Seriously, I had no idea there were so many of these dusky creatures. Perhaps they multiply like Tribbles. That would explain the Keeping Up With the Kardashians title. It's a running tally.
One thing is clear in the alarming avalanche of programming in which they are featured: They have terrible taste in men. Bruce Jenner resembles a marionette that someone found decades after it was abandoned in the woods. Kris Humphries looks like his biggest problem is keeping flies from buzzing into his mouth. And Scott Disick? I wouldn't touch a shopping cart he just used.
I'm giving Lamar Odom a pass - he's suffered enough.
As producer, Ryan Seacrest gets a lot of credit for tapping into the Kardashians' special brand of ratings magic, but all he really did is stumble upon a nest of exhibitionists who relish spending their every waking moment on camera.
Their primary activity seems to be shopping in high-end boutiques while paparazzi swarm frantically on the sidewalk out front. I don't know what they talk about. I wasn't tempted to find out.
The Kardashian ultra-marathon was followed on E! by the feature film Thank You for Smoking. In the first scene, Joan Lunden hosted her own (imaginary, I guess) talk show and I drifted into a reverie, sorting former female morning-show anchors by hair color. I snapped out of it when I couldn't figure out how to categorize Mariette Hartley.
Next up, Ice Loves Coco. No doubt Ice-T's love is strong. I just wonder how he finds time to work on Law & Order. It must eat into his chief activity: sitting on the couch, his eyes at half-staff.
Then it was time for a special Grammy edition of Fashion Police. As far as I can make out, the show is a competition between Giuliana Rancic, Kelly Osbourne, and George Kotsiopoulos to see who can pretend to laugh most uproariously at everything Joan Rivers says.
It gets sad, though, when one of them wedges in a comment, because then Joan has to pretend to reciprocate and her fake laugh looks like she's self-administering the Heimlich.
That was all I could take. I flipped over to Dr. Phil and turned the sound up. I love to hear that guy talk.
Shocking! Is our sense of outrage misplaced? Huge furor when singer M.I.A. flipped the bird during the Super Bowl halftime show. I was watching and I didn't even notice it. Loved Madonna's self-righteous reaction, though. Sanctimonious clucking from a performer whose whole career was based on offending societal mores.
Then Nicki Minaj turns up at the Grammys with an actor in clerical vestments and wearing a pope's mitre. She performs a song that combines patently sacred and blatantly sexual symbolism, and this lewd act of sacrilege is greeted with a yawn.
I guess the moral is: Vince Lombardi never won a Grammy.
Distractions. Had to happen sometime: competitive tweeting. Three minutes into the Grammys, Oprah urged her 9 million Twitter followers to switch over to OWN.
On Thursday, Simon Cowell waited a half hour into American Idol to provocatively suggest to his 1.5 million Twitter followers a showdown between his X Factor winner and the finalists on The Voice and Idol.
"Just a thought," he mused innocently. Right. Just a thought designed to create an instant online feeding frenzy. Right in the middle of Idol.
Contact television writer David Hiltbrand at 215-854-4552, dhiltbrand@phillynews.com, or @daveondemand_tv on Twitter. Read his blog, "Dave on Demand," at www.philly.com/dod.
