The Specific Urge to Put Your Foot Through the Screen

Dinner at a friend’s place—spaghetti, decent company—and then someone turned on Popstars. The German talent show. The one that exists primarily so you can feel superior to strangers while eating.

There’s a particular pleasure in watching this kind of television with a full mouth and a table of equally merciless people. The commentary gets worse with every commercial break, and nobody pretends to be charitable, because charity is not the point. The point is the shared, ugly release of watching someone be catastrophically bad at something they desperately want, all on national television. A direct route into the most genuinely deranged corners of the German entertainment industry, and I took it willingly.

The one saving grace was flipping channels during the ad breaks. Nora Tschirner was on. And Nora, in any quantity, is enough to pull the evening back from the abyss.