Are there truly many deplorable (in terms of content, not production/writing quality) television shows? I don't think I've thought of any shows that way.
I wrote the above as my initial on-topic post, and then I thought more about what I'd written. I stand by what I wrote and implied; however, I decided I'm aware of shows that strike me as insipid in concept and what little of the execution I've seen of them. Are they worthy of my contempt, as the OP would put it? No, they're not that bad; indeed, I don't know how a TV show could be. The thing with those insipid shows is that because I think so of them, I don't watch them beyond the episode (or part thereof) that I watched and found silly.
What shows strike me so? Well, I a point to two genres of shows that do:
- So-called reality TV shows, a la The Real World, Big Brother, Bachelor/Bachelorette and Housewives.
For the life of me I don't know what makes people, millions of them no less, tune in to watch what amounts to life in a dorm (or maybe a group house such as some young people live in) (Real World) or the staged goings-on in the lives of people who are colocated in some town or building, which, aside from the pretense that the characters aren't acting, strikes me as little different from daytime television dramas.
After all, the human experience is not particularly unique; everyone's lives play out more or less like those of the people on those shows. There's plenty of reality in each and every person's life. One need only pay attention to their own life to see real living played out before them....
- Gossip TV a la TMZ. There may be other gossip TV shows, but I don't know of them. I suppose my disdain for this type of show is somewhat related to my distaste for reality TV. I'm interested in what celebrities do when I allow them to entertain me, but outside of that, what they do is what they do and it matters not to me. Why do I need to know why, I don't know, Brad and Angelina are separating? What is who Justin Bieber is dating something I need to know? That "so and so" bought a fancy house somewhere means what for me? And if/when I have occasion to visit them there, I'll discover what that house looks like, but prior to that, I have no need to know.
When one of them invents the cure for the common cold, that'll be worth telling me about. If one of them is running for elected office in D.C. (where I vote), that too is worth my knowing. There are plenty of things celebs might do that are worth talking about, but the stuff on which gossip TV focuses isn't generally among those things.
Does any of that make the shows deplorable? No, it just makes them puerile, boorish and boring.