CARLTON FLETCHER: ’90 Day’ shows are perfect examples of MUST-NOT-SEE TV

“Blow up your TV …”

— John Prine

I tell you what’s another huge victim of the coronavirus: the entertainment industry, TV in particular.

Have you watched TV lately? And I don’t mean a baseball playoff game or a college football game — no one watches the NBA or NFL anymore, so who cares about that? — but what passes for entertainment on the tube?

I’m reminded of Bruce Springsteen’s song of yesteryear: “57 Channels and Nothing On.” Ahh, those were such quaint times. Well, Boss, we have hundreds of channels now thanks to the wonders of satellite technology. And, guess what? There’s still nothing on.

This is the honest truth: Minus the baseball playoffs (I’m a Braves fan forever, what can I say?), here’s what I watch on TV now. I watch “Bob’s Burgers” (one of the funniest shows on television), “Seinfeld” reruns, “Andy Griffith” reruns, “Family Guy,” which kind of gets stale, and some of those crime shows that don’t get to deep into the psychology of the serial killers they profile. And that’s about it.

Network TV has nothing, no new “Chicago PD,” no groundbreaking new shows, not even Blake and his buddies on “The Voice.” Instead, they offer reruns, game shows that cost nothing to produce and wondrously dumb fare like “The Masked Singer.”

One thing I have been kinda watching, in my efforts to be a kinder, gentler, more supportive sort, is this series of shows that include (and these names may not be right, I really don’t care enough to check) “90 Day Fiance,” “90 Day the Other Way” and “90 Day Lockup.” Something like that.

Here’s the premise of these modern-day bastions of entertainment: Foreign people come to America and have 90 days to marry someone here (they should call that one the “Green Card Hustle”); Americans go to foreign countries to seek love with people they met on the internet, and — this one is my favorite premise — people stay in contact with a prisoner and hook up with them to find true love and romance when they released from the pen.

Now that’s a recipe for real Must-See TV.

But there can oftentimes be pearls of good-time entertainment fun in the oddest of places, so — without options worth fighting for — I figured I’d give it a try. This is the thing that strikes me most as I half-watch one of these shows. There is not one — NOT ONE — redeemable person on any of them. There’s no one in these “real life dramas” that are so contrived they’re laughable that you could even at least wish well. They’re reprehensible, the lot of them, the dregs of the dregs of society.

I get so mad watching these shows, I actually find myself cursing the TV, amazed that anyone could care about even one person on any of these shows. I would rate them on a LOVE TO HATE scale, but it’s impossible. I’m thinking Darcy is the most sickening individual ever to walk the Earth, then they do a segment with Angela, and she moves into the top spot. But then, there’s Colt (yes, everyone calls him “Coltee” because the Green Card-seeking bimbo he married but she left him when he wouldn’t pay for her boob job mispronounced it (on purpose) that way) and his mother Deb make an appearance and they move into the top spot for a while.

A couple of the African guys are OK, but it’s obvious they got into this for the money and the (hoped for) U.S. citizenship — I’m talking about you, Michael and “Soldier Boi” — but even they are so unbelievably stupid, I can’t give them a pass.

And then along comes Elizabeth’s money-grubbing, snobby family, and they quickly move back into the No. 1 spot. The girl who was a fake lesbian who went all the way to Australia so that she could be on TV — hell, it wasn’t even worth remembering her name — she soon emerges as a candidate.

Call these shows MUST-NOT-SEE TV. Trust me, there is nothing on the shows worth watching, at least not until the end-of-season tell-all when they gather all these vipers together and let them try to outsleaze each other. In that respect they’re all winners.