Intro: When Brilliant Skews Sadistic

My "friend group" fantasy football punishment this year is to watch a full season of an abysmally bad TV sitcom and write/post a blog for each episode on Twitter. 500 word minimum per post, 1 episode per week.

In what will hopefully be the low point of my fantasy football career, I lost.

Most “sacko” punishments fall into one of three buckets: an act of public humiliation, doing something genuinely unenjoyable / uncomfortable, or honoring an inside joke / tradition. The best ones creatively combine all three. Judging by these standards, this year’s punishment is a certified stroke of genius. But when does brilliant turn sadistic?

Is it veering off from the typical single act or at worst full-day event into a 13-week (that’s a quarter of an entire year) torture series? Is it going through a structured, democratic process of consuming countless “worst shows of 2021” trailers and blog posts to stack-rank and select the worst among the worst? Perhaps it’s deciding that instead of the option to binge through Season 1, I need to watch the All-New Season 2 (how was a second season lawfully commissioned!?) as each episode premieres. Any of these acts of cruelty would have met the criteria, but this punishment turned sadistic the moment the 2021 Fantasy Football punishment TV show was announced: “Call Me Kat”:

“An optimistic and fun-loving woman continuously defies societal expectations, and her mother's wishes, to prove she can live a happy and fulfilling life on her own terms. Her first move? Using her entire savings to open a cat café in Louisville, Ky. Kat's in her element at her lively cat café, working alongside her friends: Randi, a bold, aspiring artist, and Phil, the café's resident baker dipped in Southern flair. Across the way, the local piano bar, run by cool, down-to-earth Carter, is the gang's favorite watering hole, where Kat's best friend from college, Max, slings drinks and charms the patrons. All the while, Kat's mother, Sheila, actively keeps tabs on her daughter's romantic life. Kat finds herself in all sorts of predicaments, handling them as only she can -- with joy, humor and positivity.”

Here’s the thing, I don’t even watch good TV shows. In fact, I’m outspoken about how much I don’t like TV. It’s one of many unrelatable symptoms from my character persona - the stereotypical tech entrepreneur who is addicted to the drug of feeling productive and tries to optimize every aspect of life. Being forced to watch a full season of any TV show (except “Rick & Morty” or “Black Mirror”) would feel like punishment to me - so this? This is what league commissioner / dictator George Chunias aptly called my “personal hell.”

Most people like TV, so readers may feel personally offended by my anti-TV position. I beg you to channel that energy into impassioned commentary. I’ll be lacing these blog posts with controversial takes in the desperate hope that some annoyed reader will take me out of my misery and give me something, ANYTHING, more interesting to engage with than this show.

I have very low expectations. If the show has an impact on me, it’ll likely be the meta kind that requires personal reflections on growth from failure rather than any direct, intentional lessons. But hey, who knows, maybe “Call Me Kat” will prove me wrong. Maybe it will profoundly change my views on television and take my productivity-obsessed, anti-TV character on a sweeping transformation that teaches me the value of entertainment for its own sake and how to find joy in the simple things in life. Mark my words, if I fall victim to this type of banal story arc that is part of the basis for my ire towards bad television, if my psyche holds no firmer ground than the easy-to-pacify conformist cultural norms that I openly ridicule, than I’ll wave the white flag and acknowledge I was wrong.

So there’s a lot of pressure on “Call Me Kat”. Not just because my 300 Twitter followers might be more than Kat’s retained audience for Season 2. This Fox magnum opus is representing all of its kind in the rageful war of Ameet v TV.

If you’re excited to follow along and learn the gory details of why I hate television, want to read my reactions to the opening of this show, or are helplessly trapped by contrived, bad TV inspired cliffhangers like this sentence, stay tuned for next week’s blog post on Episode 1.