I’m falling behind in my TV viewing because of fall screeners, but I hope to give you a Tell Me You Love Me Watch shortly. Even though nobody asked. Even though all reports are that none of you are watching it. (I may well be the only person in America who’s watching the show twice.) I still want to do an occasional Watch to try to get at some of the reasons that this cold, austere, often hard-to-watch show nonetheless fascinated me, and to see if there’s anyone out there who feels the same.
There’s a special, bittersweet feeling to continuing to follow a show after the audiences have left it and the rest of the pop culture has moved on. So a quick poll question: What’s a TV series you’ve followed to the end, after the rest of the world has given up on it? Let me clarify: I don’t mean low-rated, critical favorites. Arrested Development and Veronica Mars don’t count. I mean shows that had neither ratings nor critical buzz, and yet kept a hold on you anyway.
This has happened to me more times than I care to admit, but I’ll start with one: Joe Millionaire 2. Not the first one, with the fake millionaire construction worker and 40 million viewers. I mean the second one, with an American “millionaire” dating bachelorettes from around the world, who managed not to see the first version. Critics trashed the show and it bombed, but I still think it was underapppreciated reality-TV genius: a brilliant little international comedy that played out the stereotypes Americans hold about other countries, and vice versa, at right around the time that America was straining its credibility overseas with the Iraq war.
OK, yours can’t possibly be more embarrassing than that. Let’s have it.