Cougar Town Deserves Scorn, Not Yuks

Cougar Town is our nation’s newest guilty pleasure—“‘guilty’ in this case meaning ‘it makes you want to stick your head in the oven’ and ‘pleasure’ referring to the feeling humans get from having their fingernails ripped off one by one,” writes Heather Havrilesky for Salon. Tina Fey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus have given us female characters "who greet the perils of middle age with self-deprecating humor"; so why do we cheer on a show where 40-year-old women have the brains of 7th-graders?

We’re supposed to be sympathetic as Courteney Cox et al wax on about the ridiculous amounts of maintenance it takes to not look repulsive at 40, but simultaneously “cheer them on when they throw back Jagermeister shots and ogle young studs and screech at each other like coeds at a kegger.” Yeah, this show is addictive, Havrilesky continues. “Addictive the way dropping an anvil on your big toe is addictive.” (More Cougar Town stories.)