Why is the bad so entertaining?

I just finished the first season of Smallville, and I'm sorry to all my girls who read this, but the show is AWFUL! It's like a bad, teenage, X-Files! It has the same composer which makes it sound similar and even some of the mutants on the show seem to be ripped from Mulder and Scully's files. The finale had me laughing so hard my stomach hurt and I kept yelling "seriously?!" at the TV.

So does that mean I'm going to stop watching it? Um no. Because now I have to know what happens. It's so strange. It's BAD television. The acting is awful (and I mean makes-me-want-to-drown-myself-in-the-toilet bad), the scripts are predictable, EVERY single bad thing that happens in Smallville is blamed on the meteor shower that hit the town that brought Mr. Superman himself and the kryptonite within it. And yet I have to know if Clark is going to rescue Lana (which I'm sure he is), if Chloe is going to forgive Clark for leaving her at the dance (which she will), and when the heck Lex Luthor is going to turn on Clark (which right now they're BFF, but we all know that that has to turn sour eventually). I'm hooked... in a pretty loose sense of the word.

It's like the whole LonelyGirl15 business. It was pretty interesting at the beginning, but now it's worse than a soap opera. I'm just waiting for someone to be brought back from the dead...

So am I going to stop watching that? Of course not! I have to know what happens. It's like a bad book. I can't just stop reading a bad book. I don't know what it is, but that stamina is what got me through Moby Dick (in two years).

Who knows. Maybe both things will redeem themselves and I will consider them worthy of my time. I didn't like Catcher in the Rye till the end...