I don't need no doctor...

The good folks at Gallery of The Absurd did a nice job depicting Dr. Phil's lame attempt to score some serious ratings for his show by offering his "help" to Britney Spears over the weekend.  Whatever respect I still had for this man has now completely vanished...

I first became a fan of Dr. Phil when he started out on Oprah’s show, and I also thought he was outstanding on the first season of his own show.  He dealt with a variety of topics, and even if they didn’t necessarily apply to me, I enjoyed listening to his advice.  I bought a couple of his books and found them somewhat helpful as well, but Phil started gradually losing me as a viewer when his show started completely revolving around selling his books for whichever ill of mankind he was out to cure at the time.  One season, it was all about parenting (or the lack thereof) and a bunch of “family-this” and “family-that” crappola, thus kicking us single people to the curb in the meantime.

The next season, he got on this whole big weight-loss kick.  I’m overweight myself, but I found very little of that crusade’s advice helpful, let alone entertaining.  Dr. Phil's true jump-the-shark moment for me was at the beginning of that season when his weight-loss “challenge” commenced and they presented it to be some sort of “Survivor”-esque elimination contest with a bunch of overweight people living together in the same house, with the first one to fail to lose enough weight being kicked out, etc.  I felt very betrayed when I realized that Dr. Phil had “gone Hollywood” by playing this asinine “reality show" gambit.  The “reality” show trend continued on with the “Dr. Phil Families” he featured later that season, complete with cameras in their homes, thus giving the show an MTV/”Real World” feel with its contrived "mini-dramas" revolving around pregnant teen girls.  Such phony bullshit!

Then he started including Mrs. Dr. Phil—his annoying wife Robin—on the show and she always came across to me as a control-freak nag, and I couldn't stand her shrill voice with that Texan drawl to boot.  Dr. Phil didn't stop there—he brought his oldest son Jay on the show frequently to promote some book that he wrote for teenagers.  Jay was likeable enough, but he hardly struck me as being an authority on teenage angst, seeing's how his pampered little ass never seemed to have experienced any!  Then there was the Danny Bonaduce pity-party on the Dr. Phil show a couple years back, and so on and so forth...

Does Dr. Phil really expect us to believe that helping Britney Spears was his sole motivation for visiting her this weekend?  How dumb do you think we are, Doc?  You know damn well if he could've bagged Britney to be on his show, his ratings would've spiked like gas prices right after a terrorist attack.  Hate to say it, but in this household, the Doctor is out!  As Fred Sanford once said to Merv Griffin, "I used to like you...dummy!"