I work offensive hours so, ostensibly, daytime is my primetime. Homer put it best when he said primetime is where TV’s greatest stars come out to shine. I come home to an endless parade of doctors, lifestyle experts, pop culture gurus and Elizabeth Hasselbeck (blonde from the View) I’m a dude. I like meat, sport-matches, and an easy way for to get me to watch your programs is “..and guest staring Miss Carmen Electra.” But I’m not a cave man. I like Project Runway, New Girl, and the endless bitch cakes being served up between Joanna and Awndrea on Real Housewives of Miami. However one needs an actual uterus to enjoy daytime TV.

It may not be a dude-chick dichotomy but rather my own personal standing. Daytime TV is built on instruction and empathy. Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, and The Doctors want to make our lives better; which I instantly disregard. I’m against the mantra of lose weight and feel great. I either will be thin…bitter and hungry. Or fat and happy. I’m not eating stevia, and I don’t really care that butter milk is good for anything and everything. Marilyn Denis and Steven and Chris want to alter the way my home looks. They want me to reorganize my closet. But, I’m a single male. Closets are for sports equipment and old Maxims. I have a chair. Clothes go on the chair. When no more clothes can fit on the aforementioned chair – we do a wash. I sit on the couch, the chair is for clothes.

Then there are those who want to me to feel empathy or sympathy. This is the game being played by Anderson, Katie, the new Ricki Lake, and Jeff Probst. Normal people who are dealing with awful and arduous things in their lives that have either made them better people or killed them. Again, I’m a dude. I giggle at such. The Lousivile Cardinal basketball player whose leg snapped during a game, awful…horrible…still got a tee hee out of me. There’s often just awful stuff on these shows with a lot of abuse, and I’m just not watching that as its 1 pm and that will ruin my whole day. I’ll feel bad. But selfishly not feel bad for them but bad for me as I can’t empathize with their situation.

Then there is the freak shows like Maury, Jerry Springer, and Steve Wilkos. You can usually get ten minutes out of this before you just start feeling bad for society. Same goes for the female squawk fests of The Talk and The View. Try as a might I can’t make it a whole episode. I find these women very shrill and lacking in charm; talking over each other and failing in trying to be hip.

Luckily my boy-dom is saved from boredom thanks to cheap Canadian programming. Even cheaper than The Beachcombers and The Edison Twins encore presentation. Daytime TV on all sports stations is pure filler. Yachting , pool, darts, classic drag racing, cycling are put on just for the sake of something. But then the genius stroke came of just placing a camera into the all sports talk radio studio. You time it right you get yourself up to twelve hours a day of televised sports talk radio. Basically The View built for dudes. The televised part is very important. It’s not just listening to the radio. The hosts’ rarely play to the camera. It’s like you eavesdropping on a conversation. Catching when the analyst shuts his mike off to cough or yell at a producer. A very captivating experience. Yet, functioning well enough as a radio when one is off doing other projects around the house.

The best of these are Tim and Sid on The Score. Last rating check is a national audience of roughly eleven thousand. Tim, the balding jock type; Sid, the swarthy dark eyebrowed quipster. Its very frat house-y type blather. Much interaction with the Tim and Sid-izens (their army) on Twitter. Very much skewed to the young urban demographic with nineties rap references peppered among the criticism of JP Arencibia. The granddaddy of televised sports talk is Prime Time Sports with Bob McCown. Bob is a grumpy curmudgeon who hates pretty much everything. He tweets three or four times a month. After checking him out day-to-day, his sports and pop culture knowledge is very dated. He thinks U2 is the hippest band and constantly brings up late 80s and early nineties sports when he hasn’t seen the latest ball game. Bob’s strength is in the game beyond the game. He loves talking sports business with government funding for stadiums (or, as he properly calls the plural of stadium, stadia) He loves lawsuits and media frenzies that occur outside the lines.

So, I’m saved from the feminine whiles of daytime talk TV. Despite my heel fetish for what sling backs Katie Couric is wearing, or if its chocoholic week on the foodie version of The View, The Chew. The Oprah, Phil and Sally Jessie of my daytime experience are balding sports columnist David Naylor, snarky ex-pitcher Dirk Hayhurst, coke bottle glasses hockey nerd John Shannon, and bombastic lout Mike Richards. Kudos to you sirs as you are making my day a lot more pleasant.

Raphael Saray is a broadcast journalist based in Flin Flon, Manitoba. Another kid once asked him over to their house in grade 3; Raphael thought this was weird and said no very coldly, then wept a little.