CMT

See how the letters look all worn out? That's because they're hardworking, honest letters.

Out of all genres, why is country music the only one that gets a basic cable channel? Maybe it’s because it’s a genre of music so heavily tied to a particular lifestyle – after all, the entire discography of all country music ever is basically one big theme song for driving a truck around and steadfastly refusing to move to the city, so why not maximize that audience by creating a TV channel to air ads for newer trucks and albums about not moving to the city?

For years, Country Music Television has been about the same as BET – a channel in my basic cable package that caters to a lifestyle wholly irrelevant to my own. Of course, while BET is produced by and targeted at black people (I know three), Country Music Television is almost exclusively white and I still don’t get most of the stuff I see them do.

I’ve been watching far more CMT than I had ever thought I would in the past few days, due mainly to the fact that I only turn the TV on when I’m exhausted and unwilling to apply any more effort or cognitive ability to anything in my life short of pushing a button. By the time the TV warms up and I realize I’m watching CMT, I’m already sitting down and knee deep in a bowl of white rice, wholly uninterested in picking up the remote again and try to figure out if Man Vs. Food is on (even though it usually is).

The reason that the TV is so often left on CMT is because of the show Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, a reality program about the rigorous selection and training process for the feminine sideline eye-candy who try to make a game built around men grabbing and rubbing against one another a little bit less gay.

My roommates have been following the show religiously because Katelynn Johnson, a former Oregon cheerleader who is mind numbingly gorgeous even by Oregon cheerleading standards, is a contestant. Even though she’s not being actively profiled by the show or anything, they still make a habit of pointing at the screen and shouting “THAT’S KJ! THERE SHE IS!” every time she’s in the background of a shot.*

*As much as I’d like to make fun of them for this, I usually find myself joining them to play the ‘Find KJ’ game. The beauty of the game is that even if you can’t find KJ, you’re still looking at a room full of beautiful, scantly clad dancing women, which, as far as losing games goes, isn’t all that bad.

To be honest, I’m not sure why Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders is on CMT – the girls don’t dance to country music, the show takes place in one of the largest metropolitan centers in the United States, and I’m not sure how short skirts and tube tops fit in with the family friendly nature of country music.

Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders has opened the door to various other elements of CMT programming which we wind up watching once the show is over and we’re too tired from playing ‘Find KJ’ to change the channel. World’s Strictest Parents is probably our second most watched CMT product.

World’s Strictest Parents is a reality show wherein petulant spoiled brats from the big city are sent to live with a set of ‘strict’ parents for a week, who, without fail, permanently change a lifetime of disobedience and bad parenting within 22 minutes, usually by way of two big scoldings before the first commercial break and a poignant, tearful revelation before the second.

I find myself enjoying this show a lot because in spite of the fact that it’s lowbrow reality TV on a station named after one of my least favorite genres of music, it’s really fun to sit down at the end of a hard day and watch some pouty, whiny skateboarder get yelled at by a Southern Baptist pig farmer.

And I think that’s why the show is on CMT, too – the spoiled city slicker kids are out of control, swearing at their parents, getting bad grades, and smoking (always smoking), and the only thing that can save them is a trip to a rural locale somewhere in the Deep South where country folk have their way with them. It’s really a lot like Deliverance, when you think about it, only instead of getting raped the city people are transformed into upstanding members of society while a Taylor Swift song plays.

The other show I’ve seen a fair amount of on CMT is The Dukes Of Hazzard, a show which is so aggressively Southern that I feel as though CMT was only created so that they’d have a place to show reruns of it at all hours of the day. Hell, I feel like modern day country music is basically just Dukes Of Hazzard fan fiction set to a twangy beat.

It’s a show about back country farm boys tearassing around county roads in a muscle car named after a Confederate general with a Confederate flag painted on it, constantly outwitting corrupt, bumbling county officials. On some level the show could be seen as a very sophisticated treatise on fundamental conservative philosophies about individual liberties and the wasteful, corrupt nature of government, but on most levels it’s cool to watch sports cars jump over creeks and police cruisers.

So that’s what CMT has to offer me – mindless entertainment involving either women, hillbillies yelling at rich kids, or a 30 year old show about car chases. Basically all of this beats Two and a Half Men.

Truman Capps feels bad making any sort of joke about Taylor Swift after everything she went through at the hands of Kanye West, but he doesn’t know any other country singers.