Today I speak to you of the televised abomination known only as Secret Girlfriend. A creature birthed of the internet and nursed by the irresponsible funding of Comedy Central.

Shot rather brilliantly in first person perspective, the show stars you, yes you! Dear viewer in this dreadfully confused generation of stubble faced children begging to be told where they are and what they’re doing, at last we are told. We are there, on the television, just behind the camera. This will at first feel alien to a people so accustomed to aligning their greasy visages in the crosshairs of a webcam’s unblinking gaze, but Secret Girlfriend offers no respite in which to remove the viewer from the silent protagonist; provided of course that we can imagine ourselves as a post-adolescent white male living with disgusting friends and relentlessly seeking solace between a woman’s thighs or at the bottom of a bottle. I think, I believe, I trust, dear viewer, that you can.

The show moves at a fiercely schizophrenic pace, sprinting from depravity to depravity without pause. Scenes of excess are cut short to be replaced with essentially the same scene. The other characters vary from an obese monstrosity of depression to a scraggly construct of lechery. These are your best friends. They are shallow and stupid and unattractive and they live only to swim in your wake, to be foils for your unquestionable beauty and success. The female characters are either skinny painted nymphs who flit and twitter and fawn at your every implied advance, or non speaking roles. These people live and die for your approval, they are thin shadows of humanity. They are stupid and weak, but the show forgives them. For what else could they hope for? Next to you, dear viewer, the unspeaking paragon, all are wretched and low.

The camera takes you through a life of tireless pleasure seeking and eternally you are reassured that “Yes, YES you are handsome,” and “Yes YES they like you,” and “No, no don’t say a thing, don’t utter a single word but yes, yesss, dear viewer, yes.” Your eternal consent is all that’s required. It asks no precious thought for such tasks as the following of plot, the comprehending of character. This is escapism at it’s most base. The purest iteration of wish fulfillment usually found only in pornography. Because that’s what it truly is.

What’s ultimately terrifying about this show is what it says about you. The show describes you quite thoroughly, though perhaps unintentionally. You are a monster. No getting around it. You use people in horrifying ways, and because the show is all in the name of the viewer, it is completely unabashed in giving you everything and leaving the others with nothing. If you saw the events from any other perspective, then surely you would despise the character you embody. An eternal opportunist who is loved by all and contributes only a judging gaze.

I try and envision that Secret Girlfriend is a look in to the young life of one Stuart Smalley. This was the character portrayed by Al Franken on Saturday Night Live. Vacantly spiking the camera, Stuart would cry out “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.” His segments would involve the hapless self styled motivational speaker trying desperately to encourage celebrity guests who usually had no need for him. Inevitably he would break down and find himself at the mercy of his guest, until he frees himself from so called “stinkin’ thinkin’” and hits his thoughtless stride once again. Surely Stewart could hope for nothing better then the relentless self affirmation of Secret Girlfriend. And this is really the only way to justify yourself in the confines of the show. To assign a tragic persona at the figurehead of such terrible acts. However as always in this monstrosity, the persona is your own. Why gear media in such a way? Is the intended market of this show us? A generation of low self esteem and chronic failure that longs for only the most instant of gratification.

Now there’s a certain amount of escapism inherent in most of the media we approach here. In all speculative fiction we attempt to escape the confines of what can happen and explore what should. Art is a vessel by witch man can sail to the height of his dreams. Daring to imagine greater, we should be describing nuance and adventure, discovery and fulfillment. However a surrealist look at the world that never was, this ain’t. Why aspire so low? Why is it that in the most self indulgent media, you live in squalor, franticly running from one scene of absolute ruin to the next?

F. Scot Fitzgerald said “What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.” This show explores instead wretched impulses we are ashamed for. I subscribe to the idea that a good story is truth in the guise of fiction, however more and more there is media thrown at us in the form of nonsense fiction styled as truth. The Office, Parks and Rec, even the youtube persona of Lonelygirl15. Reality television. Callow and pathetic. All describe fictional characters lowering themselves to the mundane existence of reality in an effort to relate with an audience that can aspire to no greater.

This program is not art but entertainment, and if you strip bare entertainment you get pornography. This is self esteem porn, and just like real porn, Secret Girlfriend leaves you feeling empty and weak. Your surrogate eats, but you gain no sustenance. Drinks, but you fail to get drunk. Makes love but you feel no soft touch or warm embrace. Laughs, but there is no joy in your heart. Ultimately it is an experience of continuous false approval. An endless parade of characters telling you that you are just the best. That everything will be OK, that you can do no wrong. Thus does an original and innovative concept for a show allow itself to be executed in the most lowbrow of manners. And what could have been the most engaging of programs succeed only in providing it’s viewership with Hogwarts’s Mirror of Erised so that we can paw hopelessly at our own wet dreams as they smile and dance just out of reach, hypnotic and insubstantial.

To quote Wizard People, Brad Neely’s re-imagining of Harry Potter, “When Ron the Mighty is stood before the gate, he begins to denounce it. Heaven is for those too scared of nothingness, I will go no further than my flesh will carry! This mirror is the sickbed of heaven, Harry. The eternity of pansied lives!” And upon Dumbledor’s entrance, “Come away from the light of heaven’s easy life. We need such a valiant, beautiful warrior as yourself here, to live and to hack the serpents of evil in two. Hell, in to twos, in to threes and fours! Your life will be the very envy of heaven and it’s slobbering inhabitants. No Harry, you were meant to stride with us, the living! To course with us, and our blood. You are meant to end, when your share of blood turns brown on the rocks of glory. You and I shall drink tonight Harry. We shall drink to life’s confines, to life’s pearly end which is the nothingness of death, not the perpetual pansiness of heaven!”

Take heart my children, we are capable of achieving far more than imagined pats on the back, more than an eternity of pretending to enjoy the juice of plastic fruit. There is nothing in the swamp of Secret Girlfriend that you cannot take for your own. So take it, and when you lay yourself down before your flickering screens to dream and to want, imagine ever greater. Goodnight.