I'd love to see Supernanny take on the cafes and restaurants of America (see related letters thread in Broadsheet...)

Imagine what she'd do to all those hellions running around whining, shrieking and terrorizing your local Starbucks or sushi joint?

Think "kids'll be kids" and they should be allowed to bother their fellow man in public?

Then it's off to the NAUGHTY MAT for you!!!! ;-)

Thank you, lately your articles have been all I actually read throughly on salon

Yup, I am childless and every time I see supper nanny I vow to remain so ... plus 7 animals are enough thankyou :)

Nip Tuck - Loved watching here in Au just because the characters were so awful, the plots so extreme - you could make a drinking game around it.

Sleeper Cell - would have liked a spoiler warning ! haven't seen it in Australia yet.

Cheers - Lindsay

Heather, I agree with everything you've written about Nip/Tuck. However, I think maybe you're missing the spirit of the show. I know it's a fine line between godawful and deliciously godawful, but I like to think Nip/Tuck falls on the "so bad it's good" side of that line. Rather than comparing the show to Six Feet Under, try comparing it to Melrose Place and revel in the over-the-top story lines, poorly developed characters, and completely unnecessary gore. It's fabulous!

Your assessment of Nip/Tuck was completely accurate; you forgot to mention how gross and unneccessary the operating room scenes are.......

As a first time parent at the age of 50, with a 2 year old boy who is the greatest thing I have ever experienced, I think I am qualified to speak about the Supernanny show and its real crime...the exploitation of children so the parents can have their 15 minutes of fame. If you are a lousy parent, have the decency to not share it with the world. And what loving parent would want to put a video record of their child misbehaving on TV so it can be used to humiliate them later in life. Forget Supernanny, call social services, for this is truly child abuse

I've loved Heather Havrilesky's writing since I started reading 'I like to watch' years ago. I've been absent from salon for about a year and I just came back to find this. She is as great as ever. This article rocked. I too hate nip/tuck, having never seen it, just from the commercials.

I think Havrilesky is on her way to being, someday, TV's Pauline Kael.

Supernanny is a wake up call to everyone who thinks having a kid is "fun." Almost everyone I know who had kids never once gave a second thought to what the work of having a kid would be like. Every single time they talked about having a child they talked only about this vague notion of playing ball in the park or how fun it would be dress them up on Halloween. I don't think it ever dawned on nintey percent of the parents in America (before they decided to have kids) that their children would require 24hr attention and that if you don't truly love spending every waking moment being a babysitter, changing diapers, cleaning up messes and endlessly driving them places --- then you're going to absolutely hate being a parent. That's what Supernanny is revealing, that a large number of paents in this country never ever actually wanted to be parents at all. They loved the vague idea of being a parent, but when confronted with the daily grind of constantly, you know, parenting a small child 24hrs a day they realized that it sucks. Most people don't actually like it! What we're seeing isn't people that deperately want to be parents, but are just confused on the technique. What we're seeing is the depressing reality of people who have realized after two years that they hate being parents and have basically given up on the idea.

Heather Havrilevsky, will you marry me? No wait, that would be incest, because you *must be* my sister. No wait, that would be polygamy; I'm already married. And I already have a sister who is my other half. No wait, I already asked you that once (see archives).

I have to tell you, I, a bipolar OCD who probably has ADD (doesn't everybody?), who can't normally concentrate on any one article long enough to read past the headline, even though Salon is one of my only two sources of what's happening in this fracked-up country (the other: Randi Rhodes), have just finished reading your column from first line to last. I am sitting here (for seconds on end) trying to think of superlatives that would impress you, that haven't been used a billion times before, but, you know, there aren't any sufficient ones.

If you won't be my spouse, I'll have to be content with your column. I can live with that.

To the Editor ans Ms. Havrilesky (whose column I adore)

I read the beginning of this right after I read this in The Washington Times: "The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago."

CIFA? Seeing as it's the acronym fopr Cointer-Intelligence Field Activity, how would 'you' pronounce it? I'd vote Keefa. Sounds like 'Kiefer'. Coinkydink?

K Adams

The wife and I watched the first season of Nip/Tuck, but as I recall some time in the second season we gave up on it. The problem wasn't that it was wierd or disturbing. The problem is that over time our sense of empathy for the characters was, in effect, surgically removed. There came a point at which the characters became so strange and disturbed that I felt like I simply did not know these people, nor did I want to know them.

While I don't expect a program such as that to be all sweetness and light, after a while I didn't see the point of checking in each week to view the latest outburst, the most recent derangememt, the weekly descent into the bizarre and the unfortunate. In a sense, Nip/Tuck is a morality play without morality. As the article suggests, there's no center to it, nothing that holds it together except the extreme and the unpleasant. As the result, the characters devolve, not evolve. It's like watching a weekly nature show in which insects tear each other apart -- "tune in this week to see a praying mantis rip the leg off a cockroach." Do we cheer for the mantis? Do we sympathize with the cockroach? Those who do are the audience for Nip/Tuck.