Yesterday we watched the season premiere of Downton Abbey. I have to say, it may be cheesy, but it’s a very entertaining show. My grandmother watches it, so does my stepmom, and, obviously, so do I. And, in case you didn’t notice the ‘we’ in the first sentence, so does my husband. That’s right babe, I just publicly outed you. To be fair, I started watching it first, and after hearing all the hype, he decided to give it a go. Last night he bought the first two episodes of this season. Clearly he too wanted to know whether Lady Mary and Mr. Crawley finally tied the knot.

Here’s what I love about Downton Abbey – it appeals to varying generations, and it proves you can have drama and intrigue without people getting nekkid, swearing like sailors, or shooting each other (yes, people get shot on the show, but a war is going on, for Pete’s sake. It’s historical, so don’t get all technical on me). We are inundated by crappy reality TV, and the wild success of Downton Abbey proves that people will tune in to shows that don’t involve over-injected, fame fucking housewives or orange oompaloompa meat heads from Jersey.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go all holier than thou, ‘I’m too good for reality television’ on you. I don’t watch it, but I also don’t have access to any channels at all, even regular ones. We do Netflix and buy a handful of shows on Amazon. But if I did have TV, it’s entirely possible I’d get sucked into reality programming, if for no other reason than it’s on. Once, my husband and I were in a hotel room and got sucked into some show about whore houses in Nevada. It was like an awful train wreck, yet we were unable to avert our eyes (or change the channel), and we watched the entire thing. Now that I think about it, on that same trip, I’m pretty sure we watched the gypsy wedding show too. And there you have it – a big part of the reason we don’t have television is to avoid things like that – lord knows we waste enough time with Netflix as it is, no need to add fuel to the fire.

Besides, most television, and especially reality television, is soul- sucking and mind-numbingly awful.

And that brings me to Honey Boo Boo. I finally learned over the holidays that this boo boo is a person and not a thing, or phrase. I heard it thrown about on the internets, but didn’t know what people were talking about, and was too lazy to google it.

During my time in Texas I made a trip to see my grandparents. Sadly, my grandpa is not doing so hot these days. He still greets me with a vibrant “Hi doll!”, but he is having a rough time of things. Some days are good, and he’s fairly talkative, and some are…not. On this visit, after telling us the same thing five times, grandpa settled back into his chair and spent most of the time staring at the television. To be honest, I didn’t think he was taking anything in, because he doesn’t really react to much of anything anymore. Anyway, whatever show he had on announced the upcoming segment was about Honey Boo Boo. So I turned to look at the screen, and discovered Honey is a blond, rather ill-mannered child. In the show, she was eating spaghetti, and it was utterly disgusting. Then, she twined a noodle around her fingers and attempted to floss her teeth with it. Ordinarily that would have grossed me out, but a noise from my grandpa made me change my mind. Laughter. In fact, he laughed so hard he shook. It was pretty awesome.

I still don’t really understand why this kid is famous, or what exactly she does. I do know she made my grandpa belly laugh, something I haven’t seen in a while, and that makes her okay in my book.