This season's shameful pleasure

I know it's big nowadays to admit "guilty pleasures." Oh, look how hip and ironic and post-guilt we are! Wink, wink! While secretly we really think we're better than the people who just don't "get" the indulgence and inspiration that are Lifetime Movies.

But I think there's another level, a level beyond guilt, a level of enjoyment which, if admitted to your close friends, the ones who have forgiven you any number of errors in judgment, would make them question the wisdom of continuing to know you at all.

I'm talking shameful pleasures. I'm talking Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team.

For the season that I watched, I cringed even as I thrilled at the spectacle of young women of average intelligence and too much mascara crying their newly-broken hearts out.

I am not a better person for admitting it. I am not a better person for indulging in it. Though if that show were the greatest of my walks on the dark side, my immortal soul might still be safe as houses. Houses with cat doors and a couple of broken ground floor windows, but houses just the same.

But now there's Tabatha's Salon Takeover, and I find myself writhing in the vicious joy of watching the downfall of others. I breathe in deeply and sweetly as Tabatha dresses down a man who, I think, can best be summarized as a fuckwit, though that is the only perjorative I don't think she threw at him. I take consolation that he is, through his own efforts, driving his own business into the ground.

I am, in short, booking myself an express train to hell. Won't you join me? It's delightful.