My husband Patrick wandered into the room, picked up the DVD case, and scowled.

"What's Sunset Tan?" he asked, handling the box as if it were coated with cat saliva. "Isn't this one of those shows they make fun of on The Soup?"

"Yes," I said. "Indeed it is." In fact, the only reason that a "Season One" preview copy of the E! reality show was in my living room was because my editor mailed it to me, unbidden. If he had left a flaming bag of dog poo on my porch, I'd have felt much the same way that I felt about receiving Sunset Tan. Actually, the dog poo might have been funny. Sending me this, well, that was just mean.

"Maybe it won't be that bad," I said. Patrick cocked an eyebrow. "OK, it'll probably be that bad. But we can have snacks while we watch it."

Glasses of wine poured, cheese and crackers procured, we fired up the DVD player. And were assaulted by one of the most puzzling and unpleasant television shows that we've ever seen. I mean, it's really, really bad.

How bad? Let me put it this way: Sunset Tan is so creepy and wrong and unpleasant that I don't think there's a word in the English language to describe it. According to the dictionary, the antonym of entertaining is boring, but that doesn't describe something as aggressively horrid as Sunset Tan. We need new adjectives for movies and TV shows that beat on your forehead like a rubber mallet until you want to physically hurt the people involved in making them. Like ghastrocious or dreadpulsive. Seriously, someone needs to get to work on that.

For those of you who, like us, have only experienced Sunset Tan via cable programs that make fun of bad TV, the show takes place in an L.A. tanning salon. And really, that's all there is to it -- there are cameras that follow the people who work there as they sell other people tanning services. The "entertainment" comes, I guess, from the fact that virtually everyone who appears on screen is vain, stupid, and altogether horrible. These are not people that you want to spend any time with, ever. Yet Sunset Tan delivers them right to your home, and the worst part of it is that since they're on your television and not in your living room, you can't slap them.

The first episode begins with one very tan Sunset Tan employee telling another, "We got a call from Britney Spears' manager." Seriously -- those are the first words spoken on the show. And then Britney Spears shows up to get a tan. Most television programs would save something as huge as Britney for later in the run of the series, much less the episode, but not Sunset Tan. No, they know that they have to hook the audience immediately, before anyone realizes that the show offers no earthly reason to watch it.

While she's getting airbrushed, Britney says that she loves tanning because "it's my time to escape from the world." There's something kind of charming about someone who has so much money that she could buy a private island and never work again for the rest of her life saying that 15 minutes of being sprayed with brown dye is an "escape." And by charming, I mean disgusting.

Early on, we meet new employee Erin, who's recently moved to L.A. from Oklahoma. Like everyone on the show, her skin has that distinctive orange-brown color that comes from fake tanning, and her face is weirdly blotchy.

"Wow, she has really bad skin," Patrick said. "You know, a tan will only cover so much."

"Do you think she has bad skin because of the tanning, or that the tanning stuff shows off her bad skin?" I asked.

Patrick thought a moment. "I think she has dry or combination skin, and the tanning isn't helping. Maybe the spray-tan stuff soaks into her dry patches more." We used the remote to rewind and fast-forward several times to examine Erin's skin, like we were watching the Zapruder film. In retrospect, I think we were just avoiding watching any more of Sunset Tan.

After Britney, a customer brings in her ten-year-old daughter for a tan. Mom thinks she needs a tan for her school picture, because she was "so pale" last year. Nick, the leather-faced, spiky-haired manager, sells Mom and daughter on a high-priced "cocktail" by promising that it's the same technique Lindsay Lohan uses. Mom asks Bratleigh if she wants to look like Lindsay Lohan, and of course she says yes.

Patrick snorted. "Please, Mr. Leatherface! I want my daughter to look like a 45-year-old cocktail waitress in Vegas! Give her the works!"

Nick then pushes the bottles of products -- a "before tan" lotion, an "after tan" lotion and an "extender." We wait to see if he offers hot wax and undercoating, but no.

After the tan, the little girl is several shades darker. She looks, in fact, like a cross between one of those over-engineered kiddy beauty-pageant contestants and an Oompa-Loompa. Mom had said that she wanted Bratleigh to "stand out" in the school picture. Oh, she will, Mom. She will.

It's hard to tell all of the orange, unpleasant people on Sunset Tan apart, but the principal players appear to be leather-faced Nick, blotchy Erin (who's portrayed as being the "nice girl," presumably because she's not from L.A.), another leather-faced guy named Jeff, and the super-creepy owner, Devin, who looks like what you'd get if you mated Rutger Hauer with Harvey Keitel, and then staked their 50-year-old love child out in the desert for 36 hours. There are also a couple of identical, orange-skinned, blond bimbos whose names we couldn't get straight, who make house calls to airbrush rich people while dressed in tight black tank tops.

"It's out-call tanning," Patrick said. "They're one step removed from prostitutes! Only without any actual pleasure."

Some of the ostensible drama on the show comes from the hiring of two similarly identical blond bimbos named Molly and Holly, who call themselves the "Olly Girls," and they're so painfully stupid that they make Hugh Hefner's girlfriends on The Girls Next Door look like Pulitzer Prize-winning nuclear physicists. Even in this first episode, it's obvious that they're being kept on staff only because someone decided that they'd be good on the TV show, not because they have any aptitude for retail sales. Yes, they're too stupid to work in a tanning salon. Think about that for a moment. Then think about watching them on TV. Then try to not think about slamming your head into your kitchen counter-top.

As the pilot episode drew to a close, I had to ask: "Why would anyone think that a show about these stupid, shallow people with their stupid, shallow business would make good television?"

"Well, they can manufacture drama on demand," Patrick said. "Sure, it's not interesting drama, but still. You have a bunch of egomaniacs servicing a wealth of even bigger egomaniacs, so something's bound to happen. They're like those little parasitic birds who live on the backs of rhinos, and they think that if they pick at the rhinos' leftovers long enough, they'll become rhinos themselves."

With that, Patrick idly picked up the Lionsgate DVD box, looked at the back, and paled.

"There are 12 episodes?" He cried. "Sweet Jesus!" He grabbed his wine and fled. Sunset Tan had actually driven my husband from his own living room, it was that ghastrocious. Which, now that I've used it in context, is the only word that can really describe it.

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Dawn Taylor is too pale for television.

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