"It pains us that you have this fab figure and put it in the most hideous things."

"The color is not good on her and instead of curvy she just looks lumpy."

Television Without Pity reviews the year's Best & Worst Awards Show Fashions, and you might not look at these pictures the same way they do.

Did you watch "Sarah Palin's Alaska"?

I watched for about 20 minutes. I might have been interested in a reality show — more like "The Osbournes" — where we see some semblance of everyday life in this unusual family, but — as the title warns us — it's more of a travelogue — with Sarah Palin talking almost constantly. They went fishing and saw some bears. Sarah said "wow" and "oh my gosh" a lot. They fished, Todd caught fish, and Sarah complained that Todd caught all the fish. Why shouldn't Todd catch the fish?

Here's the Television Without Pity forum for discussing the show. I love the stern moderator's rules:

What’s on topic in this thread?

• Things you saw on the show.

What’s not on topic here?

• Politics
• Bristol's appearance on DWTS
• Politics
• Your personal judgements about Palin's fame/family/career
• Politics
• Posting to tell us that you're not going to watch.
• Politics.

In other words, this isn’t a thread to snark on Palin at will. Please take extra care to follow the rules of the board and the special rules for this thread. If you don’t pay attention to the rules, and treat this as a general thread given to you to bash or praise Palin or your fellow posters, you will be warned. Thanks.

Good rules!

"And when in doubt, go with the particularly American feelings about gender that would rather see Martha Stewart go down than Lee Iacocca..."

"... that would choose almost anybody, for any public office, over Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sarah Palin's entire narrative is based on the audacity, the sheer gall. Accusations of female arrogance have been big over the last year, taking up about half of the political discourse and even more of the conversation about entertainment...."

I said Lady Gaga looked like she'd been swimming in seaweed, got caught in a net, and then, without removing the net, took up beekeeping.

But let's hear how Television Without Pity's Jacob describes her woeful "American Idol" performace:

A giant angel statue under blue lights, a naked gay man having spazzers on the floor, and Gaga at the piano covered in spray-painted black branches, herself in a black chiffon version of the costumes they had to wear in The Handmaid's Tale....

Link added.

She's still got a fishnet thing over her face, because she's weird about her face. Because it's weird.... The song is very slow and not my favorite of the catalog...

Yes, it was slow. Leaden. Odd when a [big star's] mediocre performance takes place on the "American Idol" stage. Even though the judges won't judge it, you construct judgely comments in your head. Man, if she were a contestant, they'd flay her. They'd peel off that seaweed and netting and flay her.

Lady Gaga stalks over to a giant Halloween Tree/Meat God, and plays the piano hardcore and things get kind of Shakira for a second, musically, but now she's singing about somebody named "Roberto." Maybe this song is actually written from the perspective of somebody named Roberto and she's even more about appropriating gay men's sex lives than usual, taking it global. Or maybe those are the names of two of her dancers and she's just making this song up as she goes along. Or maybe this is a tribute to Cinco de Mayo, because she keeps talking about Mexico....

I thought it might be some sort of commentary on the immigration crisis. What I heard was: hostile words for a series of men with Hispanic names — get away from me Hispanic men. I imagined that she might be on the anti-immigrant side of the debate — or trying to tap into that side of The American Brain.

But we can read the actual lyrics here:

You know that I love you boy.
Hot like Mexico, rejoice.
At this point I gotta choose,
nothing to loose.

Don't call my name.
Don't call my name, Alejandro.
I'm not your babe.
I'm not your babe, Fernando.

Don't wanna kiss, don't wanna touch.
Just smoke one cigarette and hush.
Don't call my name.
Don't call my name, Roberto....

Don't bother me.
Don't bother me. Alejandro
Don't call my name.
Don't call my name, Fernando.

My theory is not so far-fetched now, is it? She even cites Mexico as their country of origin.Yes, I realize there's love relationship talk in there, but I'm talking subtext. (Remember interpreting "American Woman" by the Guess Who?)

Jacob has nothing to say about the immigration subtext. He's all about her questionable relationship to homosexuality:

Lady Gaga creates culture, but more importantly if you have a subculture of any kind, Lady G would like to be a part of it, because she's an upper-class prep school New Yorker and thus has been exposed to subcultures her entire life that do not admit her. So when that happens -- when you are too interesting for your world -- you have to do things like this, which are awesome, but also things that are not so awesome, like glomming onto gay culture so hard you actually have to pretend that your bisexuality is more than hypothetical. 

Glomming!

IN THE COMMENTS: Daniel wrote:

I got into Lady Gaga because of American Idol. Her first performance last year. Playing that bubble piano then rocking out, with that S&M zippered leather eye cover. Whew! Hot.

Now, symmetrically, I'm souring on Gaga because of American Idol. Yesterday was a snort fest. Her cheap costume. The dude skirt shorts -- a weird mix of rib-high waists (because you're not a woman, you're a mom!), bike shorts and mini skirts. The gallons of sweat pouring off the dancers shaved chests. The fake tree. The flame spitting angel -- because that's what angels do, they shoot flames out of their heads. Gaga's apparent boredom (the only part of the performance that was dead on for me). TERRIBLE. Between that and her crappy telephone song, I really don't care how many women she makes out with -- she's sucking hard right now.

"American Idol." The Final 3 is tonight. The finale, next week. And here I am in Ohio with no TV.

Gah! I've watched the whole season! Now what? Read Television Without Pity recaps?

""My wife’s dead' 'Oh yeah well my eyeballs are dead.'"

The "American Idol" "tragedy off"... and other things.

I can barely force myself to watch AI anymore, but reading descriptions of the show is great fun. Yes, I know, maybe you had fun reading my descriptions of the show in year's past, but the problem there is that I have to watch it, and my current watching involves the kind of fast-forwarding that compresses a 2-hour show — why the hell is the show 2 hours?! — into about 15 minutes. I'll hear 2 seconds of a singer and know it's too horrible to watch. Even the good ones are annoying me now.

The link above goes to Trooper York. I also like Jacob at Television Without Pity. When I was trying to actually watch the show, I thought Jacob's recaps were ridiculously long and meandering. Well, the solution to that is not for Jacob to rein in his effusions and digressions. It's quite simply for me to stop watching the show and read Jacob (who absurdly gives every episode an A+):

First up we're going to group sing -- mostly seated, because of the Scott [blind guy] factor -- a Katy Perry song, "Hot & Cold," which is the third Katy Perry single that has to do with boys and girls and boys who like girls who do boys like they're girls and reinforcing gender stereotypes while congratulating itself on not doing that. Let's talk about Katy Perry for a second. I actually heard this cover of "Electric Feel" that she did, and it was totally lovely. She has a wonderful voice under all that bullshit, which makes me hate her more and not less. It's not even the horrific Diablo Cody/Betty Page cute/burlesque crap, although they do contribute to the overall '90s-ness of her, which is admittedly yucky.

The problem is that, just like this show is not so much about selling your soul as speculating against the real estate market of the place your soul would normally be located, Katy Perry took a pretty face and a fantastic voice and leveraged them against this stupid-ass dead-end offensive gender stuff: "You change your mind like a girl changes clothes" tells you everything you need to know about Katyworld, where men have minds and girls have clothes, and girls only kiss girls to impress guys because they are drunk. It's not even a one-trick pony, it's just a trick, and a cautionary tale for these kids, who have not even begun to sell out yet. Katy Perry is to sexuality what Gwen Stefani is to racial equality.