The worst hour of TV. Ever.

Now that I’m back in the teevee trenches, I get the dubious honor of watching stuff that I would never touch off-the-clock. Well, not so much watching as… what’s the official word? Monitoring. That’s it. But all the same, how can you not watch a train wreck unfold when it’s on the scale of a little thing we call Conveyor Belt Of Love?

The first I’d even heard of this thing was the night that it aired: ABC was so proud of this show that it completely failed to promote it until the night of the pilot episode. The lead-in whose audience this show was trying to maintain was The Bachelor – how bad could it be when it’s barely worth promo time in the manufactured crapfest that is The Bachelor!? – and I have a feeling that it probably didn’t hold onto that audience.

If the holdover audience from The Bachelor bails out on your show because it’s that bad… well, do I even need to complete that thought?

Here’s the breakdown of how Conveyor Belt Of Love works. Four or five women are seated on a set. In front of them is a conveyor belt which occasionally carries a would-be suitor across in the space of roughly 90 seconds. While the men are visible on the conveyor belt, they’re welcome to do whatever to get the ladies’ attention. If one of the ladies shows her “interested” sign, the man in question steps off the conveyor belt and stands in that lady’s box (wait, what? that’s just so wrong on so many levels!). If two ladies show interest in the same guy, the guy gets to pick whose… erm… box… he wants to be in.

How the hell did they even pitch this show to the network without breaking into laughter?

Anyway.

If one of the ladies is more interested in a man who scoots across the conveyor belt later, the guys get to trash talk each other for a couple of minutes and she has an opportunity to change her mind. If not, the displaced contestant leaves. At the end of the show, there’s a montage of how everybody’s post-show dates went. (Don’t believe my description? I’ll let Reuters and the Hollywood Reporter back me up.)

Apparently this is based on a format imported from the UK, but even though I’m not a huge fan of reality TV on either side of the pond, I’ll bet the British version has the good graces to not take itself very seriously. To be fair, the US version didn’t exactly handle itself with the same forced overdramatic flair as The Bachelor, but …wow. Just wow. Apparently ABC’s waiting to see numbers before putting the show into regular production.

I’m not holding my breath waiting for the conveyor belt to start up again. I don’t ask everything to be serious, or sci-fi, or what have you, but this was literally the TV equivalent of a train wreck… it just kept getting worse. I don’t think I’ll ever diss “Shaq Vs.” again.