This Show Was a Hot Mess… and I Loved Every Minute of It.

Forget prestige TV.

This is a love letter to the beautiful disasters and gloriously unhinged shows you just can't quit. Welcome to the art of the hate-watch.

A Love Letter to Hate-Watching

There are few pleasures like hate-watching a show. Not doom-scrolling, not background noise, but truly engaging with every outrageous coincidence and mismatched tone, and loving every minute of the frustration. That's where I found myself recently with a certain wildly popular K-Drama, and it made me realize something.

Sometimes we don’t want prestige TV. We want pulp. We want to feel smarter than the script and watch something so bold and messy it reminds us how hard it is to stick a landing. Hate-watching is freedom. It’s permission to let our tastes be unserious for once.

This isn’t to dismiss the artists. If anything, the sheer commitment it takes to make something that bonkers is iconic. The show I watched tried to be sharp, sexy, deep, and action-packed all at once. It almost never succeeded, but the swing? Unforgettable. Every grave monologue felt like a Wattpad fever dream. Every twists were dumb AF. It was camp by circumstance, a genre blender that had no business mixing the ingredients it did. And yet, I licked the spoon. I did. It was awesome.

This show also has a LOT of controversy. Which is why I’m not naming it. No way. I don’t need the ire of that fandom or the even crazier anti-fandom. But in a way, the off-screen drama only adds to the fun. Rumored feuds, the thousands of miles of gossip blog ink and the PR disasters have honestly turned this hate-watch into a social event.

I don’t want every show to be perfect. I want some to be so flawed they become something else entirely. Camp is good. Bad is perfection. Would I watch it again? No, no. But would I press play on the next equally messy, try-hard, tonally chaotic series?

Absolutely.