Earlier this week, I was trolling E! News’s website to find something interesting to write about in my column. Scrolling past a story for “Rich Kids of Beverly Hills,” I decided to click. What could be the harm?

I’ve never seen the show, other than a photoset on Tumblr about a girl getting a car on her birthday instead of at her birthday party like she wanted (spoiler alert: The girl threw a fit and burst into tears). So to get a better gist of the show and to keep up with all things #trendy and #cool, I gave the show a gander.

Oh my goodness. To say I’ve been left with more questions than answers is an understatement.

For starters: Is “Rich Kids of Beverly Hills” a real TV show that people actually watch? Or is E! and the rest of the Internet just pulling a practical joke on me that I only just found out about? Like, is that show a real thing? And more importantly, why do people watch it? Why does it have two seasons? And lastly, why is “#RichKids” always trending? Is it really _that_ popular?

If we’re going for total honesty, I love me some trashy reality television. I really, really do. I have spent more time than I would like to admit watching those shows. I wish I didn’t know the names of all the girls in ‘Dance Moms,’ but sadly, I do. So I’m not typically the first one to judge taste in television shows. But this just seems ridiculous.

Watching Dorothy Wang call a hotel to make them open the mall downstairs way past closing just so her friend could get some acne cream pronto wasn’t funny. It was just sad.

In another episode I watched, another girl in the group threw a fit because the concierge didn’t greet her by name, and her friend excused her to the concierge. But rather than saying sorry, the friend says, “We’re usually not like this. Actually, we are. But it’s fine.”

How is that fine? How is it OK to treat other human beings without a shred of respect? Because you have the funds to make it OK?

I guess I just don’t understand why this show is so popular. I don’t understand why people enjoy watching these kids make fools of themselves and use money to get their way. To me it’s kind of pathetic. Actually, scratch that. It’s really pathetic. The rich kids of Beverly Hills may not have ever had the chance to want anything, but that likely means they’ve never had the chance to work for something. Or feel that overwhelmingly exciting feeling when you’ve accomplished something you had to work really hard all by yourself for. And that’s kind of sad.

So why are we promoting their already-glamorous lives? I get it. They don’t have to work nearly as hard for the things they want. They can travel to really cool places a lot of us will never get to see, and then they can complain when the hotel concierge doesn’t remember their names. I just don’t understand why people want to watch that.

But apparently it is popular enough that it is just about to finish its second season, and it’s likely to be back for a third. Not only that, but a New York-based spinoff is in the works. Yippee.

All of this is pretty unsettling to me. Even more unsettling are E!’s comments below clips of the show on their website. “The #RichKids dish on everything from how to dance, how to yacht, where to spend New Year’s Eve and how to zap a zit. Learn their diva ways!”

Learn how to be incredibly impolite and how to spend money like it’s going out of style! Only then can you be as glamorous as these kids are! Not #cool, E!. Not #cool.