Shark Tank

Things are cookin' on the new season of Shark Tank, especially when someone comes in to pitch the merits of his big invention: Wake 'N Bacon.

ABC's Shark Tank is easily the best new reality TV show to air this summer (which, admittedly, isn't saying much).

Mark Burnett's newest plunge into the reality waters--somewhat predictable, with all the requisite reality bells and whistles (lots of dark blue mood lighting, dramatic music, quick-cut editing)--is mildly entertaining in that summer TV kind of way.

The cleverest part of the show is that it makes the judges into contestants; they compete against one another for the right to invest in a business, and they haggle with the entrepreneurs over the terms of their investment.

Brisk, sharp and surprisingly emotional for what essentially is a series of venture-capital-investment interviews, the show--based on the Japanese format "Dragons' Den"--balances the human element of its wish-fulfilling conceit with at least the illusion of the business legitimacy that made Burnett's "The Apprentice" such campy fun.

So is Shark Tank cathartic, or merely depressing? Perhaps appropriately, it's a little of both.

There are so many things I hate about his new show, In the Shark Tank, that I started numbering them just to calm down. Where to start?