Part of my nightly ritual involves watching Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Extra! and every other inane, equally salacious excuse for half-an-hour well spent ever to hit a major network.
It’s true – in my capacity as a contributor to US Weekly Magazine’s "Fashion Police" column, it’s my job... nay, my duty... to report and comment upon the abhorrent apostasy that is the fallen state of art in America.
Or rather, that’s the lie I tell myself when I’m facing down the 3212th picture this year of an Olsen Twin dressed like an ass.
But in order to come up with snarky one-liners on-point enough to prove that I actually follow what’s happening in Hollywood, I do need to know which Nicole lost her baby weight the fastest (Kidman), which Jonas Brother is the cutest (Joe), and how much crank Amy Winehouse can mainline without killing herself (infinite, as of 10:49 PM Eastern Standard Time on August 26, 2008).
At this point, these shows are practically parodies of themselves. The funhouse graphics, the oblivious redundancy, the endless assault of three-second blurbs and clips under the guise of "breaking news"... why, it’s enough to make a girl want to start reading The Economist. And the smarmy slop they pass off as newsworthy... I swear, the amount of airtime they’ve devoted to Marie Osmond and Barry Manilow this year alone has me thinking someone’s great-grandma is in charge of programming. So unless you’re sincerely interested in re-watching last night’s Dancing With the Stars in real time or guessing which actor turning 87 today once appeared alongside Conway Twitty on The Lawrence Welk Show in the Crest Whitestrips Birthday Challenge, do yourself a favor and spend the night drinking borax instead.
The ET-ification of TV in general has left me so soured of "news" that I have slowly forsaken it all – the bloodlusting local feeds, the bombast and sanctimony of the networks, the ticker-mad cable news shows, even that pretentious but generally reliable old standby PBS – in favor of quieter online purveyors instead. While I would like to say that I seek out a balanced and fair reportage of all current and cultural goings-on via an assortment of reputable outlets, I don’t. All I can stomach is pure satire at this point.
And so, I glean most of my knowledge of world events from What Would Tyler Durden Do? I have sunk so low that I knew about the demise of Sienna Miller’s latest extramarital fling before I knew who Obama picked as his running mate.
Yes, I should be ashamed of myself, but for some reason, I’m not. I’m too busy munching on the hand that feeds me. (Good thing Mary Hart keeps her nails short.)
