LOL! BETHENNY'S NEW SHOW ON BRAVO SUCKS!

Addition by subtraction doesn't make this "Real Housewives of New York" spinoff, featuring housewife Bethenny Frankel, any more watchable than the mother ship.
New York's "Real Housewives" collectively are the most annoying in this franchise, so you might hope that spinning Frankel off into her own show would at least remove some of the irritants.

It does. It just doesn't make Bethenny any more interesting.

The selling point for Bravo, no doubt, is that Bethenny managed to generate more drama in her life than her fellow "Housewives," so getting her own show was her reward.

As the title suggests, this series opens tonight with Bethenny making sort-of plans to marry Jason Hoppy, the younger fellow who is also her (wink, nudge) baby daddy.

She's several months along, and the situation seems to be that while she doesn't love the pregnancy, she loves talking about it.

Take, for instance, the conversation in which she tells Jason she's interviewing several guys to become her new assistant, since she's now so busy that her longtime assistant, Julie, can't do all the work.

Jason sounds a little wary, but says it's fine with him as long as the guy she hires is gay. After all, he explains, he knows how she gets, walking around the house in a thong and stuff like that.

She responds that she can't imagine who'd want to "hit it" with "a knocked-up 39-year-old." She also points to the area involved, in case anyone missed the point.

So yes, in case you were concerned, "Bethenny's Getting Married?" retains all the class of the "Housewives" series.

The rest of the show covers other topics, but almost all of it has the same level of general interest, which is to say, little or none.

The dialogue is the kind of conversations that thousands or millions of people have all the time with spouses, boyfriends, sisters or girlfriends.

And that's fine because the people with whom they have those conversations presumably are interested, or at least feel obliged to listen because they have a personal connection to the speaker.

We TV viewers don't have that, which means that we only need to listen if the conversation is interesting to someone other than the people involved.

News flash: It isn't.

Mundane conversations and routine lives don't automatically become interesting just because someone puts them on television, and the fact Bethenny asks potential assistants if they "sleep around" doesn't make her sound hip. It makes her sound low-rent.

That doesn't make Frankel a bad or flawed person. It just makes for pretty tedious TV.