Last night the new reality show, The Hasselhoffs, premiered on A&E. After the perfect awfulness that was the A&E show, Teach: Tony Danza, I thought perhaps The Hasselhoffs would also be worthy of recaps. I was wrong. This show is terrible on a whole other level that is not even fun to mock. What follows here is not a recap. It is a summary of the first episode that will serve as an explanation of why this show will absolutely NOT be recapped. Get your suicide machines ready.
The episode begins with what turns about to be the first in a long series of instances involving David Hasselhoff and his two daughters, Taylor and Hayley yelling and talking over each other. Oh yeah, I should explain. David Hasselhoff has two daughters named Taylor and Hayley.
Isn’t that nice how I explained that clearly? Guess where that wasn’t explained clearly? IN THE GODDAMN SHOW. They don’t really explain that in the show. It just starts off with David Hasselhoff and two young women yelling at each other. Upon rewinding, you can notice David Hasselhoff screaming into his flipcam that Taylor is his daughter while she yells over him, but I for SURE am the only person in the United States of America who bothered to rewind any part of this show.
And, by the way, this might not even be the first episode. You can’t even tell which episode is supposed to be the first episode! The “second” episode, which aired immediately after the “first” and WILL NOT BE DISCUSSED EVER, shows the younger daughter moving back in to the Hasselhoff house after she was already living in the house during the “first” episode. So unless this is a show about some very subtle Hasselhoff time travel, they are already off to a terrible, terrible start.
Back to the yelling: it continues. And for some reason, Poland is mentioned while David Hasselhoff repeatedly tries to plug his website called Hoffspace.
Yikes.
So, after all the yelling, the Hasselhoffs start talking about how much they are all addicted to caffeine. David Hasselhoff makes a bet with his daughters that whoever can stay off caffeine the longest will win $1000. David Hasselhoff then immediately explains to the camera that he plans on cheating and will not be off caffeine during the duration of the bet. Oh, so this bet in which the viewer already had no stakes has even lower stakes than we previously thought? Awesome, David Hasselhoff. Also, he sometimes pronounces caffeine with the stress on the second syllable. Caf-FEINE. It’s horrible.
“But, how,” you might ask, “did they transition from yelling into making a bet about caffeine?” They did it by yelling.
Next, the show introduces us to story line B. The younger daughter calls a pet psychologist to come help out their dog, Coco. What’s the problem with the Coco? She is “addicted” to tennis balls.
See, the Hasselhoffs are addicted to caffeine and the dog is addicted to tennis balls. The episode has a theme! A lighthearted addiction theme. And, really, it makes sense that they would bring up addiction in in a lighthearted way in this episode because it’s not like anyone on this show has ever had an actual serious addiction that was wildly disturbing.
So, the daughter gets the pet psychologist on the phone and the psychologist says, “Yeah, just stop leaving 40 tennis balls around everyday.” Story line: finished. Just kidding; that doesn’t happen at all. The pet psychologist has to come to the house, and she has a completely sane expression on her face.
When David Hasselhoff hears about the pet psychologist, he thinks it’s ridiculous. He says that there’s no way the dog is addicted to tennis balls. He decides to have a private discussion with Coco. You know, just a nice private discussion with his dog, the way everyone does when they’re not on camera and not the star of a transparently scripted reality show.
Now here’s where things gets super uncomfortable.
Because David Hasselhoff doesn’t think the dog is actually addicted, he advises the dog to start hiding the tennis balls so that she won’t get caught with them. He tells the dog an anecdote he finds very amusing. “During my drinking days, I used to hide my ‘ball’ in the gutters. No one would ever go up there, so I would go up on the roof, and in the gutter is where it was! No one ever found it up there. Hahaha!”
Hahaha! You used to almost kill yourself everyday by getting black out drunk on a roof! Funny story, David Hasselhoff! And while that is undeniably HILARIOUS, there are a couple of things that don’t add up. You had previously said that the dog isn’t addicted to tennis balls. But, if in your metaphor, your “ball” represents alcohol, then that would presuppose that the dog is addicted to tennis balls. And then you give him advise on how to hide his addiction. And you do it while laughing. That’s messed up, David Hasselhoff. This show is the opposite of Intervention.
The pet psychologist ends up telling them that the dog is feeding off the family’s energy of caffeine addiction and that’s why she’s addicted to tennis balls. Sure.
By the end of the episode, the older daughter loses the caffeine bet by drinking a Red Bull. They all laugh about it. Total LOL moment.
Then, after that, David Hasselhoff catches the younger daughter in the bathroom drinking a Red Bull. She’s totally busted lying on the floor, feeding her addiction.
And that’s another total LOL moment because it is not at all reminiscent of a disturbing image of another Hasselhoff lying on the floor, feeding an addiction.
The episode ends with the daughters figuring out that David Hasselhoff had been cheating the whole time and never actually gave up caffeine. David Hasselhoff fesses up and has to pay the younger daughter the $1000 because she, in fact, lasted the longest.
So that’s it. The episode ends there. See? It’s the worst. Don’t watch this show ever again. I certainly won’t.
