Broken Amish

The television event of the season happened Sunday — the premiere of TLC’s new show “Breaking Amish.”

The show focuses on four Amish young adults and one Mennonite who are fed up with their lives and decide to abandon ship to live in New York City.

My roommates and I spent all weekend waiting for 10 p.m. Sunday to gather around and watch a bunch of Amish kids ruin their lives.

It’s a pretty weird predicament. The show is great, and I’m hooked, but I have never felt worse for liking a reality show.

Maybe it’s that I find the brooding Amish boys oddly attractive as they till their fields to generic rock music, and it feels so wrongly right.

Maybe it’s that no other reality show has ever seemed so exploitative.

In even the trashiest of reality shows, nothing truly life-altering is guaranteed to occur. Housemates of “The Real World” might get into fights, go lesbian for a night and show their daddy issues to the world, but none of them are ever shunned from their community without any knowledge of how to use an ATM.

The premiere of “Breaking Amish” honed in on making the audience feel empathy for the individuals and think, “Yeah, Amish life does suck. Get out of there! Jump the fence! Be free!”

But previews for the rest of the season promise drunkenness, sex and crying. A lot of crying.

Again, it’s really no different from every single episode of “The Real World,” except that Real World members aren’t perpetually deflowered in almost every aspect of life for the entire world to see.

Really, how did this show even get approved to air?

We can say we’re interested in Amish culture or we’re rooting for them to make it in the “real world,” but that’s just not the case.

All reality television is based on our obsession with watching individuals crash hard and burn harder.

I’m watching this to see a bunch of people I normally only see at Cracker Barrel go nuts. It’s borderline sickening.

But I’m not saying I’ll stop watching.

You shouldn’t, either. If I ended this column saying everyone should give up on this show in protest for basic human decency, I’d be a raging hypocrite.

I think I’ll just have to label the show as an ultimate guilty pleasure.

­— sjostrow@indiana.edu