I saw my second part-episode of Sex Decoy: Love Stings last night. If you cringe at the pun in the title then you've pretty much felt what it's like to watch the show, only shorter. It's one of the most painfully dreadful things I've seen in a long time. I've said before that reality TV is all about making viewers feel better about themselves because at least they're not THOSE PEOPLE. But this time I think it may be about making viewers feel worse because THOSE PEOPLE are really of the same species.

The show follows Sandra and her three daughters who are named Kashmir, Jasmine and Xanadu. If you name your daughters that way you've got to know they're going to grow up to be strippers, and sure enough two of the three are! The third is still underage.

So Sandra is trying to get the girls more involved in her business, which is being paid by insecure women to set traps catching their cheating men on video. Apparently there's a whole industry devoted to sending ridiculously hot, slutty women to seduce unfortunate schlubs while their jealous beady-eyed soulmates watch on hidden camera. And it's much more respectable than taking your clothes off onstage. Maybe.

During the first show we watched, this woman sent the team after her boyfriend/husband person, the lead singer in a bar band. Good lord, where did these people grow up? If your man is the lead singer in a bar band, he is fucking other women. That's why men join bar bands. So she hired Sandra's company which hired some hilariously hot chick to pose as a rock journalist and come on to the singer as hard as humanly possible.

As this was unfolding on our TV, I told my long-suffering wife that she could save her money if she ever considered hiring this company: If a woman that far above my pay grade ever came on to me like that, I'd totally fall for it. Any man would, let alone a guy in a band. No contest. It's totally unfair.

In the second one, they sent one of the daughters -- her first undercover assignment as a ravenous slut, although I guess as a stripper she had some experience -- after this guy working in his music studio. She showed up at the door saying she was lost and needed to use the bathroom, then she settled in and began tempting him into meeting her at a party later for a threesome -- including anal.

Clearly the guy has never left his house because anyone who's seen movies like "Species" or "Lifeforce" or any of a hundred other titles would know when a ridiculously gorgeous woman -- or even a skanky stripper -- comes on to you out of nowhere, your choices explaining what's going on are a) you've inexplicably, suddenly, and surprisingly become vastly more attractive to the opposite sex or b) she's an alien/vampire/killer robot who's going to eat you before you come.

In this case she was bait in a trap where your wife will run in, slap you upside your cheating head, and berate your tiny penis in front of the whole world, or anyway in front of the infinitesmal fraction of the world that watches this trashy, trashy show.

I can't say what made me watch this aside from the fact that every other channel I turned to at the time was running commericals. Honestly, I tried uplifting, educational programs before settling on this one. Still, I watched it. You'd think maybe it's worth it for the prurient shots of the stripper daughters and the wildly over-made-up surgically enhanced mother, but in fact any time the camera gets closer to any of them you start wishing they'd pull back a bit, like when you get a glimpse of that hot chick down the block so you go out of your way to walk over for a closer look and realize she's not so much a hot chick as a fifty-year-old meth addict chain-smoking outside because her mother's inside on oxygen.

I suppose the other attraction of the show is watching the evil scumbag cheating men get their public comeuppance -- Sandra comes across as having some serious issues with the male of the species, always raving about their "coming clean" and so on -- except I don't see these guys as being especially evil scumbags, just regular guys I probably wouldn't like very much but who are only trying to live their crappy little lives. I feel bad for them, surrounded as they are by jealous, nasty harpies who lead them on with promises of anal sex and then morph into slimy space creatures and eat them.

Although, honestly, I feel much worse for myself, since I watched the show.

I'm driving north on the New Jersey Turnpike and I'm thinking.

I should back up a bit to give you an idea of the kind of day I'd been having.

The night before my wife arrived home after grocery shopping on her way home from a hard day at work to find me sitting and playing Battle Tetris. She had no way of knowing, of course, that I hadn't been doing that all day; in fact I'd spent the day laboriously scrubbing the last layer of lead-based oil paint from the 80-year-old chestnut window trim in our daughter's bedroom while juggling increasingly energetic calls from a recruiter desperately trying to set me up with an interview in less than 24 hours. She couldn't see that. This was like throwing an M80 into the litter box of her usual bitchiness. My wife began to slam things and scream, calling me a fat lazy asshole, and so forth, and my daughter began crying, "Do you see what you did?" until I finally fled to the local multiplex where I sat through Used Cars, I mean, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, which was not exactly an uplifting experience.

The next day, in the time before I had to get ready for my sudden interview, I scrubbed another incremental area of the lead-based oil paint, then went looking for my suit. My suit was missing. Just gone. No idea where it could've ended up. Simply not in the closet. So I pulled out my back-up pair of dress pants only to be cruelly reminded when I tried to button them that I'd put on forty pounds since I bought the back-up dress pants.

At this inopportune moment the bathroom called to me most urgently. In the midst of that operation, my middle finger punched right through the paper and up into an area where no middle finger should be.

After another thorough washing I commenced to search for my suit, which I finally found rolled in a ball in the corner of the entry hallway to the house, waiting vainly to be taken to the dry cleaners since the last time I wore it six months earlier. A quick steam iron to get rid of the wrinkles and I was ready to go and wait for my wife to return with the car fifteen minutes late.

The interview was a complete disaster, terrible, a horrible, colossal waste of time. It made me absolutely certain that I am completely, utterly unemployable in my now-former career as a computer programmer specializing in Perl.

After all of that, I am driving north on the New Jersey Turnpike and thinking. I'm singing along with Wayne Coyne as he croons, "Is to love just a waste? And why does it matter?" and I'm thinking, yes, it is just a waste, it doesn't matter, nothing matters.

Just at that moment I look up and see a billboard for The Toxic Avenger Musical and I realize: This planet, as it exists right at this moment, is beyond satire.

So the other night, while watching the season's final episodes of the still-awesome-and-actually-sorta-getting-even-better Better Off Ted, I saw this:

Bad enough that the impending denizens of ABC's "Comedy Wednesday" shuffle shamefacedly into their new fake house with all the confidence of cattle headed for a date with a compressed-air gun and a meat saw. (In the brief glimpse we get of Kelsey Grammar, you can practically see the man wishing he'd invested his "Frasier" earnings more prudently.) But when every single one of your supposedly hilarious stars gets absolutely blown off the screen, comedywise, by the creepy guy from "Lost"? In less than 30 seconds?

That, my friends, is the sound of absolutely no one laughing on Wednesday nights. At least, not on ABC.