It's time to judge the premise of the show

I'm judging this show not having seen it, but I think I know enough about it to do so. Those who think that it's wrong to judge a show without having seen it should look at why they have a TV guide in the first place. By your reasoning, you should have to watch every TV show in existence in order to decide not to watch it in the future. If you don't do that, you can't criticize me for not liking a show I've never seen.

I saw this show on a list of shows that got canceled after one episode aired, and I have to comment on it.

First, the premise is fundamentally flawed. My advice to any man who dates a woman who has these kinds of "rules" (or in Emily's case, "reasons why not") is RUN. Run far away. I've dated women who think they can apply self-help, or self-written, "rules" to a relationship, and they are all flakes who are in need of psychiatric help. If a women gives you "three strikes", get out of the relationship before you have even one strike! You won't regret it when you learn what a nut she is.

Flawed approaches to relationships are not limited to just women of course, but pop psychology is marketed almost exclusively to women. Women are taught almost from birth to doubt their self-esteem, self-image and body-image so that the multi-billion-dollar self-help, "Oprah-culture" can sell them solutions to made-up problems they never knew they had. This is why Oprah is one of the biggest con-artists of all-time, and has contributed nothing to modern culture but a television platform for self-help charlatans to take advantage of distressed, and/or vulnerable women, and of course raid their wallets.

This line of reasoning applies to "Emily's Reasons Why Not." Emily doesn't see mere bad luck as the reason she hasn't found a suitable boyfriend. That's the truth in most cases of being single: just plain, out-of-the-ordinary bad luck in finding the right person. Being educated, "modern" and "independent", though, Emily thinks there has to be a higher power at work that's responsible for her failures. She is incapable of accepting the messy and inconvenient truth that she may have to wait patiently for her luck to change. Her solution is to torment well-meaning men with her "reasons why not."

The flaw with her reasoning, of course, is that men have no reason not to use "reasons why not" to judge her as harshly as she's judging them. When you add that to the fact that the confusing name of the show locked the show into a rigid, week-after-week tedium of Emily finding fault with men, it's not hard to see why it was canceled after one episode on the flaw of it's premise rather than anything else.

I'll take the word of people who have actually seen the one episode that's aired that the acting, writing, directing, etc. is bad as well. But the fact that the show was canceled gives me hope that most people reject the idea that you have to judge your fellow human beings with a list of predetermined, dogmatic "rules", or "reasons why not."