A Note on This Week’s Column: I’ve been sidelined by the Dreaded Deadline Doom this week, so there’s no new column, strictly speaking. But as a special treat — all right, to fill the gap in the schedule — I’m presenting here, for the first time, the very first How Bad Can It Be? ever written.

Jeff Giles first approached me about doing a column about a year ago — November 2008. We kicked around some concepts, knocking the premise into shape. To help me get a grip on it, I wrote a bunch of sample columns, including this one, about the then-current season of NBC’s The Biggest Loser. The start date for the column was eventually pushed back to January 2009, leaving this piece basically unpublishable — hopelessly past its sell-by date. And so it has sat on my hard drive until now. Hope you enjoy this peek behind the curtain — the Secret Origin of HBCIB?, if you will.

As this was to have been the inaugural column, it begins with a statement of purpose — one I find worth revisiting now and then…

I will not cop to charges of snobbery; I find my pop-culture thrills wherever I can. I freely admit, though, that I’m selective. Any consumer of media has to be, I think. There are only so many hours in a day, and so much to fill them with. It’s not so much that I’m actively avoiding anything; it’s just that there’s so much good stuff out there that I’ve not yet experienced — Infinite Jest, “Trout Mask Replica,” Kurosawa’s Rashomon — that I’ve got to be choosy with the little time I have above ground. And because I write about media from the perspective of an enthusiast, rather than a critic, I’m not obliged to watch or read and listen to anything in which I would otherwise have no interest.

In practice, that means gravitating towards a comfort zone. It’s a big zone, as these things go — I’m a pretty well-rounded guy — but in the great spectrum of mass media, it’s a relatively narrow bandwidth. Now, I can and do often enjoy myself when I venture out of that zone; but I always do so with mingled feelings of hope and dread. Part of me wonders, “Am I going to hate myself for watching this? Will I wish I could have this hour back?” And another part of me thinks, “Hey, you never know. This could be a keeper. And really, after all — how bad can it be?”

This column aims to answer that question. (more…)