Snark & Superiority

I will take the blame/heat for getting my wife & I hooked on Survivor. Shari was going to a Thursday night Bible study and I was putting Braeden to be each night right around 8 pm. After doing a couple of quick chores, I found myself with 20 minutes or so before CSI was on, so I'd crank up the TV early and catch the immunity challenge & tribal council of Survivor.

In other words, I wasn't really watching it... I was just catching a little bit "accidentally". But it was the season of Tom and Stephanie and of getting Pagong'd... and by mid-season (about the point that poor little Pagong won the jellyfish reward) I was hooked.

Shari's the one who got us started on The Amazing Race... it was one of those "nothing interesting is on but we need the brain-dead embrace of the cathode ray tube" nights. So, we managed to catch a passle of contestants thrashing about Russia, drinking shots off of swords & trying to eat a stinkin' pound of caviar. We missed a few episodes after that... then started watching the last few episodes of that season (we loved Chip & his wife!). The rest is history.

Steve & Shane Oakley are to blame for American Idol... Shari visited Nashville in January of 2006 and was sucked into their weekly routine of watching the auditions. Of course, she brought it home with her. (Granted, I'm like a TV show addiction magnet, so it didn't have trouble taking hold at our house.)

Which leads me to TWOP, which I will now blame for making me "superior" to my reality TV shows. Television Without Pity is a recapping website that manages to snarkily comment on a number of television shows.

So, when I booted up my computer this morning, it was fun to find the following in the recaplette from last night's American Idol:

Tomorrow: two hours of celebrities pretending to care, plus Bono, who invented the concept.

I'll be there... but that's dead on.

Quickly, some more TWOP highlights from the last week of TV:

Mirna happily claims in an interview that she and Charla have coined a new phrase: "Yield karma." Don't tell them that they didn't coin it; you'll just make her sad, and she'll start begging for mercy in that charming accent. Mirna then cranks up her disappointed-playground-supervisor voice as she says, "There's really no reason to resort to dirty play, like the beauty queens." I have to respect Mirna's persistence and imperviousness to outside influence, given that she is the only person who came on the race this time who had a very bad reputation last time and managed to be much worse about absolutely everything. This is really all her "criminals, criminals" stuff from Season 5 all over again, which means she watched her entire season and never once cringed at herself. That takes a certain kind of resilience that most people lack. I mean, she's now managing to be morally outraged about things that literally have nothing to do with her. At any rate, Mirna says they're going to use "the muscles," then points to her head and says, "This muscle here is the one we try to use the most." She says this with absolutely no sense of irony, which is what makes it comic genius. It's like indignantly declaring, "I'm going to use my B-R-A-N-E." Amazing Race 11:9

Over at Ravu, Alex brings back the same message, rather nauseatingly addressing his tribe as "horsemen." As in, "Greetings, horsemen." "Ahoy, horsemen." "Does this tank top make me look feminine at all, horsemen?" I always wonder, when people use the "four horsemen" reference, whether they are aware of what the four horsemen actually are, and that the next logical question is which one of you is the Antichrist. They're not the four horsemen of the Greenwich Hunt Club, nitwits. Survivor 14:9

Important safety tip: TWOP uses language that is PG-13 or better/worse (you be the judge), so consider yourself fairly warned.