Quality Television Viewing These Days

Have you ever seen this television game show called "Baggage"? It's like an updated version of 1970's show, The Dating Game .... with a twist. Three total strangers compete for a date with another total stranger while admitting to several choice tidbits of bizarre deep dark secret behaviors from their past while attempting to justify it all as being normal behavior ...... It's like, Which of these freaks once serenaded their ex-fiancee each day for a week while standing naked and drinking from a chalice of pig blood in a crowded pizza parlor? .....  Why would anyone appear on this show and in front of the world and throw this crap out there for all their family, neighbors, friends and business associates to discover? Then the person choosing is supposed to weed out the two freaks with the most baggage in an attempt to find their one true dream date.

I watched it once for about fifteen minutes after it first went on air just to see if some creative television minds actually came up with a quality new idea in this sea of copycat sameness that's out there. I should have known better. That was about a year or more ago and now I've noticed, while channel surfing the TV guide listings that it's still on the air. WHY?? I can't fathom that it received any sort of positive numbers when the ratings came in. I can't imagine any totally sober and socially mature sponsor wanting their good name associated with this drivel. Of course it's hosted and presided over by the same defrocked ex-big city mayor, .... Mr. Springer of unquestionable credibility who made a name for himself while pitting all sorts of inbred misfits and their hillbilly grievances against each other on the long running audience participation "talk show" bearing his name. I always doubted that any of that show was real. There just couldn't be ten/fifteen-plus years, five-days-a-week worth of  morons and kin running around the back hills of this country .... could there? Certainly most of that show after week one had to be scripted, right? It appears that he brought his most creative writers along for the ride on this new venture.

There's probably only been two or three unique game show ideas in the history of the genre and everything since has been some sort of spinoff or ripoff of what came before.