First thing's first. Are you watching 24 this season? If not, you should be. I'll be honest: I hadn't planned on tuning in agan this season. Since the last 2 seasons were pretty average at best, I figured the 5th season had no chance. But after the incessant advertising push on Fox, my heart was turned. I decided to watch the (4 hour-long!) season premiere and was immediately hooked. This solidified my decision to cut Desperate Housewives and The OC from my schedule (they have both really sucked it up this year), making my new weekly lineup as follows:

Grey's Anatomy, 24, Arrested Development (if they ever decide to air the remaining 4 episodes... P.S. thanks again to all of you readers for getting the best show on TV cancelled by your inaction), Lost, and Invasion (I challenge you to name a TV actress hotter than the woman that plays Larkin...)

This week, since I couldn't wait until the show started, I tuned in to Fox about 40 minutes early. Being admittedly unfamiliar with the schedules on the major networks these days, I figured that, in a perfect world they would surprise me with an Arrested Development, in a mediocre world I could get a repeat of last week's 24, and in the worst possible case they would be showing an old episode of My Two Dads. Never in my wildest dreams would I have foreseen that they would be showing:

First of all, I don't know what that Dancing with the Stars craze was all about last year or how it got so popular - that sludge was horrifying. But it was just the next logical step in the pantheon of pseudo-reality shows involving celebrities doing pretty much normal stuff: Celebrity Fear Factor, Celebrity Poker Showdown, The Surreal Life, Punk'd, Anna Nicole, The Osbournes/Newlyweds & copycat programs. Say what you will about the tenets of Celebrity Reality shows; at least in the above cases the titles are accurate. Dancing with the Stars wasn't misleading, right? There was dancing, and there were stars. Evander Holyfield, Jerry Rice, John O'Hurley (the guy from Seinfeld and "To Tell the Truth" - a riveting game show which you would only know about if you had GSN but nothing to do during the one day in history it aired), whatever, you've seen their faces before on TV, so you always knew which one of the pair was the dancer and which was the "star". But seriously, I turned on "Skating with Celebrities", and I had never seen any of those people before. Every time a duo hit the ice to perform, I tried to guess which one was the skater and which was the "celebrity", and I was NEVER right. Not once. Okay, so I only watched 5 minutes of it. I was wrong both times. In any case, a few things struck me for those five minutes. Okay, 2 minutes.

1. Remember the 1992 Olympics? I cut out pictures of Summer Sanders from Newsweek and hung them up on my bedroom at home. I was in love with her. She was going places, a really promising future star. Those muscles! That smile! That one piece bathing suit! That was before I came to understand how the country only cares about sports like swimming, gymnastics, skiing, and ice skating during the Olympics... the rest of the year, at least based on commercials, they all work at Home Depot or Wal*Mart. So Summer's celebrity star faded fast. The next rung down on the ladder of fame is, apparently, hosting MTV Beach House, which she did at some point in the late 90s... and since then, she has slid to the near-bottom as the co-host of Skating with Celebrities, with Scott Hamilton (for some reason the only male skater anyone has ever heard of--how screwed would Fox be if they couldn't get him to host?)

Then...

...and now

2. Kristy Swanson was on this show? I didn't see her. I saw this soccer-mom type lookalike but not the real Kristy Swanson, you know, the hot one from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the November 2002 issue of Playboy. I don't think Kristy was actually there.

Would the real Kristy Swanson please shove her hands in her pants?

3. I stopped watching after it became clear that I had a column's worth of material, and for the next half hour, went back to practicing saying the alphabet backward so I can win a free sundae at 7-11. At 8:56, I turned the TV on again to make sure I didn't miss any 24, and incredibly, impossibly, I tuned in at the exact worse time. I am sure they explained during the show why this would be the case, but there were four skaters on the stage wearing ridiculous vaudeville costumes, with makeup and all. Todd Bridges (Diff'rent Strokes!) was inexplicably wearing an Afro wig. I don't even want to write about this, my hands keep migrating toward the large hunting knife next to my desk. The other couple were, I think, dressed as flappers from the 1920s.

Couldn't quite reach it.

4. The audience was clearly being told what to do by some higher power. Just like American Idol, it seems like they kind of pit the crowd against the judges, so they get mad whenever the judges don't praise the contestants. Unfortunately this doesn't work when the judges are all sweeties like Dorothy Hamill. Another judge was incredibly named Mark Lund. I checked and this is not the same Marc Lund who walked on for GW Basketball and played 2 frantic minutes a season for four years, but I do believe that GW's Lund is more famous than the skating analyst (who actually wrote a skating book called "Frozen Assets.") In any case, the judges are giving the scores for one category, and each time a judge gives the score (7.8, 7.8, 7.9, nice consistency guys!) the audience boos as if they're dismembering a poodle on stage. Then for the next category they give 8.0, 8.0, 8.1, and the audience is on their feet screaming with elation. Is there something dark and terrible about the number 7? Black magic? Harry Potter? I don't understand how 7.9 and 8.0 can be so different as to warrant such a ridiculous disparity in reaction... unless, as I suspected from the beginning, they couldn't find a live audience for this show, and the crowd is a bunch of inflatables with a big fan in the back of the auditorium to make them sway.

Good Marc Lund	Bad Mark Lund

5. As the show drew to a close, the announcers signed off, and some frightening dance music came on. Now I know this is kind of racist--and certainly a cliché, but let's not forget that the reason clichés exist is because they're true--but white people really can't dance. In general. Imagine what happens when you add skates to the mix. Save yourself the trouble and watch next week. Make sure your knives are out of reach.

During the credits the terrible truth closed in on me like a pack of wild rabid dogs. This show is going to get picked up. This show is going to live to see another season, while Arrested Development remains in Fox Limbo until it's totally forgotten by all but the few faithful viewers. Seriously, I bet the number of people that read Deadly Hippos rivals the number of people that watched Arrested Development.

I just hope the apocalypse comes first and saves us all from that ungodly moment.

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