By: Jesse Jones

We live in a hectic, fast-paced world. Things happen in an instant and you don’t have time to think about whether or not they should — they just do. So when you sit down to take in some televised entertainment-based programming, the last thing you need getting in the way of your viewing experience is talent or ideas, or some goddamn “storyline” with anything interesting or important to say. Fortunately, reality programming has delivered us from the tyranny of actually enjoying television, instead allowing us “unscripted” glimpses of the “glamorous” lives of the rich and “famous” in lieu of being entertained. Between avoiding the accusatory glare of our significant other and resenting our children for robbing us of all our hopes and dreams, we simply don’t have the time or energy to argue the point. Instead, we just sit back and let the television tell us that the people we are watching are interesting and worth our precious time and take it at its word, because if they weren’t, why would they be on our TV?  Hmm?

The truth is that passionate devotion to honing your skill and painstakingly refining your craft is for suckers. Who has the patience to devise an engaging story with interesting plot and subtext which, through elegantly assembled dialogue and surprising twists and turns, ultimately culminates in an exciting and thoroughly satisfying resolution, when a bag of silicone in a belly-shirt will pull in ten times more of the coveted Axe Body Spray demo? Today, the most important and bankable talent one can posses is that of having passed through the reproductive organs of someone else who at one time in their lives actually make something of themselves so that their children wouldn’t have to — like Kim Kardashian. But there comes a point when the sheer tonnage of Kardashian, to be kept up with, becomes too much for one television show to handle. Then there is only one solution: a spin-off.

With Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami, we are introduced to two misspelled celebutwats who somehow manage to not even be very talented at having been born into privilege. Understanding that this “Lavern and Shirley” of inane bullshit would need something different to set them apart, the producers set out to create something even less entertaining than your typical reality show, and thus was born an entirely new genre of television — a genre that I have lovingly dubbed the “Realimercial.”

Don’t get me wrong — I know a lot of shows are nothing more than thinly veiled product placement dressed up to look like a game show, but gone here with the latest Kardashian distraction from E! is all remaining pretense that we as viewers might still have any interest in the mundane goings-on of two bitchy, over-privileged “personalities” whose only claim to fame is being related to someone who is related to someone famous. Instead, we are presented with a brand of television so whorish that if it were to take human form, it would have to be given an erroneously “K”-spelled name and a brand of shoes of its own to promote on yet another reality commercial on the Entertainment Exclamation Point channel. The entire reason for this show’s being is to promote the sibling’s clothing store and new radio program. Before watching this show, I didn’t know a damned thing about D.A.S.H., and now I feel like I no longer know anything about anything else.

But I was under the impression that this kind of thing was illegal, kind of the same way that Hasbro couldn’t run commercials for G.I. Joe action figures during the Saturday morning exploits of said Real American Heroes (who, for some damned reason, could only be bothered to tell us what half of the battle was). But apparently the trick is to simply set the program inside of the thing that you wanted to advertise. If only the creators of SWAT Kats had known that all they had to do was set their adventures in a KB Toys store and make their anthropomorphized heroes the bitchy relatives of Heathcliff that they could sell all the action figures the kids could eat. But apparently the same rules don’t apply to those born into talentless fame as they do the rest of us.

Not a day goes by that I don’t curse my father for not having owned a chain of low-rent motor courts, or my mother for not having helped a rich murderer to — if only temporarily — avoid prison. If only they had thought about how their lack of personal achievement would effect my own future potential to live off of their personal achievement. I guess I’m just going to have to rely on my own talent and effort to get me where I want to go, and look where that’s gotten me so far!

Well, I just hope they’re happy. I hope they know that every time I step out of my car with no pants on, they’re the reason that instead of being greeted by a swarm of camera-toting scum-bags waiting on the curb to shine flashbulbs on my fleshbulbs, there’s a police officer waiting to taser my taint. Thanks mom and dad! Thanks for nothin’!