By Steve Rhodes
My name is Steve Rhodes, and I’m a binge TV viewer. I know it’s killing me, and I hate myself when I do it, but I don’t want to stop, either. It makes me feel good.
Like yesterday, when Dr. Phil morphed into a particularly good Celebrity Fit Club, which slid easily into Bad Girls Club, and then its male counterpart, the Cubs. Can you feel the high?
Oh yes, there were bouts of self-loathing amidst the rushes of seeing Dr. Phil smack down the 19-year-old doofus planning to marry his sneaky 30-year-old girlfriend after just two weeks of dating, and watching the rerun of new roommates arriving to cold, skeletal shoulders on Bad Girls Club, but this was also a journey of self-discovery. I discovered, for example, a new high/low in laziness, which I reported to my friends with glee. Like John Bender said in The Breakfast Club, being bad feels awfully good.
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I like Dr. Phil. Actually, I kind of love him. That may come as a surprise to many of my longtime readers, but I beg of you, don’t live in the darkness like I did for so long. Come to the light.
For years, I loathed Dr. Phil out of general principle for what he seemed to represent in the culture – a Jerry Springer Lite creation of Oprah, a family-friendly Dr. Laura. I was wrong, and I bury my head in shame.
Phil McGraw is a damn good psychologist. What his show really is, at its best, is a therapy session open to public viewing. Having just a smattering of knowledge about a few particular psychological theories and principles, mainly in the areas of addiction, depression, and the impact of those things on relationships, I find Dr. Phil not only spot-on, but insightful and revealing as hell – if you’re paying attention.
Sure, the Dr. Phil House and some of the show’s other gimmicks are pure voyeurism, and he’s always hawking his books and the products of his sponsors, but if you can accept the fact that it’s a TV show and settle in, I guarantee you’ll learn something.
Yesterday’s show, “Call It Off!“, was a barn-burner. The topic: Couples who should not get married. Or couples planning to get married with families trying to stop the proceedings. In each of the two cases presented, the families were right.
The first case featured two recovering addicts whom, we learned, had used drugs much more recently than previously thought. Turned out they weren’t as recovering as claimed. The dynamic between the couple and between the woman and her family was both fascinating and depressingly familiar. The couple met at a meth house and, from the looks of it, the creepy weird guy provided the beautiful lonely girl with the emotional comfort she wasn’t getting from her parents. It went on from there.
The second case was the aforementioned 19-year-old nerd being roped into marriage to a graceless and geeky 30-year-old woman with two children. (When Dr. Phil asked the boy if the relationship was sexual, he stammered, “Uh, yes, uh, but, um, not physically.”)
Dr. Phil was kind and open to the couple and seemed to hurt for the boy even as he embarrassed himself with an incredible lack of self-awareness or smarts, and in the end put the hammer down on the woman – the one who should know better – by finally chastising her for seeking a marriage license to a teenager who didn’t yet have his driver’s license.
That may be where Dr. Phil delivers the entertainment value, but if you watch long enough you will recognize psychological dynamics – even if in melodramatic cases – that surely exist in your life and the lives of people you know. The genius of Dr. Phil is that he basically offers Therapy 101 with real live case studies in an entertaining, if often cheesy, package. It truly is educational TV, even if it sometimes gets schlocky and embarrassing. Those are the days you simply change the channel.
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I have no interested in Celebrity Fit Club, but they teased me into the show with clips of Dustin “Screech” Diamond getting ripped on by his colleagues, so I tuned in to confirm what I suspected: Diamond is so desperate to revive his “career” (remember the sex tape?) that he’s gone on Fit Club with the express motive of being the bad guy to get screen time.
Memo to Diamond: You are not Puck.
Diamond’s gambit is that he can lose weight on a junk food diet. Without exercising. Just by eating less. Junk food. And he does lose weight in the opening round (I think nine pounds), but the judges accuse him of keeping a fraudulent food journal.
At the same time, Diamond provokes and alienates virtually every other cast member, and not in a cute Screech-like way (actually, Screech was never cute). The tables turn on Diamond and he leaves the show – though the tease makes us wonder if he’s really leaving.
So Diamond accomplished his goal: he made the show about him. Unfortunately, his persona is so unlikable and lacking even in some of, say, Puck’s charisma, that it’s hard to imagine anything but a pornographic future for the Screechster.
Programming note: Marcia Brady is also on this edition of Celebrity Fit Club. So is Da Brat.
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I recently discovered Bad Girls Club (hey, I work at home, and all the time, and even I can’t subsist on The Situation Room, Baseball Tonight, Animal Planet, M*A*S*H reruns, and Family Guy alone) on a Saturday afternoon and tore through a whole mini-marathon to get as caught up as I wished to be on this not very good reality series. But I’m a sucker for these kinds of shows – for the first dozen seasons or so I watched every episode of The Real World, if only to loathe every one of its cast members except the comic book skateboard chick in Miami who wore that old Cubs t-shirt.
Bad Girls Club is a bad show not worth getting addicted to, but I can’t help but watch in amazement at humans of the type whose existence I am all too painfully aware of, yet still somehow shocks and surprises me. You know, idiots.
And in this case, stereotypical spoiled blonde clubbing idiots who can’t hold their alcohol and have a world of emotional trouble under their makeup-caked facades. (I might add, there is the black-haired Aimee who plays it tough and brash but in the end is as “blonde” and bitchy as the rest, or more, possibly angry about her unblonde appearance and lack of emotional range.)
There’s not much else to say about the episodes I watched except that as much as the girls in the house they are stuck in all hate each other, their bond was threatened by two new roommates who arrived, so they froze them out. It was like seeing a fascist army congeal against the new recruits – or like blonde blood cells fortifying a defense against red ones.
Oh, and one of the girls in the house had an embarrassing runway modeling gig on behalf of a local boutique – embarrassing because of the discovery that she’s not anorexic enough to really make modeling a career. Aimee advises she stop eating so much ice cream.
This show, of course, is a disservice to women, but also to men; the notion that these are the kinds of women whom men go for is offensive to our gender. I know men and women like this exist in nature, but they don’t reflect even the most mainstream people I know. Never forget – they are the freaks. And not in the good Freak Nation kind of way, but in the “go away, you’re ruining it for everyone else” kind of way.
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From there the Cubs game came on and provided its usual laughs – like how the Pirates bunted the bases full in the first inning, among other follies. More importantly, during the Cubs games I discovered a new high/low in how lazy I can be. I was laying on the couch when my land line phone rang. The phone was at the other side of the table in front of my couch, so answering it would have required movement on my part. So I just let it ring.
But that phone is also basically my business phone – as opposed to my cell – and the possibilities were gnawing at me. Maybe, for example, Bill Maher had seen the site and wanted to give me a lot of money. Or perhaps it was Dunkin’ Donuts inquiring about advertising on The Beachwood Reporter.
As I considered just what it would take to get me to move, I spotted my cell phone within reach. That’s when it hit me. I could use my cell phone to call in and get my messages from my land line – which was sitting about two feet away. I was so proud of myself I called my friend Tim instead to tell him about the plan.
Then I fell asleep.
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When I awoke, the Cubs game was curiously still on. In a way. There had been a rain delay (the game would eventually be suspended), so it was like I had barely missed anything at all. Now that’s good TV.
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See the What I Watched Last night collection.
Posted on May 2, 2007