The Benefits of Trash TV
One of the many hats I wear is as a podcast cohost on the fantastic
! I am so beyond lucky that my dear friend Amye Archer asked me to join her - the experience of being on this podcast over the last almost 18 months has been life changing in a number of ways. Monthly, we do a mailbag episode where our patrons can ask us questions/for advice/ or just our thoughts on something. One of our listeners asked us this week how we’re able to talk about the shows we talk about with such “humor and sincerity”. First, what a lovely compliment! Thank you, friend! If there are two things I aim to be it is funny and sincere. Secondly, I’m glad that we are able to chat about these ridiculous shows in a meaningful way.
What are these ridiculous shows you ask? Let me throw a few titles at you….
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MILF Manor
90 Day Fiance
Love After Lockup
Couple to Throuple
Sister Wives
…you get the drift.
If you had met me in 2019, you would have met a woman who had MSNBC on the TV almost 24/7. I was glued to NPR whenever in the car, and I had my finger on the pulse of what was happening in the House and Senate. Then came 2020. WOOF! Like many, I lost my job early on in the pandemic. I had a stint of unemployment the previous year so I had not really had the chance to rebuild my “safety net”. Unemployment? Sure, they gave us an extra bucket of money but it took MONTHS for it to get to us and if you had a question? Tough luck. Like every other state, Pennsylvania was not prepared for the deluge of a global pandemic and catastrophe and it showed. I had friends literally sending me groceries and sending me money to cover my mortgage in an effort to quell my intense anxiety over the state of the world. Somewhere around mid-April, I turned off the television - or rather turned it on to something else. I couldn’t bear the news anymore - my mental health that was already impacted by economic fear, extreme boredom, months and months of solitude, and was deteriorating at a rapid clip. I found opportunities for virtual connection with friends, I met with my therapist weekly, I dove into a handful of house projects but my mental health was in trouble. I couldn’t control the state of the world but I could control what information was coming into my brain.
I switched the TV from MSNBC to Netflix. I turned off NPR and turned on podcasts and immediately found the joy, laughs, and connection that I needed in reality tv podcasts. Podcasts that discussed the COMPLETELY inconsequential poor decisions that these people made and who also highlighted the humanity of these people, who were able to talk about real issues of human relationships, and people who gave me a welcome respite to the disaster of the world.
So - in mid-2024 am I back to MSNBC? OH HELL NO! 2020 was bad - it was a special kind of bad. 2024? STILL BAD! It is a different bad but it is still bad. The world is literally burning down around us - wars are waged across the globe, the earth is getting hotter and hotter by the day, we are quickly sliding into the “imaginary” world created by Margaret Atwood. While I do not completely ignore the state of the world, I do not and cannot make it my whole personality. I cannot spend hours watching talking heads talk about how terrible things are. I cannot look at political polls that point to a drastic and scary future. I vote, I donate money to organizations that do work I believe in, I keep up with major events but I do not live there anymore. Instead, I spend my time watching and talking about people who, while ridiculous, are living their lives and are choosing to show us that life. Do I laugh so hard I can’t breathe at Jonathan self-extracting from a messy throuple on “Couple to Throuple”? YES - oh hell yes and that laugh is so needed these days. Do I take breaks from looking at long held beliefs that no longer serve me in therapy to watch Kody Brown be a TERRIBLE husband and father? YES, YES I DO.
Has this impacted some relationships? I think it has. Much like when I stopped talking about weight loss and bodies, some conversations have died but that’s ok. Relationships change over time and the things we are interested in also change over time. I am not the woman I was at 30, at 40, or even 50 (I’m 51 now and I’ve changed over the last year). People talk about reality tv and call it trash and while they may not be wrong, there is value in that trash. There is value in watching things that make you laugh and most importantly, there is value in knowing what is the best thing for your own mental health.
Trash tv and podcasting about it? Fantastic for my mental health.
