The World Does Not Need Another Season of Single Ladies

Sometimes shows should be cancelled because they’re bad and VH1’s previously-defunct Single Ladies is just that. Unfortunately, when crappy shows have a built-in audience of more than 2.6 million viewers, some lazy network will dredge them up if only to sell more suspect Dove products against LisaRaye’s attempts at acting. Enter BET.

BET is re-branding their offshoot channel Centric to target all-black-ladies-all-the-time, writes Shadow and Act, and they believe that black ladies want Single Ladies. This black lady, however, does not.

I honestly can’t think of a worse show on Vh1; most of the others are (scripted) reality show dramas like Love & Hip-Hop and thus more tolerable — no one there laboring through memorized lines. Fake kerfuffles and lunch fights, yes; stiff and poorly executed romantic moments with one of the Wayans children, no.

I’d rather watch a thousand hours of Hollywood Exes, wondering how Nicole Murphy got her stomach like that and whether Mayte still remembers what Prince smells like, than Single Ladies. I’d suffer through the snooze fest that is LaLa’s Full Court Life if that meant that the Single Ladies nighttime soap would never return.

But alas, with Oprah’s OWN network cleaning up in the African American women television demographic, perhaps BET got territorial. How much better is Single Ladies than OWN’s The Have’s and the Have Not’s? It isn’t. But with the success of ABC’s Scandal with Kerry Washington, FX’s Angela Bassett-led Coven and BET’s Being Mary Jane with Gabrielle Union, it’s no secret that black girls are pushing the needle on-screen and off. I’m hoping that bleeds over to FX’s Justified, and Erica Tazel’s character US Deputy Marshall Rachel Brooks gets more screen time, but I digress.

So Queen Latifah’s production company Flavor Unit Entertainment, who I believe should know better than to peddle this swill, hooked their Single Ladies stinker onto another channel. I’ll clap for Queen’s check, but, as I do for other shows like Two and a Half Men which suck but somehow stay on air, I must ask who is watching Single Ladies? SHOW YOURSELVES!

On the other hand, with networks like OWN and Centric fighting over my television time, I feel flattered. Like, maybe one of these channels will finally create a show that I would actually spend my valuable time watching. Here’s hoping …