Sweetest let-down

“Tuesday Night Book Club,” gladly, is no more. CBS saddened me more than any tear-jerker movie with this horrible show, and I’m glad they’ve put it out of my misery.

Ostensibly, the show was a reality program about seven female friends sharing intimacies of their lives as they enjoy their book club. Really, these were auditioned and screened strangers who were chosen for the stage-like simplicity of their dramas.

“Book Club” challenged my emotional endurance. My impression is that this was supposed to be an insiders’ look at how women’s troubles are all a soap opera in real life and they can get together and dissect it over boozy social gatherings. Instead, I watched seven women with real emotional, social, relationship crises smear their personal problems all over network television. It hurt.

Their pain was so personal and so common, that I cringed as the producers tried to lighten things up with yet another alcohol-fueled party at which everyone laughed over the surface of their problems. There was the woman who was coping with her husband’s addiction problem and how it had nearly destroyed her family of young children. There was the woman who was trying to decide if she wanted to leave her husband, who was himself obviously desperate that she not go but unable to communicate it. There was the recently married woman who fought with her spouse so much that their every aired utterance was mutually belittling (I found the unnecessarily mean fight over whose fault it was that the dog ate the wedding band especially stomach-turning.) There was the young libertine whose empty life was eroding her from the inside out though she pretended she was the happiest of the lot since she was so carefree. Who am I forgetting? Oh, the pathetic over-drinking, over-rich, over-weight swingers. How creepy? I’m skipping the doctor’s wife whose husband was implied to be closeted gay.

Overarching them all was the gay-divorcee, ever ready to ply the women with liquor and enable them to share heart-wrenching stories of emotional trauma and anxiety, acting as some fake Dr. Phil lousy therapist to get them to spill their inner-most turmoil for the cameras. She betrayed them all. Her plastic helmet hair and omni-present bottle of red and bottle of white made the women’s stories seem not dramatized, but like CBS was trying to reduce real crises to palatable mush. But these were not the manufactured traumas of “Big Brother 4” or “The Real World Season 7.” These were actual women whose lives were really falling apart in front of us. It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t entertaining.

I had high hopes when I tuned in because I love to laugh mindlessly at other people's ridiculous made for TV problems. There was no humor in “Tuesday Night Book Club,” unless the joke was on me.