The Cats with Knives Television Network

Not to sound ungrateful, but I have noticed that a lot of shows are skewed to the unfortunate. Heavy, Extreme Makeover Home Edition, Biggest Loser, 16 and Pregnant, Intervention, I Used to Be Fat, Hoarders….seems to me like, unless you are a fat crack addict with twenty disabled children, you are not eligible for these change-your-life shows. And some part of me - granted, it is the insane part – feels just a little bit cheated.

Not that I want to be fat. Or have my house taken over by toxic mold. And God knows I don’t want to adopt disabled children or become addicted to meth. But I do envy the attention and the esteem-building that the people who go on these shows get. I want some damn esteem-building! So here are a few shows I would like to propose:

1) Biggest Loser: Medium – This is a show for people who are not overweight, but just want to be super hot. Same grueling workouts with Bob and Jillian, same weekly weigh ins (but on a regular scale instead of a giant-sized one), same sponsorship by Extra Sugarless gum and Britta water filters, but at the end of the season, the contestants will have lost, maybe twenty pounds and gone down, like, 2 sizes. Do I think America would be interested in this show? No. I mean, it would basically just be normal people working out. But I want a good workout, dammit, and I can’t afford a personal trainer.

2) Intervention: Peanut Butter – Most of us probably know at least one person whose life has been negatively impacted by the consumption of peanut butter. This is one of my personal struggles; I can take out a large jar of Jif Creamy in a week. I need some professional fucking help. Just like regular Intervention, the cameras would follow the peanut butter addicts. I alone would provide some GREAT footage of me standing in my pantry, with a spoon and a jar of peanut butter, just chowing away. Once, I told my son to hide the peanut butter, and when he did, I yelled at him for refusing to tell me where it was. Peanut butter addiction is no joke. This would be some gritty shit.

3) Modest Makeover, Home Edition – Listen, I do not want the world. But I would like some window treatments. So, in this show, somebody – it wouldn’t even have to be a designer, just someone with taste – would come over, look around regular houses, and replace the really shabby stuff. No sad story about the subject’s life, no theme rooms, no Disney vacation for them and their family, no bulldozer and certainly no bus….maybe they’d tell the subject to go hang out at Starbuck’s for an hour or so while they go to Target to get a new bedspread. The reveal would be like, “Look! We replaced your cereal bowl!” But the subjects would go even crazier than those Extreme Makeover people. They’d be fainting and stuff, punching the designers with joy, and yelling, “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! I needed a new cereal bowl!” And the designers would be like, “Wait, we also got you a new pillow for your couch!” and the subjects would start jumping up and down, like, “No! No fucking way! This pillow is A-MAZ-ING!”

4) Cluttered – In this show, essentially someone would come over and clean my house. My house is not filled with piles of stuff. Things are generally in the area where they belong, and there are no blowflies circling piles of garbage. But, I mean, it could be neater. So, people would come over and be like, “Whoa! This floor doesn’t look like it’s been mopped in, like, three weeks!” And then they would mop it. And then they’d be like, “Look what we just found! Laundry that needs to be folded!” And they would fold my laundry. And I would help a little, but mostly they would show me sitting on the couch, drinking a glass of wine and watching TiVo’d episodes of Hoarders.

5) I Didn’t Know I Was Tired – This is a spin-off of I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant. Except it would show people accidentally dozing off in the middle of other peoples’ sentences.

I’m just going to sit back and wait for the networks to call me about these shows. I think they sound like winners.