Today, we have a different kind of debate as it’s not red state vs. blue state so much as bad taste vs. good taste. I debate someone with equally liberal politics but horrible, horrible taste in shows (i.e. big reality TV fan). We talk about why someone would like these shows, and what horrified boyfriends across the country can do to pull the women they love out of the spell of reality television or as I like to call it “Real Shitty Television.”
Brody: Hi, thanks for coming Lauren.
Lauren: It’s great to be here although I thought my first time on Alabama Liberal would be getting interviewed instead of debating The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Brody: Well let me disillusion your starry-eyed dreams of an interview now. You’re here to talk about Real Shitty TV taking over the television landscape like Kudzu and putting quality scripted shows almost out of business. What’s your defense?
Lauren: There isn’t one. I know the shows I watch are bad. You can’t defend them in anyway except to call them entertainment, so I don’t.
Brody: But that’s what loses me. I don’t get the entertainment value of watching overgrown girls stop taking their bi-polar meds and get into a knockdown drag out over who is “disrespecting” who and who “doesn’t know me like that.”
Lauren: But some of those battles are the best part. It’s the same with guys and football–
Brody: I don’t watch football.
Lauren: Well most straight guys do–
Brody: Resent the implication. What if I said only stupid people watch reality TV, oh wait, I have said that.
Lauren: See! It’s really just what you like. For me, I know I didn’t really experience women like this–
Brody: Thank the Lord. Your parents must have raised you right.
Lauren: [Laughter] I know I don’t know a lot of women like this. So for me it’s “Look at these crazy women.”
Brody: So you like to feel mentally superior to idiots? It’s a bit of an ego stroke?
Lauren: I don’t know if I’d go that far–
Brody: I would, Americans love laughing at fools so they can feel smarter, look at jackass, Jersey Shore, George W. Bush, etc. Also, I think there’s some wish fulfillment in these shows. Americans get less sick days than any other industrialized nation, they’re overworked, stressed out, and it’s sort of comfort food to watch these worthless reality show wives make millions of dollars to sit around bullshitting. They literally get paid to exist.
Lauren: You could be right about that [laughter]. I know these women are way more privileged than they realize. And so no matter how much they piss and moan, there’s not a lot of women that wouldn’t want to trade places with them for a day.
Brody: Making them the 500th horrible role models for young women in 2011. Let me ask you, isn’t this bad for the culture though?
Lauren: I think it can be if–
Brody: They always say that The Matrix or exposure to real violent movies and video games makes kids more violent. Well, won’t exposure to excessive amounts of drunken women sitting around bad mouthing each other make kids more worthless than they already are?
Lauren: It’s possible and you can definitely tell some people try to copy what they see on these shows just in their facebook statuses or how they behave when they’re not at their real job at, like, a fucking Staples or something. Because it’s awfully hard to be a diva at Staples. But in my case I can say that I have never wanted to be these women and if I actually met one of them I would run in the other direction.
Brody: Well now all we have to do is get you to run from them on your TV remote and we’ll be doing good.
LMAO – great interview that was fun.