For Ryan Outloud

Caught the premiere of the Tatum and Ryan O'Neal reality show on OWN last night. (Anyone else see it?) I was pretty excited when Oprah first announced it -- you gotta figure I'm their key demographic: gay boy who grew up lusting Ryan, idolizing Tatum -- yet I found myself alternating between being disgusted and annoyed throughout the whole thing. While I'm the first to accept that things that happen to us as children affect us the rest of our lives, there was something pathetic and sad about seeing a 47-year-old woman still whining about how her daddy had "abandoned" her for another woman when she was a child, all the while repeating the same mistakes over and over to the detriment of herself and everyone around her. (Her addiction to heroin cost her custody of her three children with John McEnroe in 1995 -- way to do the SAME thing to your own kids -- then she was supposedly clean when she wrote her tell-all memoir in 2004; she later got arrested buying drugs in 2008 and boasts to being sober for ONE year on this show.) There's no doubt your dad was a piece of shit, Tatum, but you've still had way more opportunities than most. That you haven't gotten your act together yet says as much about you as it does him. For his part, Ryan was completely insufferable, acting like it's still 1970 while he's hunched over and pitifully hitting on 20-year-old women and taking little to no responsibility for anything he's said or done. His quote about his only daughter that "I didn’t take her to bed, you know. I didn’t do something terrible" pretty much says it all. (I thought my mom's "I'm just happy I didn't kill any of you kids" was a cop out, but at least it was said tongue-in-cheek!) That he thinks that he's an OK parent BECAUSE he resisted(?) molesting her is clearly at the root of all their problems -- he famously tried to pick Tatum up at Farrah Fawcett's funeral, not recognizing that it was his own daughter, and his inappropriate feelings are evident throughout -- yet hearing them repeat their same issues over and over and over makes for surprisingly unriveting television. Everyone comes off looking bad in this show, which is probably why they say you'll always be disappointed if you meet your idols. I don't mind having the Hollywood veneer stripped away, but don't bore me while you're doing it.

UPDATE: Watch the highlights of Ryan's trainwreck interview on Piers Morgan HERE and you will see what I'm talking about.