Summer Tv Watching

After May, when all the shows have had their finales, the tv landscape is a veritable wasteland. I'm definitely not going to waste my summer nights on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here or anything else so atrocious. I'll take reruns of How I Met Your Mother over that type of dreck any day of the week. But I've happened upon two shows that I will admit to you as being my guilty pleasure shows. I'm even more sad to admit that they're both on ABC, a network I have officially boycotted after they canceled my beloved Pushing Daisies.

First guilty pleasure summer show--The Bachelorette. Sadly, I got hooked on the last Bachelor when I caught an episode one night. Our newest Bachelorette was the third place loser (or winner) on the last Bachelor after sadly getting the "friend" card. But, luckily, she hopped off that train just in time (on a very digressing note, I don't get all the furor and frenzy whipped up over the Bachelor finale--isn't that what we see happen in romcoms all the time and we think it's romantic. Life is definitely too short to spend your life with the wrong person, and having been in a somewhat similar situation, I can honestly say that it'll save a lot of heartache later). Jillian, the latest Bachelorette, has a lot of men to choose from, including a foot fetishist, a rageaholic, a country swooner, a breakdancer from Brooklyn, and many others in the pool of 35 initial men. Sadly, my favorite didn't make it through the first rose ceremony, but I still enjoy this very weird and sometimes awkward social experiment.

Second guilty pleasure summer show--Here Come the Newlyweds. I caught this for the first time last Monday; it comes on right after The Bachelorette and the promos looked funny so I decided to give it a chance. What I like about it is that it doesn't demean, ridicule, or try to undermine people's relationships. All the challenges are meant to strength the couples and test their "married" skills such as listening, working together, helping your spouse, and communicating. They've done a great job of casting it with some really great and interesting couples (and the token Mormon couple) to make it funny and enjoyable.

So my Monday nights are pretty much booked for the rest of the summer. Will Jillian find her soulmate? Will the already soulmates work well enough together to take home the big cash prize? Will all of it matter at the end of the summer? And, most importantly, will it lessen my hate for ABC? Probably not, but at least it'll be some fun entertainment before returning to the "real" tv shows in the fall.