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The signs of the apocalypse have all finally lined up. For reals, kids. I wouldn’t joke about the imminent end of the world. Jon and Kate split up, the Sox took the lead in the all-time series with the Cubs and now the Jonas Brothers have their own television show. Little-known fact: I used to want to write television shows. Littler-known fact: Now I just kinda wanna kill myself.

Unsurprisingly, the Disney Channel plays home to the show “Jonas.” You may remember the Disney Channel for such hits as “Hannah Montana,” “The Suite Life of Zach and Cody” and “The Sound of America’s Youth Getting Dumber.” I’ll give Disney some credit. With “Jonas,”  they’ve actually pulled off one hell of a con. Not only have they managed to pass off three of the most vanilla “rock stars” that have ever graced the cover of Rolling Stone (though apparently the cast of “The Hills” counts as well; fuck that magazine) as the next big stars of the future, but they’ve actually managed to make people believe that they’re talented actors as well.

This isn’t to say that musicians haven’t tried to pass themselves off as things they aren’t. In fact, that’s kind of an unwritten rule; in between getting on “Saturday Night Live” and being parodied in a Weird Al Yankovic song, bands often have to do something that doesn’t agree with their scruples. As I write that, I think of Cartel living in a bubble for MTV for a month and shown off like reality show stars. Anyhow, in some cases it’s alright for bands to shamelessly promote, but what the Jonases (Joni?) do for fame is in its own way up there with nightvision sex tapes, except for that the life of an escort is a step or two higher up the dignity ladder.

This might be unfairly abrasive, and yeah, I’ll be the first to admit that in the case of most of the Disney pop stars, part of my rage is derived from the fact that overproduced 15-year-olds are living better than I probably ever will. It’s petty, and I’ll be the first to cop to it. (At least mostly; with Miley Cyrus, it’s more a matter of me feeling like a dirty old man when I’m only 20. I won’t elaborate on that.) It’s depressing to watch, more to the point, as my younger sisters and the other youth today growing up on these shows will never know what it was like to watch awesome kids shows in the 1990s; I’ll take “Hey Arnold,” which was basically a show about urban legends for kids, or something like the darker-the-older-I-get “Rocko’s Modern Life” over this stuff any day.

I’m not just hating on the show because of the Jonas Brothers either. The show itself is some of the most generic, overwrought sitcom writing I’ve ever seen. The Jonases try their best, and you can tell they are, but because they’re not actors, they only have whatever comedic timing they have in their day to day lives, which judging by this show is not a whole lot. It’s the kind of comedic acting you also see in bad Rob Schneider movies (and yes, there is a distinction between good and bad ones; “The Hot Chick” makes me laugh, I don’t even care), where the actors are contorting themselves a hundred percent of the time to try to add physical wackiness to completely and utterly flat writing.

It’s not that the show is necessarily awful; there always will be worse things on television than a bad generic sitcom. However, this is so generic even by generic sitcom standards that at times it’s borderline painful to watch. There’s one episode where the guy jumps into a trashcan so a girl doesn’t know he’s following her, and then people keep throwing things in the trash can. I’m pretty sure that joke has been done roughly two million times in history. That’s the thing, though; there’s not one thing in any episode of this show that hasn’t been done to death before. Disney is trying so little to actually make a good show here that they can’t even stop themselves from aping their own premises; the rock-stars-in-high-school setup is the exact same thing as “Hannah Montana,” just without the schizophrenia subtexts.

I think that’s my biggest issue with “Jonas.” It’s evident that the bare possible minimum of effort was put into this show by all involved, because all it really stands as is one more marketing tool. To illustrate this further, when you watch an episode of the show, literally every commercial break is a mini-show talking about the new Jonas Brothers album. They play songs currently for sale on their various records on the show. Before long, the show itself will have its own soundtrack. The show is basically a badly written half-hour infomercial for product. How fucking depressing is that?

You suck, television.