Karl Klockars

It looks nice. But it's the world's largest suburb.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve visited the City of Angels a couple two-tree times in my life.  Nice enough place.  A little greasy, but what town isn’t?  Some good restaurants and you can see famous people if that’s what you’re into.  But I’ve never wanted to move there.  And yesterday morning I had physical proof of why, found on accident.

If you have ever had the misfortune to turn on your television in the morning and have it power up while on the E! Network, you know what I’m talking about.  Now, this isn’t something that normal people do because most of us are smart enough to change off of “Top 50 Worst Nose Jobs Ever” before we call it quits for the night, but last night Chelsea Handler got left on because…well, I have no excuse for that either.

But that’s not the point.  The point is that greeting the day with E! when you’re not prepared can probably cause heart failure.  If I were an older and frailer person, chances are I would have had felt my left arm go numb and cardiac arrest would have ensued.

Yesterday I learned that E! has a program that runs for 3 hours every morning which appears to be produced by about 8 people – and 3 of them are onscreen for most of the time.  It’s a wannabe Today/GMA clone knockoff called “That Morning Show,” which in terms of titles ranks right up there with “Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place” and “This Show Sucks” (I’m assuming that there’s been a show called “This Show Sucks”).

"Yep - we've got nothin' to say about anything."

Ah, That Morning Show.  Hosted by two mannequins and a “Isn’t he the guy who won’t stop doing MTV Challenge shows?” guy.  Just a few scant minutes spent in the company of these 3 bland puppets reminded me exactly why I could never live in Los Angeles.

Granted, this is just a scratch impression based on about 20 minutes of viewing.  It could be Ed Murrow’s “You Were There” for the rest of the program for all I know, but based on my experiences in media I tend to doubt it.  It is a program that appears to be an amalgamation of all things that repulse me about LA:  It is hours upon hours of uninteresting people talking to uninteresting people about uninteresting things, and the uninteresting people doing the talking are completely convinced that they’re terribly interesting.

I always capitalize THAT whenever I can.

For example:  That Morning Show (which I already want to tack on a “sucks” to the end of just based on instinct) spent 10 minutes talking to some blonde nobody about her many roles on soap operas.  During the course of this interview, the interviewee (who will not be named, since I’m not even sure that TMS[s] named her at all) spent about half the time talking about how little she knew about her role.  Something about not knowing how many times they’ve killed her off and how many babies she’s had stolen.  I’m no TV producer, but if you’ve booked someone who doesn’t know much about her own career, you should probably start updating your own resume.

I’m sure the person doing the interview (also: not named because when they released her from the LA TV Host Factory they neglected to install an identification program) thought it was scintillating.  “Tell me more about all the things you’ve forgotten about your completely forgettable soap star experiences!”

Cut away to talking about hand soap or something equally pointless.  Cut away to coffeeshop duo singing acoustic hippy tunes.  Cut away to witty banter between two co-hosts.  It’s, to me, the definition of life in Los Angeles.  It’s glitzy and slick and fancy, with next to no substance and barely any entertainment.

Remember that girl in high school that giggled at anything and everything without really ever thinking about what she was giggling at?  Yeah – that’s this show.

It's good - but honestly, they make too big of a deal out of it.

Words cannot describe exactly how devoid of entertainment nutritional content the program is, and it’s a precise microcosm of LA.  All it needs is someone to occasionally say “Yeah, but we’ve got In-N-Out Burger” and it would be complete.  It’s amazing, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys their midwestern lifestyle and requires justification for why they’re not west-coasters.

The best part is that even throughout the program, there don’t seem to be any sponsors save for a handful of people who sell gift cards for 2 minutes at at time.  It’s essentially the Radio Shopping Show on a national level, selling $50 to Chili’s to a few dozen people at 7am.

If spending your time with a no-content presentation, with uninteresting people, while being sold bad prepackaged low-quality product isn’t a microcosm for life in LA, I don’t know what is.

It’s glorious.  I realize this sounds like an endorsement, but really it’s more of a train wreck.  No less of a reason for you to tune in and drink in the soul-stealing magic.