Reality TV is Awful
Vanderpump Ghouls
Surviving forty-three minutes of toxic femininity
Act like an imbecile. They’ll love you for it.
Against my will, I have now watched the first episode of the first season of Vanderpump Rules.
In my house, the TV remote goes back and forth. First, I pick a thoroughly entertaining, moderately educational television program with stellar acting and a strong directorial vision that both my girlfriend and I will enjoy. Then the lady that tricked me into falling in love with her makes me sit through the television equivalent of a colonoscopy.
I’ve seen a lot of shit. In the last two months I’ve sat through Love is Blind, The Ultimatum, and MILF Manor — but Vanderpump Rules takes the cake. Then, once it has the cake, this reality TV abomination switches out the icing for mustard, shakes a slice around in Ziploc bag full of sewage water, and squeezes the putrid, soggy mush into my ear canals.
What would I rather do than watch episode two? I suppose I’d prefer to:
Participate in experimental eyeball acupuncture. Raise a saltwater crocodile in my apartment. Spend twenty-four hours locked in a Starbucks bathroom. French kiss my father. Swallow all the feathers out of the only pillow I actually like.
Halfway through the first episode — just as Scheana was polishing the glassware that Stassi was supposed to be polishing (spoiler alert: Scheana doesn’t take it in stride) — I made a sincere attempt to understand why anyone would watch petulant actresses pretend to be incompetent waitresses.
Am I supposed to glory in their depravity? Should their vanity make me feel better about my own narcissism? Do I just stare at the tits until it’s over?
What am I doing here?
Vanderpump Rules can’t even claim to be a gruesome slice of life. I’ve worked in the restaurant industry for over twenty years. If the atmosphere in any dive bar I’ve tended had ever been as noxious as Sur — the restaurant in the show — I would have run away and actually made something of myself. I could have been a telemarketer; or an endangered species semen extractor; or the guy who scrubs the inside of septic tanks — and I’d have done it all with a smile on my face, knowing the alternative was to spend my days in the proximity of those snotty, malicious termagants.
The best I can figure it, Vanderpump Rules is designed for the vicarious consumption of toxic femininity. It is epitome trashy TV — and trashy TV never yearns for redemption. Who needs a protagonist? Who needs hope, inspiration, joy? Just shove a gaggle of harlots into a room full of electrical sockets, give them each a fork, and tell them they can’t come out until sparks fly.
Actually, that I might watch.
Every so often I get to exercise a veto. The veto is a high-risk measure, akin to going nuclear. I can’t veto everything I don’t like — that leads to the mutually assured destruction of sleeping in separate bedrooms.
Still, I can’t go on. My sanity won’t stand for it. I simply must . . .
VETO!
VETO! VETO! VETO! Play anything else. A beheading video; German kaka porn; that tape of my grandmother being tortured by Idi Amin that we usually save for Christmas Eve. I’ll happily watch paint dry on the backs of my own eye sockets.
Just please, for the love of God: Turn these bimbos off!
Enjoyed yourself? Then read this, Stupid:
Check out this piece on firearms and fireworks by Phillip T Stephens:
