Pop Culture Happy Hour - Terrible But Bingeable TV shows

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

What is it about a show that turns you into a bitter-ender, that keeps you dutifully watching every last episode, long after the train has jumped the tracks? Even when you know it's not good, but, for you anyway, it's just good enough to muddle through, all the way to the finale? Today, we're revisiting our conversation about terrible but bingeable TV showsSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

How and why does a TV show get its hooks into you? What is it about a show that turns you into a bitter ender that keeps you dutifully watching every last episode, long after the chewing gum has lost its flavor, long after the train has jumped the tracks? Even when you know it's not good, but for you anyway, it's just good enough to muddle through all the way to the finale. I'm Glenn Weldon. Today we're talking about TV shows we've watched in their entirety, despite our better judgment, on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Joining me today are the core for my fellow pop culture happy hour host, Linda Holmes. Hey, Linda. Hey, Glenn.

Aisha Harris. Hey, pal. Hey, there. And Stephen Thompson, my friend. How are you? Hey, buddy. All right, we're not going to pussyfoot around here. We will have much to talk about. Let's get right to it. Linda, what is your pick? Well, my pick, it's funny because in the intro you made this sound like something that would drag on for years and years and years and years, like the people who watched all like 68 seasons of VR or whatever. of whom I do, by the way,

know some of those people. But I chose something that didn't drag on for quite so long, but certainly dragged on far past when I knew it was a bad idea. Because that happened in the first five minutes of the 2003 Fox show Married by America. Now, I have made mention of this show. I have made mention of this show on the podcast before. it is important to understand that in 2003, when this show premiered, we were three years-ish after Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, which was Fox's sort of big, controversial beauty pageant slash nightmare, you know, dystopian nightmare of a quote-unquote reality show. And this was a modification where there were a group of single people and I'm cutting out a lot of steps because believe me, there were a lot of sense.

steps. But single people had their friends and family choose a person for them to get engaged to, quote unquote. And so then they got engaged and the scare quotes are enormous. The air quotes are blowing your hair back. So they got up on stage at a live, it was sort of like a live pageanty type of an event. They got up on stage and with the woman sticking her hand through a hole in a sort of screen so that the guy could put the ring on it, because these were, of course, all straight couples. I don't remember this part of it. Yeah, the woman is like a crotch level. Yeah, the crotch level hole that the woman stuck her hand through so that the man could put the ring on it without them seeing or meeting each other.

And then they would take down the screen and the people would meet. And there were, I think, like five couples, I think. They sent them off to a like a resort hotel to spend time together and decide whether to actually. get married. And there was a prize where they were going to win, I believe it was a car and a house if they actually got married, which if you think about it is perverse in the extreme. No sure. Yes. But the thing that made it really special in the end was that in the end, no one got married. So it was a show called Married by America in which no one got married, which the entire point of it was supposed to be, these people are committing to marrying someone they've never met, which of course was not true and should not be true and was completely made up.

So the show came to nothing with the exception of the fact that it was very, very low class. I guess I would say I don't tend to think of myself as someone who's bothered by low class reality TV. But for me, this was the low point for class and reality television in some ways. Lower, I would say, than fear factor. Because those people just take. Like if you're just eating bugs or doing something gross, you're fine tomorrow. If you're hiding in the closet on your fake wedding day on national television because the bro that you're supposed to marry broke your heart because you really decided that you fell in love with him and he doesn't love you, that's going to stay with you for a while. So the biggest reason why I stuck with this for all, I don't know what it was, six episodes, eight episodes. I had an excuse, which was I was watching this for work. Okay. This was something that I covered. And so I was getting, you know, I was on an assignment with that show.

But honestly, even if I hadn't been, it's possible that I would have stuck with it because at the time, I think I had a bigger appetite for just the kind of train wrecky. I can't believe I'm watching this kind of thing, which now when I start to get that feeling, I'm just like, okay, something actually bad is going to happen either now or later. and I'm going to turn away from this before it happens. And the funny thing is, I know one person on the entire planet who watched this show besides me, and it's Stephen. And this is before we met. This is before we knew each other. Now, Stephen, this feels like a show that was not made to entertain, but instigate. It's aimed to be water cooler television to launch think pieces and get a lot of hands ringing and tongues clucking.

I understand the curiosity gets you in the door, even morbid curiosity gets you in the door because car wrecks cause rubbernecking. But what keeps you there as a fellow bitter ender for this show? What kept you there, Stephen? Like Love is Blind, the current show that has a lot of Married by America DNA to it, it was one of those shows that was sort of unintentionally interesting or that stumbled into revelations about the way bad couples can fall into patterns in ways that I did find sociologically interesting. But it is an objectively terrible show. It is a show that has absolutely no idea what it wants to do and kind of changes course and changes the definition of what it's even supposed to be trying to accomplish over the course of that season. Yeah. The only other thing I would say about this show, and I think we've probably now talked about it more than anyone's ever talked about it in history, there are a number of reality shows from this period, and this is one of them, that have been kind of memory hold in a certain way.

You can't find it. You can't even find, like, scrubbed press releases and photos as easily as you can for most things. They have really tried to take some of these shows and sort of suck them into a hole of we never did that. That never happened. You can't just find it. Like, you think Disney stuff's in the vault. Yeah, this is in a vault.

I did find what looked like the final episode on YouTube. I would believe that. Now, Aisha, I was looking over our prep talk. And I noticed that a few of our picks are older shows from a time, you know, before peak TV, before streaming. And I figured that makes sense because now it is so easy to abandon the show midseason because so many other shows are just waiting for you. But your pick. Your pick is more recent. It premiered before peak TV, before streaming, but it is still ongoing.

And yet and yet and yet you are still watching it. You defy my thesis. Tell me what your pick is. Dude. So this might as well be called Aisha's Guilty Pleasure because, yes, I am still watching it. And that is Teen Mom 2. No, not Teen Mom, the original iteration, but Teen Mom 2. Although it has recently been merged with the OG series and is now called Teen Mom the next chapter.

There's also Teen Mom Family Reunion, which like, it's a whole thing. I'm still watching it all. What is the difference between Teen Mom and Teen Mom? Yeah, please. Okay. So, yes, I have to get. give a little bit of context here. So first of all, teen mom is a franchise. Yes, it's a franchise within MTV. It's a spinoff of another TV show known as 16 and pregnant. And that premiered in 2009.

And that was a docu series, kind of in the same mode as like true life where it was like every episode was about a different teenage girl who got pregnant. And then it follows her pregnancy. And then often there's there's the partner, the boy, the boyfriend or the sometime boyfriend who's not. pulling his way and they're both immature and then they have the baby at the end. Now, teen mom and teen mom two and every other part of the teen franchise, those have been spun out of that. And in the case of teen mom one and two, they came out of those 16 and pregnant episodes. So they picked like five or six young girls or women and they got their own series. And so with Teen Mom 2, you know, it originally started with Janelle, Chelsea, Kalyn, Leah, they are all from different parts of the country and they are raising

kids. And some of these kids now are about to turn into teenagers themselves or our teen. Like, this is how long I've been watching this show. And I've had to do a lot of soul searching as to why, A, I started watching it to begin with and B, why I'm still watching it all these years later. But I think what's kept me watching is I have become somewhat invested in these women's lives and how some of them have really been able to seem as though they've stepped up in many ways and they've found partners and found some happiness. And the show sometimes will deal with some very interesting issues in a reality show way, but in a way that kind of feels relevant to what's going on. And it's just, it's a mess. And any show that, like, has Dr. Drew

Pinsky as a quote unquote expert to host the reunions they have every season, it's not not a show to be trusted. I do think that to some extent they're exploiting these things. One other final thing I will say is that it's really interesting to track these women and the like the side hustles they have. It's very much kind of aligns with the Kardashian effect. And like the era when we were people started becoming famous for being parents. So like John and K Plus 8, it kind of like came out in that same era, the rise of mommy blogs. And now all of these women have like fashion lines or like makeup uplines and they have their own podcasts and they've turned being a mom into an entire influencer pipeline. It's just so fascinating to me to watch that. It's similar to the Kardashians,

but on a different pay scale. I mean, they're not, they're getting paid, believe me, but they're not getting paid. They're not Kardashians. Well, this is the thing because any time you watch any reality show, your feelings about it are a lot more complicated than it would seem on the surface. People who think that people who watch the Kardashians, you know, it's aspirational. It's not necessarily. And people who watch housewives. It's aspirational. It's certainly not because the people are indulging in the camp. But this is

one of the reasons, Aisha, I had a question when I saw that on the prop doc, because, I mean, you have said on the show several times that you do not plan on having kids. I didn't. I don't. I'm happy. And the last thing in the world I'd want to do is fill up my free time watching other people have kids and interacting

with kids. So are you watching the show just as a narrative that unspoles or Are you relating it to your own life in any way? For me, I think it's just I, it solidifies my decision not to have children. I'm like, this doesn't look fun. Like, nothing about this looks fun. And I really want someone, I would love for someone to do a study of these kids.

Because I think this is the first generation of kids that has literally grown up on, like, having cameras in their face as long as they were sentient. And so I feel as though these kids have had cameras on their faces and been a way. of like being recorded all the time since they were coming out of the womb. And I'm very curious to see five, ten years from now what they are like. And if there's like a study that can be done to sort of compare that to also Gen Z, who has basically grown up online as well. So I just think it's a really interesting, for lack of a better word, the cliche, like social experiment that I would not wish on anyone, but I do find it entertaining for better or for worse. No, for better for worse. I get that. Now, Stephen, you picked a scripted series, and I'm grateful for that because, spoiler, I also picked a reality series. And if we had all picked a reality series, I think we'd be sending the wrong message because it's possible for terrible yet bingeable. You know, that's not the sole province of reality TV. There's plenty of lousy scripted television that you can't step away from. So what's your pick?

So what I ended up picking was a scripted series and a scripted dramatic series. Now, Glenn, when you pitched your question to Aisha about, Like, you were watching this during the height of peak TV. Let's think about the shows that were on the air in 2016 and 2017 that I could have been watching other than every single episode of the ABC drama designated survivor. Yep, you're the one. Which starred Kiefer Sutherland as a cabinet official who is, you know, set off in a remote location during the state of the union address that the president gives. And there's a terrorist attack. And everyone is killed. And so Kiefer Sutherland becomes the president of the United States.

And it's a compelling premise. It's a show that I thought would be a hit. It certainly had this kind of big pedigree behind it. The network was really behind it. It got a ton of promotion. The problem is that this show could go in a number of directions, right? Like it could be a government drama about process. It could be an FBI thriller.

It could be a conspiracy thrill. right? Like unraveling the mystery of how this happened. It could be kind of a police procedural. It could be the West Wing. It could be a light kind of spin-city style political comedy. You know what it chose to do? All of those things simultaneously.

And it was a complete disaster. This show, which ultimately ran three seasons, two on ABC and then one more on Netflix. This show in three seasons had five different showrunners. And the experience of watching the whole thing was like every few episodes, you would just imagine this game of telephone in which a new person took over with no regard for what came before it and then just decided to completely redefine it in their own image only to get sacked like six episodes later at which point that process would start over again. There is a Wikipedia page for this show that is so thorough, just listing the dozens and dozens of characters who are, like, deeply entrenched in intrigue only to get written off or killed two episodes later. Look at the cast of this thing. At one point, Anjanoe Ellis was on it. Like, there are all these, like, great people kind of just, like, coming and going and dropping off.

Suddenly it goes to Netflix and they're swearing. It is just like 14 different shows. It is completely inscrutable. If you ask me to describe, like, give some sort of summation of what happens over the course of 53 episodes, it would be completely impossible. And yet, we watched every episode. It was like appointment TV. We didn't watch it, like, as it aired on network television with commercials and stuff. But we would stream every single episode.

And it was bad. The phenomenon you're talking about here, Stephen, is that of the soap opera, is that of the comic book. It is continuous ongoing narrative that must in itself constantly regenerate and reinvent itself. And that's why people keep watching soap operas. It's tell me a story. Tell me any damn story. It also kind of sounds not that far off from like scandal. I mean, scandal was kind of all over the place, too, after season two or three and was just ridiculous.

And that's also another political kind of show in that. way, just super ridiculous. I do think there is something to be said for a show that is trying to do too much instead of a show that's not trying to do enough. And I think in some ways that kept us watching in ways that a show that was kind of repeating itself might have just kind of driven us away. Sure. I mean, this is the phenomenon. We talked about this with the show, Revenge.

It just kept getting bigger and weirder and stupider and more off the walls. And that in itself is compelling. Revenge. Revenge. T.M. All right. We're going to go back to reality with my pick, a kind of reality anyway. This is a reality show called Boy Meets Boy from the year 2003.

Just to put this in some kind of cultural context, that's one year after The Bachelor premiered. So there were a lot of imitations springing up, and it premiered on Bravo. And again, to think of where Bravo was, this was two weeks to the day after Queer Eye for the Straight Guy had premiered. But about a year before the launch of Project One Way, so that's kind of where Bravo was. was at this cultural moment. The premise, you take this basic ass, mask for mask, guy named James. He is fit. He is conventionally attractive.

He is facially symmetrical. He is square-jod. He is a young, cis, white, gay man with dimples for days. But no discernible personality. I mean, this guy was every guy you'd see out at a bar in D.C. in 2003. He was a pair of capri pants, made flesh. Not so much a snack as a bologna sandwich with a glass of tap one. That's this guy.

That guy has to choose a boyfriend from a group of 15 men. He'll be helped in this endeavor by his friend Andra, who was very protective of him. Good for her. She's staying with James in this amazing house in Palm Springs. The 15 dudes are staying in a different house in Palm Springs. And unbeknownst to James and Andra, some of those prospective suitors, seven out of 15 of them, are straight. So if in the end James chooses a gay man, they will win a cash prize and a treat. trip for two to New Zealand, because it's 2003.

Lord of the Rings. New Zealand, New Zealand, New Zealand. If he chooses a straight man, James wins and nothing. The straight guy gets 25K. So, but also it's just insulting. I had notes, right? Okay, so from the jump, leave aside the ethical murkiness of not revealing the premise to your people because that is competitive reality TV.

That's just baked in. Note also that there are straight men and there are gay men. And that's it. It's 2003. It was 2003. Everyone is one or the other. In the acknowledgement of bisexuality, pansexuality, there are two boxes, you will pick one. Well, and if you pick one of the straight men, there is no chance that he actually has any attraction to you or that there's anything genuine about the connection between you or anything like that because he is a straight man.

The entire premise is jokes on you. So the gay producers, they felt they were doing good work. It's the black, what was that? Were the white guy pretends to be black for in the 60s? Oh. Oh, you know, black like this is what it's mean. No, black like me. But for gay men.

Here is one contestant. This is Wes, who is making the point about how they are shattering stereotypes. And his confessional happens to be, just so happens to be intercut with footage of everyone out at a karaoke night. There's always a many stereotypes about gay men not being athletic, gay men, not being masculine. And I think this show blows that out of the water. The smash cut. I live for the smash cut. It's like, your world here's show to which stereotypes.

We got news for you. So the producers were in on it, right? The producers knew exactly what they were doing. But look, the premise of the show was to prove that Gaydar doesn't exist. That in this crazy mixed up modern world, it's an antiquated notion. Gaydar, it's reductive. Maybe it's even homophobic. That's their thesis.

But they didn't argue. it fairly because the producers, of course, reality TV, they stage every weekly elimination so that whoever James chose, there'd still be a mix of gay and straight men in the house. And if they really believed in their premise, they would let James choose whoever they wanted. When they did tell him later in the season, you know, the producers had narrowed it down to three contestants, he reacted. And if the moment of his reaction had happened today, it would have been memed within an inch of its life, not because of his reaction, but because of his complete lack of one, you're going to hear a silence in this clip,

seven second silence, and I want you to realize that that silence contains nothing. Of all three final mates, Wes, Brian and Franklin, one of them is straight. Did he say wow? He said, wow. And I am here to tell you, that perfect sculpted vanilla. a putting face of his does not move. There is nothing behind the eyes. They do not widen. They do not flash. They are lifeless eyes.

Black eyes like a Dow's eyes. It is utter passivity. But let's get back to the whole notion of the show. Okay. The organizing principle is that Gaydar is not a thing. Stereotypes, it's reductive. All gay men are different. Gaydar doesn't exist. Except for the fact that, bitch, it so does. I tested myself. I invite the listers. You can find the first episode of this show on YouTube.

episode one, they come out of the house and they introduce themselves to James one by one. And I haven't seen the show in 19 years. And I remembered nothing about it except how awesome the Palm Springs real estate is. They come out and I check my instant like institakes against the Wikipedia page, which tells you who who's and what to what. And I'm going to tell you, I'm not lying, 15 for 15. But in the end, you will be happy to know that he chose Wes, the gay guy from the clip who was talking about sharing stereotypes. I thought you weren't going to tell me what happened. What are you doing?

So they won the money, but they did not take the trip to New Zealand together. They took it separately. Oh, okay. It's bittersweet. You know, it's possible that they just didn't want to commit themselves to one person at that moment. And you know why? Because it's raining men. That's right.

I rest my case. Well, we want to know what TV shows you begrudgingly watched to their conclusion. Find us at Facebook.com slash PCHA. And that brings us to the end of our show. Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson, Aisha Harris. Thanks to all of you for being here. Thank you. Thank you, Glenn.

This episode was produced by Ramel Wood and edited by Jessica Reedy. And hello, come in, provides our theme music, which we will all just sit here and listen to the very end. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all tomorrow.