Watching MTV is a lot like ripping your eyeballs straight out of your head and tossing them into a pool of decaying human remains—the only key difference being that if you actually tear your eyes out, the pain will eventually end. The one time I accidentally left MTV playing in my bedroom right before I went to sleep, I woke up with a persistent lack of sanity (as my therapist delicately put it) and an insatiable craving for salted ice cream. To this day I can only really explain one of those symptoms.
Trying to boil down what makes MTV and their bevy of absurdly hormonal teenage shows bad is not a very easy thing to do. Whenever someone attempts to watch MTV, a funny thing happens: they either watch for up to ten minutes—the record for the longest amount of time that an adult human has consecutively watched MTV (this does not include commercial breaks)—or, in theory, their pineal gland erupts, exposing their third eye and, unfortunately, killing them instantly. If only we could see the wonders that they behold in their last few seconds of life.
“At last, I finally understand everything: MTV is an allegory for the—ARRRGH”
Since I’ve already established that MTV is really hard to watch and might actually kill you, let’s talk about one of their worst shows: Teen Mom. Teen Mom is a spinoff of another show that was really shitty (16 and Pregnant) and features an all-star ensemble of mentally deficient teenage sluts. In case you’re wondering, yes, Teen Mom is the spiritual successor to Teen Wolf; the difference between the two seems to be that while one is about Michael J. Fox before he discovered that he has a horrible neurological disease, the other centers around four underage girls and their hilarious attempts to raise a genuine live human being.
So, in essence, they’re pretty much the same.
Because I have suffered through the first 8 goddamn minutes and 27 whole-fucking-seconds of the first episode of the second season, I feel like I’m pretty qualified to give it a review. Now, I know that this is highly irregular for a review, but since I hate a standard format almost as much as Quentin Tarantino, I’m going to tell you what my score is for Teen Mom right now and then explain it with the rest of this article. Though it was a tough decision, I have to say that Teen Mom deserves 6 “completely doomed civilizations” out of 10.
I know, I know, that’s a pretty high score for the worst show ever made. You’re right. I gave it a high score because I think that this show might actually chronicle our society’s death for future generations. If you think about it, it’s going to be pretty useful for any future civilization to be able to watch our downfall happen in a documented form. So I guess Teen Mom will play a very important educational role in the near future.
The fall of America: like Rome, but with more retarded teenage girls.
Teen Mom Glorifies Being an Idiotic Animal With a Vagina
I probably could have just said “girl” for that subheading but I just can’t shake the feeling that these girls aren’t real human beings. I mean, sure, American culture coddles little girls and teaches them that their vagina is as good as a welfare check from the rest of society, but usually that kind of mindset gets kicked out of a person as soon as reality rears its ugly face. The kind of stuff that will make an entitled little girl become a fully grown adult woman are varied, numerous and pretty much unavoidable (having to support yourself, taking care of an adult or child, going to college on your own dime, getting married and realizing that there is no happily ever after, etc.) but these spoiled little brats seem to be completely immune to this process.
What do the paw prints mean? Are the producers trying to tell us something?
It’s almost like a mad scientist took some estrogen, a Fleshlight, a synthetic womb, and a broken down toaster and glued all that shit together to form something that looks like a teenage girl but is even more insane. While watching those eight minutes of “fantastic” footage, I witnessed everything from a zippy intro straight out of the Disney channel, where all four of the girls introduce themselves on a cute scrapbook animation while talking in ridiculous pseudo-valley girl accents, to a group of teenagers surrounding a baby—one of them was the actual mother, mind you—trying to decipher whether the infant, who had shit in her diaper, was a baby or a very cleverly disguised stick of C4 that needed to be disarmed.
That’s when it hit me: these girls were hand-picked to be the most absurd examples of human adolescent female possible—completely for our entertainment. On the scale of messed up shit that the human race has done over the last 200,000 years, I can only stand in awe of the MTV executive who green-lighted Teen Mom. Watching an infant human be traumatized on screen for entertainment purposes truly is the crown jewel in humanity’s already bedazzled diadem.
On the surface this show wants you to think that it’s dissuading young girls from engaging in unsafe sex—which would be great, y’know, if they were really trying to send that message. The problem here is that this show just screams “exploitation”. With its cast of imbecilic muppets and its minimalistic approach at sending any kind of a moral, I’d be willing to wager that Teen Mom throws out a message completely opposite to what it’s pretending to put out there. The most insulting hint at its pretend status as an important social commentary can be seen at the end of each episode with the silly “this can all be prevented with safe sex” disclaimer.
If MTV wanted to make a show about killing minorities in a giant amphitheater, they could probably get away with it as long as they ended every episode with a cautionary “you can avoid being one of the murdered participants in this show by being middle class and white”. I’m not exaggerating here: putting a disclaimer in some part of your barbaric exploitation is insurance from all of the critics who would otherwise call you out on your bullshit. You can pretty much show anything you want as long as the masses think you have some sort of naive moral message behind you; MTV has been doing it for years.
From the cutesy intro to the “babies are actually just little dolls that turn you into a grown-up” theme, a worse show about the epidemic of teen pregnancy could not be made. One of the girls says early on in the first episode—I shit you not—that she’s doing what she can, even though she has a goddamn baby, to maintain her social life; that sounds innocent enough until you realize that “a social life” is code for going to clubs and having sex with even more guys.
Because fuck you, priorities!Thankfully, stupid teen girls haven’t been caught doing anything ill-advised under the influence of this show yet—it would really suck if adolescents were trying to get pregnant just to get on national TV. Thank god that never happens.
Oh, and don’t worry if you’re a feminist; Teen Mom is also very capable of displaying the worst examples of teen fathers this side of the welfare line. Every bad fatherly behavior is thrown into the mix: from neglect to emotional abuse, it’s all covered here. Though, the stupidity of the male cast shouldn’t be too surprising if you just take an honest look at any of their faces.
Did their parents brush with uranium flavored toothpaste or was it just incest: the world may never know
Teen Mom Proves That Humanity is Doomed
In essence, if humanity was even one single percent closer to being a respectable race, this show wouldn’t have been made. If you judge society on a sliding scale, from the worst homosapiens that have ever walked the earth (Adolf Hitler, Caligula, Constantine, etc) to the greatest, (Mozart, Einstein, and Mr. Rogers) it takes a lot of mental effort to figure out where this show and its creators would fit in. Is MTV comprised of trailblazers who do whatever they must to find and cross our societal lines of good taste to further our acceptance of what makes us human, or is MTV made of shameless shock-jocks who struggle to find the most controversial hot topics available and then exploit them until every last dollar has been pulled from their smoldering corpses?
If it’s still unclear where I stand, then you should re-read this article.
For more from Apollyon, check out his gaming blog, Geared to Game.
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