My boyfriend doesn’t understand why I watch reality television. “It’s stupid,” he says. And it is. But there’s no pretense that RuPaul’s Drag U is trying to be high-art. I know what I’m getting, and I assess it according to those standards.

Every now and again I need to turn off the news. In the last couple of weeks especially, I’ve realized that these programs make me miserable because it’s all false advertising. These are reality TV-level arguments applied in the public discourse, the arena of simpleton politicians who don’t want to be voted off the island. It’s all strategy and no substance — as if life were a season of the Real World/Road Rules Challenge and you were either on Wes’s side or Kenny’s side, but you had to make a choice.

It’s like how everyone on Top Chef this season unanimously decided that Alex couldn’t cook. He won challenges on the show, and he’s an executive chef in real life, so this can’t be true. But wishful thinking can act as a strategy: If Alex internalizes some of these insecurities, if we get him on the defensive, we can take him down. They did. It’s kind of like the ridiculous — and inexplicably successful — Republican whisper campaign that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Except, of course, that conservatives seem to be grooming America to become a theocratic Christian nation, while the dudes onTop Chef only want $100,000 furnished by Dial NutriSkin.

But even Puck got kicked off The Real World: San Francisco for wearing a swastika T-shirt and being aggressively homophobic. In the real real world, Dr. Laura can call gay people “biological errors” and say the N-word on the radio eleven times, but kicking her off the show is, according to Sarah Palin, a plot by “Constitutional obstructionists.”

So I’m about to watch this season’s finale of HGTV’s Design Star, and I’m OK with that. At least I know that even the most annoying contestant is guaranteed to go home at some point — which is more than I can say for the news. If they had a phone number I could call, like on American Idol, I’d vote all these people off.