TVSquad

The marketing for this show has been relentless, and that's an understatement. It's easier to shake the SARS virus in a back alley chicken hut in downtown Hong Kong than it is to shake an ad for The Cougar.

One of my personal rules (number one is "thou who smelt it, dealt it") is the harder the advertising, the worse a show is bound to be. TV Land hasn't just aired a commercial for The Cougar every five seconds in between their few remaining watchable shows. They air it on other networks. They plaster ads all over the Internet. If the economy dips any lower, they'll probably start tattooing ads to people's foreheads.

It doesn't make me want to tune in. It makes me want to travel back in time to the early 1980s, so I can rip out the throat of the lead singer of The Waitresses and prevent them from ever singing that "I Know What Boys Like" song ever again.

It's become so relentless, shallow and pale that I can't even bring myself to watch it in order to do a review FOR MONEY. Instead, here's a stitched together reanimated corpse of news reviews. People who actually watched AND liked the show will also have a chance to defend it because I still need the money.

Now to be fair, I did my very best to find at least one halfway decent review of the show's first episode. The only one that came remotely close to nice came from Popmatters' critic Todd Ramlow who gave the show a "1" out of "10." You can guess where the rest of the reviews go from there. The closest he came to a complement was in the pleasure the show sometimes provides from watching these meatheads make an ass of themselves on national television for a date. That is until things turn ugly and even violent with the poor Cougar caught in the middle and "the tableaux looking creepily like the gang-bang set up from some cheap porn flick."

It's a complement in that porn is worth the ticket price.

Newsday's Verne Gay took the opposite approach to his review. He felt the show wasn't mean enough and left his mouth craving for the taste of blood. "What was needed was a Rabid Cougar, who would chew up, then spit out these panting puppies one by one. Now that's entertainment."

I'll take it one step further. I think the show could benefit from an ACTUAL cougar. The thought of 12 desperate guys learning that they have to compete for the affection of a nature-made meat grinding machine would teach them humility, the price of exhibitionism and how to deal with fear.

The most savage review comes from New York Daily News' David Hinckley who strips away the show's phony female empowerment veneer with an industrial strength cheese grater. "It's being sold as a proud salute to female empowerment. But it's hardly accidental that it's also feeding a widespread teenage male fantasy about their friends' hot moms."

Crap, they're on to us. To the MILFmobile, Wingman!

After reading these reviews, I can't picture anyone watching this show, not even hardcore reality junkies who gave up pieces of their own realities to sit in front of fake ones. If you do watch this show and wish to defend it, please do so in the comments section below and I'll give it its due equal time in a future post. I can't promise I won't rip it to shreds, so be happy that I'm promising equal time.