There are evenings when I scroll past the endless options on television…prestige dramas, documentaries about endangered glaciers, British murder mysteries and somehow land on an episode of The Real Housewives.

And every single time I ask myself the same question. Why am I watching this?

On paper, the formula should repel any reasonably evolved adult. A collection of self-involved personalities with an Olympic-level commitment to grudges gather around a dinner table.

Someone inevitably storms out. Someone else throws a drink. A third person announces that she is done with the group, which in Housewives language means she will return in approximately eleven minutes.

Yet millions of people tune in.

Part of the appeal is anthropological. Watching these shows is a little like observing a rare species in the wild if the wild were Beverly Hills, Orange County, Salt Lake City or New Jersey and the animals wore sequins, devoured Botox and spoke exclusively in passive-aggressive accusations.

There is also the strange comfort of predictability. The structure never changes always featuring a restaurant or retail therapy opportunity mostly focused on Birkin buying, gossip, misunderstanding, confrontation, tears, confessionals. Repeat. Shakespeare had five acts. Housewives has five cocktails.

And then there is the ringmaster of the whole circus, Andy Cohen, who sits in the clubhouse conducting post-mortems on televised meltdowns with the calm demeanor of a therapist who has long ago accepted that his patients will never improve. His interviews feel less like journalism and more like the diplomatic debriefing after a U.S. foreign invasion.

If we are honest, the deeper appeal may be simpler.

Watching absurd levels of wealth collide with even more absurd levels of insecurity and stupidity is oddly reassuring. No matter how chaotic your own life feels, at least you are not screaming about seating arrangements on a yacht in Capri while your Glam Team transforms your Mar-a-Lago face into something photogenic simultaneously adding more hair extensions then your head can physically handle.

Reality television, ironically, provides a small escape from reality. It allows us to peek into a world where the problems are theatrical, the arguments are stylized, egg prices are a huge unknown and the consequences rarely extend beyond the next reunion special.

In other words, it is modern opera, instead of arias, someone flips a table and instead of a tragic ending, Andy Cohen shows up with cue cards and asks the question we were all thinking, “So when exactly did everything go completely off the rails?”

It is a dirty little secret and as with binge eating I want to pray to the porcelain god afterwards.