The Real Housewives of Whichever Place. This show is about a strange combination of jealousy and schadenfreude, because in it (particularly in Beverly Hills, which is back on now), the "characters" are far richer than we are, and than the majority of people watching. And yet, they are hardly better off than we, are they? They fight. They get drunk, bad drunk. Terrible things happen. They snipe at each other, have nervous breakdowns, and push and shove and flip tables. They are jealous and petty and claw and talk behind back and divorce their husbands, and then sometimes they make up (with each other) and sometimes they pretend to make up and sometimes they don't at all. They are estranged from each other, their children, everyone but Andy Cohen. They are not an example for living one's best life, in most cases—they are examples of what not to do. Because of that, usually, they are hopelessly, mindlessly entertaining, and terribly dangerous. They make us feel better about ourselves at the same time that they make us feel worse, and they also prove that money does not buy happiness. (But if we had that money, we'd be happy, for sure.) Fortunately, we'll never find out if this indeed is the case and can instead maintain the blissful ignorance that our watching of this show—a Lifetime movie combined with a Disney Sunday night movie full of mean stepsisters and addictions and abusive behavior combined with a Girls Gone Wild: The Later Years—must be based in. This show is about, in a word, purgatory.

LOLWork. I've only watched a portion of this show once but I'm pretty sure it's about that nightmare in high school in which you ended up at the career fair and no one hired you but in the end it turned out the career fair was really a prison and you get out at the last minute before the bars clank down and all your fellow students are trapped there forever, waggling their fingers between bars, drinking milk from little cat bowls on the floor, screaming in agony, and, just before you wake, crumbling into tragic little piles of dust like the Wicked Witch of the West, or was it the East? Or it's about the time you never got picked in volleyball, but later realized thank God you never got picked in volleyball. Or it's about cats, and people who love cats, and working on a cat farm.This show is surreal, or maybe it's parody, but, yes, it's some kind of meta commentary on the Internet viewed through TV and back again through the Internet, but I don't want to think about that, so it's about cats. Existentially.

Top Chef. (And, to a lesser extent, Project Runway.) These are some of the last remaining of the rather quaint, old-school competition shows in which people with at least some level of talent are put into sleep-deprived and increasingly challenging conditions to continue to showcase their particular talent to the best of their ability (and not get kicked off the show). So they're a bit like Survivor in that we keep seeing people who persist in being themselves (and all the emotional and interactive dramas that ensue due to that persistence), but also, they have to be good at what they do, what the competition is about. These are fake trials, trials that don't really matter, but trials with results that can matter hugely, shows about the increasing disconnects between our dreams of success in America and our real lives, and the levels to which we must go in order to accomplish what we think we want, which was somewhere between real and not-real in the first place. Having done that, or failed it, participants generally waft back into the ether from whence they came, perhaps to appear again on a show of "masters" or "all-stars," because now they've been co-opted fully into the reality TV wallpaper, they are the cyborgs of our time. These shows are also, to some extent, about looking at pretty things on plates and runways. So, they're modern art, or maybe literature, with the spin-offs like Life After Top Chef the tragedy-based American Beautys or Philip Roth novels to the original's mostly bloodless reverse-Hunger Games. Cook, or die trying.