Marathons Are For Suckers...And I'm A Sucker

I never understood why a block of episodes of the same TV show were called marathons until I watched my father run an actual marathon. As I sat on that curb checking my watch I noticed that I was staring at the same thing over and over again but with slight variations. Every so often you’d get someone in costume or someone sprinting or if you were really lucky some kind of collision. Watching a TV show marathon is pretty much the same in that you watch the episodes go by and hope that something special or unique happens. The problem comes when after watching 3 straight episodes with nothing worthwhile, you’re likely to watch 3 more believing that you’re due for some fireworks. I speak from the heart on this topic because late Saturday night/early Sunday morning I succumbed to a TV marathon.

A little background is needed before I confess my depravity. First of all, effective marathon programming is reason #384 that MTV is the devil. Most of the shows that MTV has conned me into watching have been the result of catching a Saturday afternoon marathon. I believe the MTV executives know that if they program 8 hours of Laguna Beach on a Saturday, a viewer may change the channel when they flip by the first two times but around the third or fourth stop, the viewer will stay and watch and watch and watch. Second of all, I’m getting over a flu/cold/allergy sickness that is really messing up my flow. Now with all these excuses out of the way let’s get on with the tale.

I spent most of Saturday night over at my friends’ place. The majority of the night was spent discussing the finer points of the film Tombstone (which I will now call Captain Ron and His Huckleberry Whores). The film finished and as the clock struck 12, I prepared to take my leave. My exit would not be so easy, for as I gathered myself together an episode of MTV’s Date My Mom came on the screen.

What’s Date My Mom? For shame, you must actually have a life if you need to ask that. Date My Mom is a dating game show where a prospective suitor goes out on dates with 3 moms and based on that must choose which of their children they’d like to date. Almost 98% of the time it’s a straight guy looking for a daughter but occasionally the show feature a gay or lesbian suitor as well. The mothers and suitor seem to be fed their lines during the show on giant cue cards and they have all the subtlety of the pop up messages on Blind Date. The end of the show has the suitor making all sorts of faces as they see who they picked and who they didn’t.

Not one to pass up as opportunity to mock one of the most poorly scripted and performed “game” shows on TV, I settled back into my chair. As I watched it I thought it might be the worst episode I’ve ever seen of this show. Not only did this episode feature the most stiff dialogue delivery this side of Al Gore but it also featured a rather disgusting mother who talked multiple times about the possibility of a 3-way with the guy, her daughter and herself. Note to crazy mom’s everywhere: mentioning a 3-way once is gross, mentioning it multiple times is grounds for a child services visit. The show came to an end and once again I prepared to make my exit. My friend Steve noted that there were multiple episodes coming up…a marathon if you will. He also wondered out loud if his “best worst episode ever” would be a part of this marathon. According to lore, this “best worst episode ever” is a lesbian show featuring one of the craziest moms of all time. Steve checked his DVR to see if it was upcoming, but sadly the information on the upcoming episodes was bare bones to say the least.

I arrived home with Steve’s words of “best worst episode ever” ringing in my head. Still recovering from my sickness I had to go to bed yet the evil TV addict inside of me swung by and programmed my DVR on my way to the bedroom. Around 3am I awoke from my slumber in the midst of a coughing fit. I grabbed a bottled water, some cough drops and my blankey and took a seat on the couch. This seemed like as a good a time as any to flip through some episodes and catch up on the marathon. As is the case with most marathons, the episodes declined in quality from one to the other and sadly, Steve’s episode did not appear. Two hours later I’m full of 5 episodes of Date My Mom and loads of self loathing for having watched them.