Everyone has a show that is perfect for lazy Sundays or when they’re sick in bed. Those shows are watched only when there are no roommates around to judge your tastes.
They may not have the same production value and intricacy as something such as “Game of Thrones,” but they are still entertaining enough to keep you staring at the screen until day turns to night and your butt aches from sitting on the coach for too long. They are shows that bring you your guilty pleasure, just like how anime brings Michael B. Jordan his.
House-Hunting Shows
HGTV is a channel ripe with shows to watch guiltily. Mostly based on real-estate and home renovations, shows on HGTV play into imagining the home of your dreams when you are an “adult” with a well-paying stable career.
“House Hunters” usually depicts a couple trying to “hunt” for a home in a city they have just moved to. Often times the couple has vastly different tastes in the style of home they want, location and budget. The audience follows them along to look at three different homes as the realtor tries to please his/her demanding clients, usually to no avail.
Should it be a craftsman or a colonial home? A mid-century modern or contemporary home? Town-home or detached single-family? In the city or the suburbs?
The combinations and choices are endless. When their decision is finally made, you either cheer because you were right (if you watch the show enough it’s easy to guess right) or scream at why Sharon and Dan from Michigan would buy an over-priced house in the wrong neighborhood with no backyard for the kids to play in.
Another program is “Property Brothers,” in which twin brothers Jonathan and Drew help couples buy cheaper fixer-upper homes and transform them into the customized home of their dreams. Other than watching to ogle at the hotness of the brothers’ chiseled jawlines and physiques, you may find yourself immersed in the house renovation.
Hanging out in your run-down student apartment, you imagine your kitchen with beautiful stone countertops instead of the laminate ones put in before you were even born, dark wood flooring instead of the linoleum of the dorm and exquisite stage room furniture instead of a $40 coach from eBay and a breakable IKEA table.
Whether it is planning to do a quartz or marble countertop in the kitchen, or considering if a wall should be knocked down to make room for a larger bathroom, renovation shows such as “Property Brothers” offer a reality suspension that is just so binge-able.
You can sit on the couch all day and marathon through with just as much excitement as watching a new season of “Stranger Things.” Just don’t tell people that you find picking out kitchen cabinets fun.
Wedding/Marriage-Themed Shows
“Say Yes to the Dress” is an immensely popular show on TLC about women picking out their wedding dresses (typically with a zany, inappropriate and/or critical entourage) at Kleinfeld Bridal, a wedding boutique in New York City.
The show attracts more than just the moms of suburbia living out their fantasy of the dream wedding that never came true and the girls who have been planning their wedding since they learned about the concept of marriage. Even men will watch “Say Yes to the Dress” for the pure craziness.
After hearing a bride say she wants to look “slutty chic” for her wedding and seeing a mother-of-the-bride upstaging her daughter by buying a wedding dress for herself, you’ve seen it all. It’s fun to speculate whether she’ll get the form fitted satin mermaid dress or the classic lace A-Line dress.
And yes, you will learn all of the wedding dress fashion jargon, from fit-and-flare to princess ball gown to beaded bodice and sweetheart neckline.
Including all the other insane shows on TLC, another guilty-pleasure is the show “90 Day Fiancé.” On this reality show, participants must fall in love with and marry a person from another country within 90 days. If not, the foreign partner will lose their K-1 visa and have to leave the U.S.
The relationships on the show range from loving to borderline abusive. On “90 Day Fiancé,” there is an infamous couple named Anfisa (from Russia) and Jorge. Anfisa blatantly says she wants a sugar daddy and that she married Jorge for his money.
The problem is that he lied about how much money he has. So, she spends all his money, cusses him out and even locks him out of their apartment. It’s just one great example of what makes it a juicy edge-of-your-seat show.
A person watches every week for the latest update on how the relationships progress: will they stay together or will it all go downhill? The best part is speculating if someone is cheating and if the immigrant partner is actually in love or just into the green card.
No matter what you’ll end up shouting at the TV, wondering why they can’t realize that their fiancé is using them as a free pass to America.
Even Sex Can Make Good Shows (Non-Erotically)
The final guilty-pleasure show on the list is “Sex Sent Me to the E.R.” It sounds crazy, but it’s actually hilarious.
On this show, accounts of obscure and insane sexual medical emergencies are told by the people who experienced it. The stories are then performed by actors in very cheesy and cringe-worthy way. Some plot lines include a woman who can’t stop orgasming, a worm going up a man’s urethra and a couple falling into a grave while having sex in the cemetery.
“Sex Sent Me to the E.R” is a wild ride of a show. You always wonder how people can get into these situations and question how common these stories are. However, it’s definitely not a show to watch in the residence hall common area.
