I wasn’t super excited to start watching Big Love again this season. I actually put off starting it for a couple of weeks, because last season seemed to be on the verge of collapse, and I couldn’t image it getting any better. Well, I was clearly wrong, because this season is amazing. In some ways, I’m glad I avoided watching it for a couple of weeks because I was able to spend 4 hours being enthralled by the drama. Actually, I found it all so tense it made me feel super anxious and kind of sick to my stomach. The plot stories in this season are much stronger and more compelling than in the last season (although frankly the drama around Barb’s lack of sensitivity to the tribe is a little… I don’t know… a bit contrived feeling). One change I am not excited about is the new title sequence… no more Beach Boys??

The other night, in a shorter but equally enthralling vortex, my roommates and I watched 2 ½ episodes of Celebrity Rehab. What garbage. It is equally depressing, outrageous and utterly boring. I don’t really know if I’m supposed to believe it’s a coincidence that this rehab group contains Dennis Rodman, the Hollywood Madame Heidi Fleiss, her ex-husband or boyfriend or whatever Tom something or other, a former member of Alice in Chains (???). I mean… they couldn’t have conceived of a group of people this would be more likely to be individually completely uninteresting, but somehow their being all together is so ridiculous as to make for moderately compelling television. I doubt I’ll watch another minute of it, but watching Joey from the Hollywood Real World have another freak out and menace the cameramen, seemingly breaking the fourth wall and menacing us the audience, was pretty amusing. But his “cathartic” smashing of a car with a sledgehammer, while calling his mother a bitch and complaining that he had to wear “coke-bottle glasses” was totally unbelievable and like… depressing in a way that I don’t think I can handle repeating.

The new Real World season elicited at first only a lukewarm reaction from me. Maybe it was because of the lead-ups to it, pushing some sort of contrived political tension between the cast members, but it seemed boring and contrived at first. But then Ty demanded that Emily “don’t lose eye contact” with him while he demanded that she tell him how she feels about him, and like, he’s such a totally creepy monster than my roommates and I were riveted to the screen. It’s not quite as fascinating to watch as the Jersey Shore… well, at least not yet. Kind of creepy:

And speaking of the Real World… Joey from the Hollywood season admitted on Celebrity Rehab that he was on tons of cocaine during the whole season, which in retrospect seems really obvious, but at the time we just thought he was like…  a totally terrifying hulking beast who used outrageous amounts of coffee to get over drinking alcohol. I mean… let’s refresh our memories here: