Hey! What are the best shows to watch when you don’t want to think too much or really commit yourself to caring about the fictional characters involved?

When I was in high school I used to look down on reality TV. I bought into my mum’s view that if there is nothing constructive that a show has to offer intellectually then it’s not worth watching. Oh, what a fool I had been. Mum has also played herself, since I caught her watching Married At First Sight one night a couple of weeks ago and now it’s a part of our weekly routine to watch it. Ha.

The viable reasons for watching reality TV are as follows:

• Sometimes you engage your brain throughout the day so much that it is crying and Project Runway can be your safe place
• Pure Schadenfreude
• Feeling good about yourself because it turns out you’re not as much of a human disaster as those people
• Researching what the heterosexuals are up to these days (this one is mostly about The Bachelor and Married at First Sight)
• Crying about the bread and a plethora of other baked goods you’ll never eat as well and enjoying general Britishness and puns ( The Great British Bake-off)
• Ah! There is that great Irish panel show where twenty women all get to judge strange men as viable dating partners, one man at a time. There are 3 rounds per guy: first round the poor idiot just shows himself and the women get to turn off their ‘light’ if they’re turned-off straight away. The women, that is. Then, in the second round I think he gets to talk, and after that maybe he can show-off his one (1) talent or he can play a recorded ‘character review’ by someone who knows him. If he has no talents that he wants to show off, that is. 50% of the guys who choose to show off do that super-European thing where you bounce a soccer ball on your foot. It’s really stupid but in a way that is also superb. Oh, the point of the show is that the one woman who’s left with her light on gets to take the dude on a date, lucky her. If there’s more than one woman left the guy gets to choose the girl. In most cases all the lights get turned off by the end of round 3 which is all kinds of lovely because you get all the hilarity without the sacrifice. Oh shoot, I guess this point falls under Pure Schadenfreude.
• There are times in your life when only one thing will satisfy that emptiness in your heart which develops itself over the time during which you don’t hear someone say ‘I’m not here to win, I’m here to become America’s Next Top Model’. Guess what it is? It’s America’s Next Top Model.
• You almost always manage to develop at least one Strong Opinion about something happening on the reality show, which  you feel ready to passionately proclaim to the world. Simultaneously you also don’t really care about it, you’re not that invested, you know. It’s an interesting phenomenon to one day be ready to fight about who should have won Ink Masters, Top Model, whatever, and then the next week to completely forget their name.
• You know how you sometimes see these amazing tattoos online that make you think, ‘ I should get a tattoo’. Well, not after watching Ink Masters you won’t! The people competing for the title of Ink Master are supposed to be the best of the best and still they produce work that is comically subpar. watching that show has convinced me that I first need to get super rich if I want to get a tattoo that I won’t regret for the rest of my days. So, in a way, TV shows can also teach you valuable life lessons.

There you go. Now that I have removed the element of guilt out of this guilty pleasure of watching reality TV  through pure, academic reason you will be ready for the Reality TV Show Recommendations. Coming Soon.