I just watched the season premiere of Wipeout. Why? ‘Cause the ad was like “Here’s a show about people hurting themselves you should watch it!” and I was like “No, come on, it’s the 21st Century. We’ve mapped the human genome and invented the welfare state. Surely we’re beyond this. It’s not really just a show featuring video of people smashing their faces into things, right?”

 

I WAS RIGHT. It’s not just that. That would be stupid; this is actively evil. It actually undoes some of the good done by art. Beethoven’s music is now just slightly less beautiful; Ernst’s colors have lost some of their shine. The world is a worse place because Wipeout exists. Aliens who are monitoring our television signals have been going like “Oh… they have nuclear bombs? I don’t know about these Earthlings… Let’s see what they do next before we decide” and in a couple of years they’re gonna get the Wipeout broadcast and then it’s “CODE RED CODE RED PLANETARY EXECUTION SQUAD TO FASTEST POSSIBLE SPACESHIPS DANGEROUS CREATURES MUST BE ELIMINATED TO ENSURE UNIVERSAL SURVIVAL!”

 

 

Look, I’m not above watching reality television; I’ll watch the hell out of some Project Runway (SHINY PRETTY THINGS!). Or Amazing Race (FARAWAY PLACES!). Or Storage Wars (JUST KIDDING THIS IS A SHOW ABOUT OBNOXIOUS PEOPLE BUYING ROOMS FULL OF GARBAGE!). And I’m human, and so have sometimes laughed at people falling down. Whatever.

 

But this is not normal reality TV, and this is not normal falling down. This takes every possible vapid, awful, terrible, unfunny, sexist, anti-thought, visciously-schadenfreudetastic, dehumanizing stereotype about our current lived reality and condenses it into a single hourlong black hole of suck. The event horizon has swallowed our world, and we have entered into crushing endless night. We’re all doomed. Good riddance.