I H8 to tell you but I watched H8R last night. It was about as good as you might expect.

This day has just about killed me but I have so much work to do I’m pretty sure my office would reanimate my and have my zombie corpse chained to my desk so I could do MORE work, is how bad it’s been. But shh, I’m sneaking in for a minute. 

So far, fall television has been a huge son, I am disappoint.

I’ve watched four new shows – one of which I KNEW would be awful but the shows I was PLANNING to watch in that time slot weren’t on because somehow I got my wires crossed, I don’t know, so I had time and it was on – and none of them were all that impressive. Remember how the other day I said that right before the fall season started, it was like Christmas Eve? Well, it’s early Christmas morning, and so far all I’ve unwrapped are some really boring educational DVDs and a hat that doesn’t fit correctly. Oh, and a bag of crazy. 

Ringer wasn’t the worst thing ever. It was fine. The special effects were horrendous, though. Who thought they were ok? Someone ok’d these? Really? Because I’m pretty sure I could do better with the video camera in my cell phone. I would be embarrassed if I was the person who was presenting this to the public. Also, it’s very, very hard for me to imagine Sarah Michelle Gellar in peril, because it’s Buffy, you know? I’m just wondering why she isn’t kicking the badguy’s asses and snarking at them. It’s disconcerting. Oh, also, Jason Dohring WASN’T EVEN IN THE FIRST EPISODE. Um, this is very worrisome, why would you do that to me, Ringer? It’s early yet, though, so I’ll give it another go. 

The NBC comedies Up All Night and Free Agents were…um…well, to be kind, they weren’t the worst things I’ve ever seen ever in the history of ever! That’s nice, right? Here’s my problem with them. First, Up All Night. Not that funny, first off. Will Arnett should only play his typical stupid/smart characters, because I don’t know if he can pull off anything else. Maya Rudolph was funny, but it’s just her Saturday Night Live Oprah character, so it seems like a rip-off. And the show’s kind of stupid. Free Agents – well, listen, I have always had a crush on Hank Azaria, and there are a lot of good actors crammed into this series, but it’s just not very good. It’s actually also pretty stupid. I guess you could turn the sound off and just stare at Hank Azaria, but that seems like a waste of half an hour. So will I watch them again? Probably not. I don’t see them getting much better. 

Now for the bag of crazy. When I tell you the title, you’re going to say, well! OF COURSE IT WAS INSANE WHAT DID YOU EXPECT. I was curious, give me a break. H8R? I almost want to say that title in a small voice and run away from you, I’m so embarrassed I watched this thing. Ok, premise is, Mario Lopez pretends to interview everyday people for a reality show and part of the interview is “blast off about one celebrity you hate more than anything and BE DESCRIPTIVE.” (They don’t say that, I added that part, but it seems to be the subtext.) So on video, we have some schmo going on and on and on about how much they hate some celebrity like, oh, I don’t know, Snookie. Then Mario Lopez shows the video TO Snookie, who he is apparently close personal friends with. And then Snookie CONFRONTS the h8r (I think I might be contractually bound to spell it like that) in his or her natural habitat. The h8r is shaken when confronted by his or her asshattery, but continues to act like an asshat because it would totally look like he or she was losing face if he or she just backed down and said “Sorry, Snookie, I don’t know you at all and was just blasting, as you do, on a celebrity that seems annoying!” Then – THEN! – Snookie took the h8r grocery shopping (…I don’t know either?) and they bonded a little, then she cooked dinner for his whole family, and at the end of the dinner, she said, “Are you still a h8r?” and he said “NO SNOOKIE I AM A LOVER” and she wooo-ed and all was well. 

The second segment was similar only stupider, because it was a girl with spotted hair (no, seriously, is this a thing? I will have to find you a graphic. She had white-blond hair with leopard-like spots running down one side of it.) 

Well, this isn’t a very good photo and also what's with this chick's emo eyeliner and such and I can’t find a better one so I guess the H8R was on the cutting edge of stupid. But it was like this, only the spots were BIGGER and only on one SIDE and VERY PRONOUNCED. And no one mentioned it? At all? In the whole episode? So that struck me as odd. 

So anyway, Spotty hated, hated, HAAAATED Jake Pavelka from The Bachelor. I don’t know anything about The Bachelor. I don’t watch it. I don’t care about dating shows. Well, except for Rock of Love. Now THAT was a dating show. Yowza. So awesomely filled with whoredom. Anyway. She went on for a while about how awful he was and then the worst part – “I heard he was probably GAY!” she said, in a shocked tone. Hmm. That WOULD be upsetting, because then he would have been MISREPRESENTING HIMSELF ON A DATING SHOW OMG. The only thing worse than that would be if he lied about the “journey” he was taking while on the show. Because isn’t that just the best? When they talk about being on a “journey?” It doesn’t at all make you want to vomit until you’re sore. 

So Mario gleefully showed Jake the footage and Jake got all sad and teary-eyed (honestly, he seemed like kind of a whine-ass, but he was pretty as all get-out) and then confronted Spotty at some spa she was at but first played a trick on her where he pretended to be hitting on her and being a douche and she was totally turned on by him but pretending not to be, so it was all of a sudden very sad. Because you could see WHY she hated Jake. Because he was every guy who’d ever turned Spotty down ever. And Spotty was actually quite pretty, if you did something about her horrendous hairstyle. Then Mario popped out of a potted plant or something and kind of strong-armed Spotty into going on a date with Jake which was kind of like one of the dates on The Bachelor, where they drove around aimlessly getting to know one another in an SUV and then went on a plane. And she was very cold but you could TELL she dug him but was just being a dick because she was getting revenge on whoever had hurt her in the past. And then – because Jake is a big old pretty weirdo – he took her to the Bachelor house, I guess to show off and be all, “Lookie what I can do, take you to a famous place because I am a very famous person!” and she was pissed (and this time, rightfully so, because it was so douchey of him.)  

OK, now THE BEST PART. He sat her down and started just spewing all over about his childhood, and how he never felt like his father loved him, and how this affected him throughout his life, and how her being a h8r really bothered him because of it, and she’s watching him all confused because HE IS TOTALLY CRYING, and then he says “I’ve never told anyone any of this before.” Really. REALLY? Then why are you telling a total stranger who just blasted you to the whole world and hates you so much? YOU ARE A WEIRD REALITY SHOW WEIRDO WITH AMAZING BONE STRUCTURE WHO IS TOTALLY SAD. She then just kind of wandered off and he realized that his daddy was never going to love him so he slammed some doors and then they separated and as she drove off she said, “I was a h8r before and I’m a H8R NOW!!!!” 

THIS SHOW IS AWFUL. 

At the end, they showed the celebrities who were going to be on the rest of the season, and I recognized three of them. And there were about ten of them. The three I recognized were Kim Kardashian, Janice Dickinson, and Eva Longoria. Then they said their names and one of them was the asshole who does the Girls Gone Wild videos. Is there anyone who LIKES this guy? I bet even his MOTHER thinks he’s a exploitative douchecanoe. And there was one guy who looked like he was made of wax and he made me laugh until I almost pissed myself. He looked like Christian Bale but made of wax. SO SO SHINY. I wanted to confront him and discuss what was going on with that face, honestly. It is apparently Scott Disick. 

This photo isn’t so shiny – it must have been the H8R lighting or he’d just had some major botox something – but I chose it because it makes me laugh. Why is he posing in front of the ocean like this? Does he think he’s auditioning for Miami Vice? Fun!  (I have never watched a single episode of that Kardashian show but my father watches it. Here is a sample of him talking about it: “I hate that show. Those people are so stupid. The people that marry them are so stupid. Something’s wrong with Bruce Jenner’s face. I don’t like their butts but all the men say they have the best butts. Why are they famous. I hate that show.” “Um, Dad, if you hate it, why do you watch it?” “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Amy. EVERYONE watches that show.”) 

Here are my thoughts, Mario Lopez. First: it doesn’t exactly mean you are a h8r if you blast a celebrity on the internet. Sometimes it means you’re unintelligent and believe everything that’s in the tabloids; sometimes it just means you’re venting. Listen, I have a lot of celebrities I don’t like, for various reasons. Here’s a list: 

Tom Cruise: scary cult leader

Chris Klein: hates women

Miley Cyrus: seems unintelligent

Jay Leno: not funny and seems like kind of a cock

Roman Polanski: child molester

Chris Brown: beats women

Ginnifer Goodwin: seems unintelligent and chooses men incorrectly

Carrot Top: WHAT IS GOING ON WITH HIS SCARY FACE 

I don’t really HATE them, though. Why? I don’t know them! I think in order to hate someone, you really have to know them. Do I like these people? No. Do I want to hang out with them? No, no I don’t (and actually, in Carrot Top’s case, OH MY GOD PLEASE GET AWAY FROM ME NO.) 

But if Mario Lopez showed up and said I needed to spend a day with one of these people you know what I’d say? NO THANK YOU MARIO LOPEZ. That’s just a recipe for disaster, really. The people who say yes are just reality show whores who want their moment of fame. They’re just as sad as the celebrities! It’s a sad shame spiral, really. A co-dependent shame spiral. 

So this season, so far, kind of a total letdown. Luckily, it’s still early. Tonight: The Secret Circle! Starring the girl who kind of annoyed me from Life Unexpected and Gale Harold, WHO WILL NEVER ANNOY ME. What will happen? One can only imagine.

Nick Jr.'s Website Wants Me to Friend Dora the Explorer on Facebook. WHAT? NO.

This past weekend, I watched Nick Jr. with my almost 2-year-old nephew. This seems to be a channel where educational shows are aired on a regular basis. He was entranced – a good sign he is not a fairy changeling, because he shows the same unwavering attention to television as his aunt – but I couldn’t help but compare these shows to the shows I watched growing up and find them lacking.

When I was young, you didn’t have much choice, educational-television wise.  I grew up in a small, rural town, without cable, so we had PBS, a few basic channels, and a few Canadian channels. My children’s programming was mostly Sesame Street, Romper Room, The Electric Company, and a Canadian show called Mr. Dressup. (Just a quick aside – Mr. Dressup was, in retrospect, creepy. He was a man who invited the neighbor child and his dog – Casey, a plastery puppet with no facial articulation, and Finnegan, a floppy puppet dog – to come into his house and dress up in costumes. Said costumes were stored in – wait for it – his “Tickle Trunk.” I could not make these things up if I tried.)

Mr. Dressup and his weird, possibly illegal, habits aside, I learned a lot from these shows, enough that I was able to read already upon entering kindergarten, much to the joy of my teacher, who would install me in front of my class and have me read while she went out in the hall to chat with people. (This, thinking back, might have started my 13-year run of unpopularity.)

Note – this is going to sound like craziness unless you understand that I talk to the television. Listen, I live alone, and the television is my roommate. I know it doesn’t respond. But I have fun snidely commenting on its shenanigans. Watching these shows, I did the same thing. It didn’t go over well. It goes over better when the only audience = my two cats who don’t care what I do as long as treats are dispensed at the accustomed times.

Dora the Explorer: This show is about a girl who lives in the forest. Her sidekick is a talking monkey. But it doesn’t stop there. Everything talks in this forest. Including inanimate objects. And there is a fox (I only know it’s a fox because the Internet told me so, I thought it was a weasel, it LOOKS like a weasel, and weasels are known to be weaselly, wouldn’t that have made more sense, show?) named Swiper who takes things, but they seem to get returned, so that’s not a huge plot point. The thing that irked me was her constant breaking of the fourth wall. She kept turning to the audience and asking us questions. “There’s a hole in my SHOE!” she’d say. (Oh, and she shouts every other word, it seems. Maybe you have to do that, to be heard over the forest noises.) “Do you see any OTHER holes?” Then she’d stare at us with these creepy dead unblinking eyes. There would be a hole in a tree or something, and I guess the correct answer was you saying “Yes, Dora the almighty, there’s also a hole in the tree there,” and after what seemed like the longest pause in the world, an arrow would pop up pointing to whatever she wanted you to notice and she’d say, “In the TREE! YES! GOOD!” My thought was, what if you said, “There’s a hole in my sock” and she said “In the TREE! YES! GOOD!” – wouldn’t that confuse a kid, that the TV seems to be talking to you, but wasn’t answering you correctly, or even referring back to what you’d just said? This might be the cause of the terrible twos. Just a theory.

The episode of Dora that I watched involved holes, and talking about holes ad nauseum (and because I have the mentality of a 13-year-old boy, I thought that was hysterical, and whenever she asked “Can you see my hole?” I would crack up, garnering me major glares from my mother and sighs from my more-tolerant father) and fixing things with a magical machine that fixes holes, and traveling through the forest with other talking animals, all of whom had hole-related issues (don’t we all, forest animals, don’t we all) and confronting the audience with in-your-face hole-related questions every few seconds. Very disconcerting. My nephew loved it, though. Whenever I snarked on it, he would look at me with a confused look, like, “I do not understand your venom, beloved auntie! This is Dora! She is my teacher, nay, my friend! Her backpack and her map talk! Her monkey wears red boots!”

Ni Hao, Kai-Lan: This show is about a Chinese girl who has adventures with animal friends (a tiger, a thing that looked like it was meant to be a rhino with a balloon tied to its trunk, and a monkey) and her grandfather. It seems to be teaching our children Chinese as well as friendship. I saw two episodes. Both involved a naughty monkey named Hoho.  In the first episode, Hoho would NOT PAY ATTENTION. People were talking to him and he was all “ooh shiny apples wind a tree look a bird I like grass on my feet.” When Kai-Lan asked me “What can I do to get Hoho to pay attention?” and I said “You can go to the doctor and get him a prescription for ADHD medication,” my parents thought that was an inappropriate response. Well, she opened herself up for the answer. If she didn’t want it, she shouldn’t have asked. In the second episode, Hoho had a temper tantrum because someone took all the yellow paint and banana stickers (they were painting a mural. You know, as you do, with your magical talking animal friends) and so he furiously kicked a tiger named Rintoo who, Rashomon-style, may or may not have been the cause of the paint and sticker pilferage. (See, I was thinking it was Swiper, but no one got on board with this theory.) I was sure we’d get some major action and Rintoo would eat Hoho, but no such luck. We just got a speech about using our words. It was, overall, a disappointment. But Kai-Lan was much less bitchy than Dora, so I was less inclined to stab her with a fork whenever she opened her mouth.

Team Umizoomi: This cartoon was very much like the dreams you have when you are very ill and drink too much codeine cough syrup. There were two cartoon children, rendered in bright colors (Wikipedia says they are Milli and Geo) and Bot, their sidekick robot. They seemed to perhaps be teaching us about math? Or hallucinogenic drugs. It didn’t make a lot of sense. Because in the episode I saw, they went to the grocery store, and this very, very bossy child popped up on Bot’s stomach screen and started screaming about how she was left alone with her toddler brother and they needed to buy him some items so she could make his favorite snack now now now and my comments at this point were, “Why is there a live person on a cartoon robot’s stomach?” and “Why does she get to be such a bitch? RUDE” and “Where are her parents? She can’t be more than 8. That’s kind of the thing you call CPS for, no?” My father at this point tried to explain to me that this was a children’s show, but I don’t think that means logic gets thrown out the window. Sesame Street used to make sense, didn’t it? They were neighbors who lived on a street and they taught you things, and some were monsters, but some were people. Just like in real life!

So the cartoon children and robot had to buy a banana and a carton of yogurt, and the girl was most unhelpful about the yogurt. “Buy the one with the triangle inside the square, that’s his favorite” she said, and I said, “You couldn’t just say, ‘Buy YoBaby Peach’ or something like that? Way to be vague’” and my father told me if I couldn’t behave I would have to leave the room, so I had to quietly watch the rest. Which killed me, because next, the loud girl told them to buy him EIGHT BLUEBERRIES. Eight? Who sells blueberries individually? This does not happen. Now my nephew is going to think that the grocery store sells individual blueberries and it just isn’t true. You are crushing his little dreams!

Oh, and also Milli’s braids doubled as measuring tapes, and Geo had a magic belt. And there was singing.

After this show, it was time for dinner, so we didn’t have to watch anymore television. I was pleased by this, because there’s only so much of this you can take.

I’m going to YouTube some old Electric Company episodes now. I need a palate cleanser.