But I respect it for its commitment to the bit, potential health benefits, and centering of the human drama. The little interjections contestants offer from the peanut gallery (The Floor) can be golden.

I’m watching this pregnancy-focused dramedy for the first time. It’s deeply conservative, even for an ABC Family joint, and even with characters blastin’ out bastard children every few months. The writing is repetitive in both content and structure, with a solid third of each episode consisting of characters telling each other things that happened in the previous scene.

But the most baffling part by far is the interiors. The Secret Life of the American Teenager has, by a wide margin, the most soulless set design of any show I’ve watched.

For a series that claimed to be all about the ~realistic~ pressures and contradictions of the teen experience, they sure do decorate these kids’ bedrooms like a goddamn Holiday Inn. The bedding is always symmetrical, everything on the wall is framed, and every dresser has a maximum of 3 pieces of decor on it.

This sucks so bad, because the show spends a lot of time in these rooms, and teen bedrooms can do so much heavy lifting for otherwise flimsy characterization. Where are the posters, the messy desks, the bulletin boards, or other layered detritus of adolescence? Best I can do is framed photo of a boxing match.

Despite enduring significant body horror, the children on this show don’t have any real interiority. Every character is an open manila folder, sharing everything immediately with their parents, school counselor, and healthcare providers. So it makes sense their bedrooms would be impersonal plywood lean-tos.

But I do like this show, because the line deliveries often stop me in my tracks. I think this is due to the combination of the spectacularly bad writing and some very hungry young actors trying to prove themselves. Some of my favorite specimens:

AMY: Hey! I am not gay, alright? If any of you are still talking about my mother or me or my wedding, my mother is not gay, I am not gay, I am getting married, and the Fourth of July is not some kind of gay holiday.

AMY: I don’t want that… that...
ADRIAN: Slut?
AMY: Yeah. That’s the one. I don’t want that…
ADRIAN: Slut.
AMY: Touching my baby.

And of course, this clip that made me decide to watch in the first place:

I am a 90 Day Fiancé cinematic universe stan. I respect the utilitarian production strategy of the whole lineup, from Before the 90 Days to Last Resort to Pillow Talk. As couples kept percolating through the main 90 Day Fiancé series, TLC gradually created enough franchise vehicles to package every step of a couple’s journey, from before they ever meet in person to 10 years after their divorce.

90 Day Diaries is a newer spinoff wherein the producers couldn’t even be assed to be on the scene, instead making previously-featured couples film themselves doin’ stuff until there’s enough footage to cobble together a season. This offshoot started in the early pandemic as an alternative to in-person filming, and has continued ever since, with couples setting up little tripods in their home to argue and cry in front of.

This is bottom-of-the-barrel content, but that’s also the beauty of it. As we get force-fed generative AI, Cure for Wellness-style, the bottom of the barrel has gotten bottomer. We can go lower than ever before. So there’s something kind of comforting about dipping into these shitty self-tapes. It’s almost like watching people’s home videos, if home videos were echoey as fuck and usually revolved around a medical procedure or cheating allegations.

Everyone is also much sweatier than on mainline 90 Day.

I have a messed-up little poem, “That Couple,” in the new issue of ballast. It’s about the surveillance state and the inherent sexiness of shared values. It takes place partially in a Chili’s. I like it. You might too!