About Last Night: Sarah Palin’s Alaska

So, remember last week when Kate Gosselin was on Sarah Palin’s Alaska and we were all kind of like, “oh, that Sarah Palin lady isn’t as bad as we thought?” Well, Kate’s gone, so there’s no one to make Sarah look sane — the wicked witch of Wasilla is back to her old self. In the first 20 minutes of last night’s show she was up on her soap box, talking about abortion, guns, and Michelle Obama’s evil plot to steal candy from America’s children. If you didn’t see last night’s episode, you may think that perhaps Sarah was preparing for some sort of debate or doing research for an upcoming campaign or appearance. Bah! She can’t be bothered with that. She doesn’t do such things! She heard someone say something once on the Twitter and now she uses her weekly television commercial to respond to that thing someone may or may not have said that one time. So no, she wasn’t prepping for anything. She and her family were going on a camping trip. You know — family camping trips. The perfect opportunity to angrily say things about controversial topics. So there she was in the tiny kitchen of the RV, slamming cabinet doors, looking for marshmallows, and muttering about Michelle Obama wanting to take Christmas away from kids or some other such faux political nonsense.
Last night’s episode was a hodge-podge of tape from the cutting room floor. A melange of mediocrity. Some stuff happened and it wasn’t all boring but there was no point to any of it. There was no point to this show. There was white water rafting with some dude called Mud Flap. There was some four-wheeling followed by panning for gold with the Palins’ homeboy Bones. They also threw in a fossil hunt and some target practice. Sarah and Piper worked in a pie restaurant owned by one of those Alaskans with a strange, foreign accent. And then they went to a kennel where a man with another foreign accent trains dogs to pull him around on a sled, like some sort of freakish, Finnish Santa.

As a TV junkie, watching this experimental bit of programming has been a real thrill for me. First, TLC disguises a political ad as a TV show. Then, they decide to completely do away with plots, story lines and literary devices; they just show footage in a slightly-less-than random order. We’re on a new frontier in television, people! Savor the moment…. this could be the greatest experiment in programming of the decade. What else happened? Well, Sarah’s nephew Happy was back. Happy’s mom sent him a text reminding him to shower. We learn how Sarah and Todd met and began the greatest, quietest romance of our time. Puppies! Willow has a special friend who went camping with the family. And we learned that Michelle Obama is a secret Nazi who is plotting to run away with her secret lover, the very “un-American” Julian Assange. Their days will be spent replacing desserts with vegetables; their nights will be full of sex by surprise. See you in the re-cap!