Secret Life of the American Teenager

This is the worst show on TV.

Last night while my wife was cooking me a delicious dinner I was channel surfing and I landed on this piece of crap.  I had heard a little bit about this by the inundation of ads that ran for it for months on end, kind of like that stupid show Leverage which beat me over the head with the fact that the Tim Allen-look-a-like dufus main character won an Emmy like twenty years ago or something.

For those of you blessedly ignorant of this piece of crap, the brief recount is: let’s make a stupid TV series to ride on the coattails of that stupid Ellen Page movie, Juno.

I watched about 30 minutes on and off, out of sequence.  I wanted to barf.

It seems like the writers of Dawson’s Creek finally ran out of money and mercilessly injected themselves back into the business of writing dialogue that only college-educated adults would be capable of enunciating designed for characters who are supposedly teenagers to recite.  Yes, it’s one of those stupid shows where 14, 15, 16 year-old boys and girls speak like coherent 30, 40, or 50 year-olds.  As much as I loathe Laguna Beach, at least the lines themselves in that piece of shit are improvised which adds at least one dimension of believability to the ridiculous story arcs they put together on that show.  If you want me to believe that I’m watching anything about the life of a teenager, you can start by making me believe that I’m listening to teenagers actually speaking like teenagers isntead of reciting a memorized script that is so far out of left field it would make your head spin.

I watched the titular character perform a monlogue that lasted at least 30 seconds long in which she waxes philosophical idiotic about the deep meaning of kissing some random asshole.  They made a girl who is supposed to be a sophomore or a junior in high school use the words, “husband material”.  By the way, she’s speaking to her bumbling beta-male father whose wife left him and at another point in the episode called his ex-wife to brag about witnessing some completely irrelevant and anticlimactic moment of faux-bonding between his two daughters who were talking about masturbating at the time.  During this conversation he preemptively apologized to his ex-wife for possibly interrupting a date with her new boyfriend.  Yeah.

Speaking of sisters, the girl who has a baby has a little sister who looks like vaguely like Selena Gomez.  At first, I was put off by a very inappropriate casting decision: a caucasian girl does not have a latina younger sister.  However, after witnessing the manner in which they portray these two girls’ bumbling beta cuckold father, I was able to suspend my disbelief and merely assume that they’re successfully implying that his whore wife banged the gardener.  Like mother, like daughter.

The show was pitched as this incredible story about teen motherhood, but the baby appeared on camera for less than 1 minute in the 30 through which I suffered.  The fact that this idiot girl had a baby at all seemed like nothing more than a conversation piece, which is fitting given what the show is really about: artifically inflated, unrelenting, over-the-top fake teen sex drama.

My wife and I invented a drinking game to be played while watching this stupid piece of shit series: every time a character under the age of 18 says the word “sex” or anything related (“condom”, “masturbation”) you take a shot.  Any time an innuendo to that effect is made, you take a sip.  You’d be absolutely hammered in about 10 minutes of watching this crap.

Every single scene of the episode that I watched featured some dopey teenage boy using every sappy, exaggereted, feminized, beta maneuver in the book to get into a girl’s pants.  “I think I love you, we have a connection.”  But the girls, being sassy, intelligent, totally rational creatures of the 21st century are all wise to their games.  Like the saps they are, the boys are led around by their dicks into having stupid conversations about “us” and the girls create fake drama amongst themselves by trying to steal each other’s pandering lap-dog suitor.

One particularly loathesome scene is when the very ugly female principal of the school who tries to look and act like Rachel Maddow gives a lecture to a dippy blonde idiot girl who they made sure to inform us was a Christian.  In a very lame attempt to portray all religious people as shallow hypocritical douchers, this character plasters banners all over school with the phrase “just say me” which is a campaign to promote female masturbation as an alternative to sexual intercourse with boys – and the Jewish principal is of course not cool with that and smugly makes her take them all down.

At a later point in the story, they use this “just say me” plot element to give the teen mother character an opportunity to make a smirky face and imply that she’s going to go up to her bedroom and masturbate.  Wow, how edgey.

Later, another particularly loathsome scene involves Ms. Maddow hosting some kind of preposterous mother/daughter dance ball at the high school gym during which she lectures all the attendees about how her grandmother survived the concentration camps by escaping to her happy fantasy cave of memory in which she, her sister, and her mother were dancing together in the living room while her father played the violin.  The visual there is enough to make you want to gag, and this scene was obviously injected for no other reason that to take an already preachy, sanctimonious stupid show and make it even more preachy, more sanctimonious, and more devastatingly stupid.

One of the teen mother character’s half-asian female friends approaches teen mother at said dance.  Teen mother proceeds in the presense of her mother and her hermanita to pull a condom out of her purse and hand it to half-asian girl, who leaves the scene with a stupid smirky face with the implication that she was going to go get boned later that night.  Her little sister, whose sole purpose on the show is to be a bratty little emo bitch and remind her bigger sister in disgust that she did, in fact, have a baby at the age of 15, pretends to be disgusted while her mother accusatorily insists to know if teen mother is … get this… having SEX!  No way!  Seriously?!  What follows is some kind of rambling monologue in which the teen mother defends herself for having a condom… blah blah blah… you can just imagine the drivel.

This is seriously the worst show I have ever seen.  It baffles me that the following chain of events could have actually happened, seeing as each one of these should have an independent likelihood of nearly zero: someone thought this premise was a good idea; someone actually wrote a script for a pilot of this series; a network actually bought this script and funded a pilot; a casting director was actually able to find people to star in this show; the actors were able to recite this script without becoming nauseous; the network, after watching the pilot, bought the show; the public, after watching this show, didn’t smash in their TV sets with a sledge and vow never to watch television again; advertisers actually bought air time during this time slot.

It just plain baffles me.  This is the worst show on TV.

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