ABC’s “Shows More Popular Than BattleBots”

Welcome back. Today’s Update isn’t really about robot combat per se, but it does have ties to the 2016 season of BattleBots. Throughout the season I’ve been taking pot shots at the shows and series ABC has deemed “more popular than” or otherwise worth promoting over BattleBots despite the show’s phenomenal performance against a number of absolutely unprecedented broadcast complications. Week after week ABC would add more and more of these stupid “ABC Digital” shows into the “Popular” category of their website while BattleBots languished at least seven or eight full scrolls down the page. While the Blacksmith vs. Minotaur fight was busy going viral on Facebook to the tune of 20+ million views, ABC doubled down on shows that aren’t even good enough to make it on television yet still apparently command more attention.

These shows have become somewhat of an in-joke on the /r/BattleBots subreddit community due how often I’ve been making snide remarks about them, so I’ve decided to write this joke article where I sit down and watch a handful of these stupid series to let you that they are indeed cancer. On the chopping block today is the word salad Tastemade Get Cookin, the “comedy” series Newborn Moms, the late Gen X-pandering Forever 31, the shamelessly topical All My Gay Friends Are Getting Married, and — the big ticket item currently causing a shitstorm on /r/BattleBots right now — I Can Find $3,000 In Your Home. These are all real shows that real people paid real money for and uploaded on a real website belonging to a real multinational media conglomerate. Really.

Here goes nothing.

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TASTEMADE GET COOKIN’

Tastemade Get Cookin is a cooking show, obviously. That’s why the host is going to be making ice cream, a dessert which doesn’t require heating anything up. That doesn’t count as “cooking” to me. It might to you, but this is my website and my opinions are fact here. I’m splitting hairs but my selections for this article were limited to what I was able to rip from ABC’s YouTube channel so it was either this or a 17-minute episode about cilantro lime chicken tacos or something and I genuinely don’t think I’d be able to put up with this shit for 17 goddamned minutes. You get ice cream instead and that’s that. This is guilt-free ice cream too because you get to “shake it” when you make it which burns off all the calories you’d consume if you ate the entire bag like the fat piece of shit we all know we really are.

Our host Megan Mitchell is about to perform a grade school chemistry project. If you haven’t heard of this at all then you have my deepest condolences because your childhood must’ve been shit. Basically you just mix heavy cream, sugar, and your flavoring agent in a container and then place this container in a larger one containing ice and rock salt. Megan says rock salt is important because it has a “larger crystal” and as such “won’t melt as quickly”. Sodium chloride — salt — has a melting temperature of 800 degrees Celsius. Putting it in the fucking freezer isn’t going to heat it up to the point of becoming molten fucking lava. “But Draco she didn’t meant ‘melt’ like that she meant dissolving in the bag.” Fuck you, she should’ve said “dissolve in the fucking bag” then. Science isn’t hard, people are just retarded, there’s no reason to let basic fucking shit like this slip under the radar. The production value on this show is so astronomically small you’d have a better chance of finding Donald Trump’s cock.

So, throw the shit into a bag, then throw that into a bigger bag and agitate it for eight minutes. 30 seconds of this 210-second video is devoted to Megan shaking a bag of ice cream slurry with the cringiest mannerisms and catchphrases mankind has ever seen. After eight minutes of looking like a jackass in your own kitchen you’re left with “soft serve” ice cream that looks like it could use another eight minutes of being agitated because what you’ve made resembles the shit they fed the mutant dog in The Fly 2. That’s exactly the reason why Megan’s ice cream terror requires additional time in the fucking freezer; this ice cream thing is a really common science experiment and most additional sources I can find for it recommend upwards of 15 minutes to allow the treat to better solidify. Consequently, none of these experiments’ instructions require you to admit defeat and put your mixture in the freezer to finish up. Congratulations Megan, you literally failed a seventh grade science fair. Godspeed, you fucking imbecile.

This is a trendy cooking show so we’re not just making run of the mill vanilla ice cream here, no way. That shit’s for the plebeians. While Megan’s dairy accident is hardening up in the freezer she’s taking some time to make a brittle topping out of macadamia nuts. This consists entirely of whole nuts and a reduction of a simple syrup. For those of you reading this who didn’t grow up on a TV diet of Good Eats, this is basically “nuts and sugar”. I guess this also technically satisfies the “cooking” requirement of the show’s title. Also, why are the nuts whole? Why wouldn’t you chop them up or crush them so you’d have better nut-to-syrup coverage? You’re going to have like three nuts maximum and a pound of sugar per fucking topping because that’s all you’ve put into this nasty fucking brittle. I write about robot combat and somehow I know more about confectionery making than someone who studied culinary goddamned arts. How is this even possible? How has my life come to this? WHAT THE FUCK DOES “TASTEMADE” EVEN MEAN???

Megan beats her plastic sack of dollar store nut brittle like it owes her money, then sprinkles it on her ice cream. As she does so she says it’s going to be “crunchy and creamy”. She takes a bite of her concoction and uses those same two words to describe her reaction to it. For fuck’s sake, Guy Fieri has made 260 episodes of his stupid goddamned show where all he does is visit random places and eat shit and he’s apparently figured out 260 different ways to describe a greasy BBQ sandwich. You mean to tell me this chick can’t think of more than two words to describe fucking ice cream? Fuck this stupid show.

Also, let me just go ahead and point this out in case you hadn’t picked up on it yet. You just got duped into watching a 7-minute ad for fucking Hefty bags. This fucking show appears to exist solely to sell you plastic fucking bags. The little Hefty box is the only brand name item that’s ever seen on camera and there’s a shot of Megan specifically interacting with it in the most painfully obvious fashion in order to draw attention to it. She even says she recommends “this type” of bag for [reason]. No leaks, “click” seal, no freezer burn, you can beat on it with a rolling pin and it doesn’t burst open and get ice cream cum everywhere, etc. Every time you see this fucking woman interact with a plastic bag the producers have made damn sure you can see and read the “Hefty” logo clear as fucking day. Is Hefty really that strapped for cash that they need product placement to aid in brand recognition? Is the market for PLASTIC FUCKING BAGS that cutthroat?

WINNER: Middle school science teachers.

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NEWBORN MOMS

Oh man, this one’s rated TV-MA. Two lonely ladies hanging out together without their husbands and one of them brought booze? Oh, they fuckin’. Get your dicks out boys, because these two 4’s are about to bare it all right about now. Or… they’re just going to shriek like harpies and cut to the opening credits. That too. Mercifully Newborn Moms, clocking in at just over three minutes, is the shortest video we’ll be taking a look at today. Don’t let the duration fool you, though. This one’s a fucking doozy.

The first thing you’re going to notice about this show is that it’s not even written by anyone. Seriously. These two women are literally just going to shoot a bunch of scenes where they do “trope A” before cutting to “trope B”. These actresses are portraying such cookie cutter roles that you could replace them with actual cookie cutters and achieve the same fucking effect. This show’s writing is so shitty that not once in the first episode do they refer to each other by their own goddamned names. You have no idea who is who, the episode essentially becomes three minutes of two nameless people acting like total caricatures. I had to cheat and go dig through some of the other episodes of this show just to tell you that Rosie is the one who looks like Peter Serafinowicz in drag and Julia is the… other one.

After confirming that wherever they currently are is a “safe space” the two moms waste no further time getting completely shitfaced on boxed wine because this is the year 2016 and “wine moms” are actually a thing. This show goes from boring anti-sitcom to full-on Tim & Eric sketch in seconds, and just like that any off the wall steam that was being built is gone just as fast because the ladies are now sorting laundry soiled with literally poop and vomit because they’re new moms and babies just can’t stop shitting and throwing up everywhere. Am I right folks? And what’s the deal with breast pumps? What am I, a cooowwwww? TOP KEK.

But after that they’re suddenly back to being trashed and watching Game of Thrones while completely unable to follow the plot because that fucking show is almost impossible to watch when sober. Jump cut. Rosie walks out wearing a tube top that she stole from the 1990’s. The joke here is that she doesn’t fit into it anymore because she had a baby and now has all of that gross baby fat everywhere that has ravaged her “goddess” body and turned it into a thumb. She’s even breakneck emotional about it because she was pregnant and her hormones are soooooo crazy and out of whack! GET IT? BECAUSE THAT’S HOW PREGNANT WOMEN ACT! ALL THE TIME!!! Also who fucking dresses like that to go to a wedding? Is the bride and groom getting married in a goddamned bowling alley? If they were intentionally going for the most unflattering look possible for this scene then we may very well be witnessing cinematic perfection.

Jump cut. More wine. Rosie says she misses weed. Wow, you’re going to be a great mother. Again, if the goal here was making a character as ugly and morally repulsive as humanly possible then whoever made this atrocity needs to get a fucking Emmy or Oscar or whatever bullshit award they give out to fake TV shows like this. The gag for this scene is Julia all of a sudden isn’t acting like herself and is doing such a shitty job at pretending she’s “okay” that her best friend is able to see through her act even after consuming enough Walmart boxed wine to kill a fucking horse. Julia’s acting funny because she’s distracted and worried about her baby due to the very obvious earpiece she’s now wearing all of a sudden. I guess we’re supposed to believe that she’s been wearing it this whole time and Rosie has only recently noticed, but Julia literally hasn’t worn it at all until just now. I don’t know if that’s intentional for yet another textbook fucking gag or if it’s a case of shitty continuity but whatever.

Julia’s justification for lying to her best friend is that she “married Nate”. None of us know who the fuck this character is or why her being married to him warrants the use of 24/7 baby monitoring. Is Nate an ex-con? Does Nate exclusively have sex with newborn infants? Is he the human embodiment of SIDS or something? The truth is the punchline here is literally “lol men”. That’s it. Even worse, it turns out Julia is a conniving bitch who’s also spying on the man she married because she’s an insecure cunt with trust issues and this behavior of hers is something we’re supposed to find endearing. Fuck that noise. Fuck Julia. She probably treats her husband like shit and makes him watch while she lets black dudes bust in her ass. Her kid’s going to grow up to be a fucking mental case that shoots up a goddamned school.

And that’s the end of the show. That’s it. I know I’ve used the phrase “that’s it” repeatedly here but there’s nothing else to say. That’s really it. I told you this show was just a bunch of shitty tropes cut together back to back. I wasn’t lying.

WINNER: Contraception.

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ALL MY GAY FRIENDS ARE GETTING MARRIED

Okay, this is going to be a goddamned minefield to navigate because it’s going to be extremely hard for me to start cracking insensitive jokes on top of All My Gay Friends Are Getting Married because LGBT rights are a very real thing right now. This show’s heart is in the right place but its pandering as pop culture relevancy is absolutely shameless. I guess to start things off I should first come out and say that there was never a time where I didn’t support same-sex marriage. I mean let’s face it here, without it my chances of being married myself were 0%. They are still zero, but for other reasons now. Also, I know this wasn’t intentional but if you’re going to make a show about dudes who blow other dudes and name it something really long that people are going to want to abbreviate you probably shouldn’t go with a title that sticks “FAG” right in the middle of it.

Michelle Collins is the host of AMGFAGM and she seems to be a mostly competent anchor with the exception that the show feels completely directionless. This probably has less to do with Michelle’s abilities as a host and more to do with the fact that some dumbass TV executive somewhere woke up one morning after spending more cash in a single night than I’ll ever make in my entire life and had this great idea for a show that literally capitalizes on a fathomlessly massive milestone in American culture. Look at it this way, if there was a show in the 1960’s called “All My Black Friends Are Drinking From The Same Water Fountain As Me” that would be pretty fucked up. That’s the mindset that I’m watching this show with because that’s the impression I got from seeing it. You can at least tell Michelle is genuine because she’s done work with LGBT people in the past; in 2010 LOGO (a TV channel for gay and lesbian interests) gave her a “Brink of Fame” award. I’m still not sure if that’s a backhanded compliment or a legitimate award or what, but hey it’s something. She cares.

It’s also worth pointing out though that Michelle was formerly a co-host of The View. You know, that show your mom watched on the days when you didn’t have school and it bored you half to death. In July 2015 the producers of The View announced that she would become a permanent host. “Permanent” in this case was defined as less than one year because her ass ended up getting fired. I tried looking into this deeper but all I could find out was how Michelle and another co-host said some nasty shit about Miss Colorado and Carly Florina and were crucified on social media because of it. They were also forced to apologize and when they did nobody believed them and said they were being disingenuous; damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Basically all I’ve taken away from my research into this nonsense is that women are catty and backstabbing and I’m now as proud as ever that I suck dick.

Speaking of sucking dick the two guests that Michelle has invited onto her show are Jeff Zarrillo and Paul Katami, two wedded men whose marriage was highlighted in the Supreme Court case to overturn California’s “Proposition 8”. We’re literally dealing with Patient Zero here. Homo Zero, even. These two gentlemen are deserving of respect, and I don’t mean that in the usual snarky BattleBots Update tone. I’m not going to throw any shade their way even if their accomplishments are being exploited for someone else’s gain here. Michelle calls them “cocky”. This is going to be another one of those shows where the jokes are that obvious, by the way. Still, our host throws out a Geocities reference so I have to applaud her for that. That’s the one thing my generation has on Millennials: they never got to use Geocities. Suck on that. Have fun never owning a home OR a Geocities site. She even makes a joke about “Under Construction” GIFs. This woman is fantastic. She was obviously too good for those dried up Sahara vaginas on The View.

Also, wow, “gay dot com”. That was back when the Internet really was that simple. Take an interest — like BattleBots — and just slap a “dot com” on the end and see where you go. We have Grindr now. It’s spelled wrong on purpose. Fuck me. There’s a special guest this episode in the form of Alec, a friend of the couple, who brings them a slow cooker as a “wedding gift” in a painfully cringeworthy gag segment. The three of them play a “game” called Barely Legal which is basically an excuse for a bunch of double entendres and innuendo jokes to get thrown around, like whether or not it’s legal for “bears” to have sex in a bar. (“Bears” in this case meaning the animal, but in the context of a show about gay men this is meant to sound like “bear” as in someone hairy.) That’s where the bar is set in terms of humor, and for a show that’s supposedly socially progressive they just have to ram in a joke about Alabama and incest. Way to break stereotypes, assholes.

Anyways, I’ve also cheated on this entry as well and thumbed through some of the other episodes to get a better feel for AMGFAGM. It’s just another bullshit “reality TV” show that glamorizes excessive weddings except AMGFAGM manages to do so under the veneer of being socially progressive. Michelle’s a good host and she converses well with her guests; her gay jokes are decent, they’re like the “dad joke” equivalent of a gay joke. Totally harmless. She can’t save the show however, and it comes off as something that we’ll look back on in 10 years’ time with secondhand embarrassment.

WINNER: Love.

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FOREVER 31

Forever 31 begins with our as of yet unnamed protagonist (Iliza Shlesinger) having an existential crisis in the middle of a Lord of the Rings convention. Iliza is visited by the ghosts of Cosmopolitan past, present, and future who warn her that “turning 30” is basically the death knell for all women. You know, in a world where kids are growing up faster and faster it’s only understandable that they’re going to have their midlife crises much earlier as well. It used to be you’d make it to 40 or so before the dirty bomb that is your biological clock detonated but now 30 is apparently the magic number. I’m going to undercut any credibility I’ve built up thus far, but this show’s introduction is amusing if not directly spot-on. The fact that it turns out Iliza is having this epiphany while getting ready to host a bullshit trashy gossip show only seals the deal for me. I don’t hate Forever 31 yet.

Iliza is the host of the fictional television program Snap Crackle Pop Culture which pretty much looks like a carbon copy of fake news shit like Inside Edition. I say “carbon copy” and not “parody” because as Iliza’s crew primes her for the show they inform her of “hot” stories like Katy Perry leaving the light on in the bathroom and how Kelly Osbourne has an opinion on kiwis that needs retweeting. The punchline here is that Kelly Osbourne hasn’t been culturally relevant for a fucking decade and nobody in their right mind gives a shit about what a never-has like her has to say about anything. This is exactly the type of un-news that fills the entire timeslot of Inside Edition. Iliza’s prior realization leads her to finally ask her crew if anyone thinks this shit is actual news to which no one responds. She pushes the topic further and asks if anyone even watched the goddamned debates and gets a “Rhianna has a diet root beer” from the floor manager.

The crew goes live again and Iliza loses her shit and absolutely thrashes her crew and show. As someone who came from “Generation X” I tend to be able to pick up faux “countercultural” bullshit when I see it, because that’s basically what people who tried to be “hip” would do, but when Iliza spits out that hot fire about networks producing garbage content so garbage advertisers can sell us garbage… I fucking believe it. Look at what I’m writing about in this motherfucking article. Iliza, I know I’m treading into some TMI territory here, but I am absolutely fully torqued right now.

Normally I’d cry foul of a show whose opening titlecards are in the middle of the fucking episode but I’m too engrossed in Forever 31 to care by this point. Maybe it’s because I’m right there with Iliza at the same cusp of feeling like it’s all downhill from here, I don’t know, but as she has her monologue where she hypothesizes that maybe she took the job to “stay young” I can’t help but wonder if that’s yet another stab at Inside Edition whose female host is almost 60. By this show’s logic, that’s basically dead. In fact, 60 is “rotting corpse that the police just found in a swamp after it sat there for at least four years”. As Iliza starts to look on the brighter side of life while watching a couple do that stereotypical sitcom love twirl her bubble is burst by getting her coffee spilled all over her. Is this the same shit that passed for Gen X entertainment in the 90’s? You bet your ass it is, and I fucking love it.

I’m starting to understand why this comedian’s stand-up album reached #1 on the iTunes charts. Her segment on “funny women” is so fucking poetic that all she had to do was take existing jokes from that archetype of stale “comedy” and just get people to say them with the vocal infliction of someone who didn’t get mainstreamed in public school. Iliza’s friends remark that her video is going viral on social media, but Iliza says she knows nothing about it because checking Twitter just reminds her of all the fun she isn’t having. I swear to god this person is literally me with a vagina. All of Iliza’s new “fans” start suggesting she should have her own show which leads to her second epiphany of the episode… which is that she should start her own show. Mark my words, this show is iCarly if it wasn’t written by apes.

A broken clock is right twice a day. Forever 31 is fucking amazing and you need to watch it right now.

WINNER: Generation X.

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I CAN FIND $3,000 IN YOUR HOME

I Can Find $3,000 in Your Home has become somewhat of a minor meme in the BattleBots community because, as ABC’s newest “Digital Series”, it exemplifies the mindlessness that goes into these Hiroshimas of shitty programs that weren’t even good enough to get picked up by the MTV2’s of the broadcasting world. Recently I did a little experiment where I compared the YouTube views of this series against a BattleBots fight video uploaded around the same time. The fight with the least amount of views had just over 45,000. This show? Fucking twelve. TWELVE GODDAMNED VIEWS. It had been online for a week, it’s not like I caught this a minute after it was uploaded. This was up for a solid week and ABC still decided that 12 measly views was “more popular” than BattleBots and warranted higher placement on their website’s list of shows. Fuck, I’ve seen Minecraft let’s plays uploaded by idiot children who filmed their fucking computer screens get more than 12 fucking views. Somebody better have been murdered for this.

After making my crack about the show on Reddit the number of views on their video has gone up to 25. You’re welcome, ABC. I doubled it for you, and all I had to do was tell people how much of a piece of shit your show was.

I Can Find $3,000 in Your Home is hosted by Linda Lightman, a self-made millionaire who earned her fortune selling used designer clothes on eBay. According to her show’s description on ABC’s website she actually got her start on eBay by selling her son’s classic video games. Mom of the year right there. Hopefully he didn’t give a shit about them otherwise I’d love to come visit your suburban McMansion and key your fucking Prius on his behalf. Linda says she can find 52 items in your home worth over $3,000. That’s the whole basis of her show. Why 52? That’s such an arbitrary number. Is it like a joke about a deck of playing cards? Are you assuming they’re going to sell one thing a week for a year? She never fucking explains it. 52 things totaling up to at least $3,000 factors out to almost $58 per item. That’s such an uneven number. You’re fucking with my OCD here, Linda.

The focus of this episode is Antini and her daughter Jaz. Jaz is musically inclined and her mother is so unfortunately sized that when the editors bring in the side-by-side cut to show Jaz doing her thing on stage Instagram they actually have to shift the footage over to the left a bit and not use a clean 50/50 cut. Antini is also pictured in the video’s thumbnail (seen above) which is now probably one of my top ten favorite pictures ever. It’s hard for me to understand where Jaz is coming from during the introduction; she says she needs the money for school (because “education is important”) but she also loves to perform and waxes jealously about people with degrees not being able to find work while the PewDiePie’s among us make their living off of YouTube. Jaz, I don’t know what the fuck your problem is but you can’t play both fields at the same time like that. Either pursue your schooling or drop it and go hard into performing, otherwise you’re going to fuck them both up. Guaranteed.

Linda’s show is basically a half-assed version of American Pickers where instead of buying valuable old crap from hoarders she’s just going around saying “here, you sell this”. She starts her search in Jaz’s closet which sure enough is full of the tackiest fucking clothing in the world… and lots of shoes. Oh god, the shoes. Jaz’s closet is like that display of shoes in the Holocaust memorial museum except twice as depressing. Throughout this segment there’s all of these stupid pieces of “advice” (for lack of a better term) that slide in on the bottom third of the video. Most of them are no-brainer shit like “wash the clothes before you sell them you retard” but one of them mentions including a photo of the original receipt so buyers know how much you spent on it. Uh, no? What are you fucking stupid? The goal of reselling something is to get as close to what you paid for it back, if not more. Showing the receipt does nothing except give the buyer a point to start haggling from. This woman made a million dollars selling shit on eBay? I absolutely refuse to believe this. This woman is so incompetent at her job she’d fuck up washing trays at a McDonald’s.

All these shoes are showing prices of like $20 and $30. I’m no mathematician but that’s not even close to the $58 average per item. You better find some gold bullion in the cracks of their fucking couch at this rate, Linda. She finds something alright, but bullion it ain’t. Linda finds keyboards. Fucking keyboards. “Keyboards have value,” she says. NO THEY FUCKING DON’T YOU STUPID CUNT. HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO A GOODWILL STORE BEFORE ONCE IN YOUR MISERABLE GODDAMNED LIFE??? Every Goodwill store’s electronics department is wall to wall computer keyboards. They might as well just rename it to the “Keyboards (and a Coffee Maker Every Once in a While) Department”. Other “gold” that gets dredged up includes yesterday’s cell phones and yesterday’s news in the form of Jet magazine. Exciting.

Jaz finds a dress that Linda looks up on her phone and says is selling for $175. Her idea? List it for $199. Yeah, $24 higher than the average price. Her justification is “pretty pricing” like how Billy Mays used to scream “$19.95” until you believed that it wasn’t just $20 with lipstick on. If you’re looking for “pretty pricing” but also trying to move merchandise fast, Linda, how about $149 instead? That’s right there in the ballpark, it’s gonna show up higher on the list for people sorting by lowest price first, and it’s a “pretty price”. Retard.

Linda actually throws out one piece of decent advice regarding textbooks. Sell them when semesters are starting. She prefaced this of course with the incorrect piece of trivia that “textbooks always sell”. Anybody who’s had to pay for their own college textbooks — and has been fucked over by the books having new editions every year — knows this is flat out false. While this is going on Jaz starts pulling things out of her “junk drawer” which prompts a trivia piece to pop up saying how you can sell your junk drawer online “like Storage Wars“. No, you can’t. It doesn’t work that way. If you go on eBay right now and search for “junk drawer” you get mismatched collections of antique and vintage items, not hair bands and soda can pop tabs. Jaz pulls out a handful of assorted CD’s in paper sleeves which causes Linda’s panties to soak. This shit is literally worthless. The disc on top is a goddamned driver installation CD for a random HP printer or some shit. Nobody is going to buy this because you can download them from HP’s own fucking website for free.

We’re at the end here, finally. Linda grabs Jaz’s new-in-box Walmart guitar and says it’s worth a whopping thirty bucks. Then she corrals everyone to proclaim that she’s found over 52 items (61 to be exact) worth $3,534. This is incorrect. You know what, let’s get a better approximation based upon what was shown in this video. I’m serious. Let’s fucking do this.

• 32 boxes of shoes. Let’s assume half. — 16
• “About 100” sewing patterns. — 100
• 3 keyboards, 2 laptops, 1 printer, & 4 phones. — 10
• 5 picture frames and 6 issues of Jet. — 11
• 7 dresses from the closet. — 7
• 7 textbooks, 3 calculators, & 10 copies of WIndows 7. — 20
• 2 musical instruments. — 2

By my count this is 166 things, not 61. Even if you took that entire box of sewing patterns and shoved them up your ass you’re still over by five. Jaz and her mother feign amazement at the fact that some stranger just came into their home, found a bunch of random shit, and said “this is worth money”. There you go. What kills me about this series is that if you stick around after the credits for the I Can Find $3,000 in Your Home promotional graphic there’s all sorts of superimposed text on the things behind Linda that show garbage like original artwork and some shitty old chair worth over a thousand dollars. Where was all that crap in Jaz’s place? I mean, I know her home looked like the repo men beat you there but that’s kind of deceptive to market this show as something where legitimate old treasures are found and instead run some stupid shit where an eBay nobody grabs a handful of Windows discs and says “THIS IS BASICALLY LEGAL TENDER”.

Linda, your show sucks and you’re a fucking sham. You’re no better than that jackass that used to be in TV ads screaming about free money from the government. I hope someone gives you negative feedback out of spite.

WINNER: You! (There’s $3,000 in your home!)

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I feel like ABC “created” I Can Find $3,000 in Your Home just to spite me for having made fun of All My Gay Friends and Tastemade Get Cookin earlier in the season. I know that’s a silly and narcissistic way of looking at things, but I swear the appearance of these “Digital” series is uncanny. While writing this article (which I had been working on prior to the BattleBots season finale) a whopping six more series appeared in the list. Among the shows is shit like Tastemade Farm To Plate and What To Text Him Back, a show whose title is written entirely with fucking Emojis. Also, apparently the Tastemade Empire is expanding because they already have two goddamned series. I haven’t watched any of it — and I don’t intend to — but this one’s hosted by some guy so I’m just going to assume he “cooks” shit from that Dr. Dreadful candy lab that was popular in the 90’s.

ABC, this shit is getting out of control. Out of the five shows outlined in this article a grand total of one of them is worth watching. Out of the six that have been added since I wrote this article I’m sure you likely have one more solid show in there. 20% isn’t a great batting record. On what planet is Linda Lightman’s “let me look up how much this Dell keyboard is worth on my phone because I’m the world’s shittiest appraiser” something more interesting and more “popular” than BattleBots? Do you people sincerely believe the American public would rather watch some stupid Food Network Z-lister make disgusting looking “ice cream” in a HEFTY zipper bag instead of a show that does a much better job of empowering women through participation in STEM fields?

That’s what I thought.

As of this article’s finalization, BattleBots has ended. It was a fantastic season and an amazing event to attend in-person. The energy, excitement, and camaraderie cultivated at the show beats everything that you’re currently airing both online and on television. Please take notice of this. #WeWantSeason3.

– Draco