I’m currently watching an older series of VH1’s “Celebrity Rehab,” and aside from the “can’t look away from this trainwreck aspect,” there are several annoyances.

1. Repeat commercials. Sometimes the same spot is repeated 4 times in a row. I started out watching last night using Firefox, and at one point the playback just stops on a black screen after several repeats. I’m now trying to watch using Google Chrome, just as an experiment.
2. The Twitter app (login in the sidebar of VH1 pages) auto-posts the first time, saying “I’m watching and chatting about #[show name] – join the conversation at [show name].vh1.com” and you have no control over this.
3. After that, it edits your tweets that you post from there to add the hashtag automatically (not that bad a feature) and a link to the social networking site (somewhat annoying).

I used to watch Celebrity Rehab online a year or more ago – got very involved with watching poor Jeff Conaway, who passed away in May of this year. That made me cry, because I’d always liked him and the things that he revealed about himself and his life during his stint on Rehab were just horrific. Also, his wife/girlfriend was a piece of work. I prefer to remember him from his performance in Babylon 5.

I’d fallen out of the habit of watching Rehab because it is itself somewhat addictive. If you get into watching it once, you want to see what happens next. I skipped a couple seasons, but there seem to be patterns that I can discern.

First, there’s Celebrities, and there’s celebrities. Most of these people, you’ve never heard of them, or you might have heard their name or seen it in a tabloid. There are a few truly celebrated people who have appeared on this show, and generally, there’s just one or two truly famous people per season. Then, there’s a few “also-rans” and at least one reality-show person.

In the fourth season, there’s a young woman woman who’s famous for being famous. I doubt she’d be on this show if she weren’t very pretty.

There are very few ugly women on this show. There can be ugly, unattractive young rich men (viz. Season 4’s Jason Davis, billionaire fat slob diabetic addicted asshole). There are damaged women, there are older women who were once very beautiful, but there are never life-long unattractive women. Would Ayn Rand have been on this show if she were alive and was an addict? Probably not. Perhaps this is a function of the extreme rarity of life-long unattractive women (let’s call this “LLUW” in the ranks of the famous).

Now that I’m watching via Chrome (in another window, using Scribe Fire to liveblog in a Firefox viewer), I’m finally getting to the spot last night where there was a long, long pause and a black screen. So far, there have been no black screens at all, and although the ads are repeating, there don’t seem to be as many.

So now I’m waiting, waiting to see the part of Episode 2 that froze up last night right after the dramatic “To Be Continued” card that came up near the end. At least my headseat has a volume control when the ads come on.

Well, this is probably what stopped me before. A survey popped up that I never saw using Firefox. Only about… 4 more little ads to go.

On to Episode 3 at last. I’ll probably watch a couple of episodes today, this kind of thing gets old if watched too much.

A related note: I recently caught up on all the existing episodes of Felicia Day’s “The Guild.” It’s frustrating; all of the ones through Season 4 are available on YouTube, and thus if I wanted to I could watch them via a link on the big-screen TV using TiVo. But Season 5 and on are sponsored/hosted at Bing/MSN unless you watch at www.WatchTheGuild.com. And Bing is really hard to search, ironically for a search tool (also there was a big “cloud” outage the other night and the links were broken). I finally was able to find the latest episode and watch, but it took a while.