Has there ever been a more compelling sexual presence on reality TV than Dina Lohan’s nostrils? The way they flare when she’s snarling at somebody, which is never more than a few minutes away on Living Lohan? The lovingly lacquered stage mom spends her show trying to present herself as a full-fledged human being, unaware­ that this would require a team of experts, the Large Hadron Collider and an act of God, not just the E! network. She’s just an ordinary mother, helping her daughters, Ali and Lindsay, achieve their well-thought-out dreams of showbiz stardom. (“A lion protects her cubs,” Dina vows to the camera, shortly before whisking her 14-year-old cub, Ali, off to an Access Hollywood interview.) But the harder she tries to be human, the crazier she seems. And every time she zooms into one of her rage-queen fits about the gossip sites (“One of the idiot people are trashing us!”) and the gossip mags (“This whole tabloidism ridiculousness!”), she starts again with those furious Mother Lohan nostril flares. Oh, Dina—how your nostrils haunt me. They are like twin gates into the unknown: one portal for heaven, one for hell, but both leading to the nasal cavity of the sublime.

Reality TV has been hitting amazing new lows all year—now these are real stars: Denise Richards, who makes ex-husband Charlie Sheen seem like the sane one! Kim Kardashian, with an ass that looks like Denali National Park with a blanket thrown over it! Brody Jenner, currently auditioning potential new-best-friend candidates for his upcoming MTV show Bromance! It all adds up to either a nadir for Western civilization or a really beautiful moment to be hungover and unemployed in America. Appreciate it now, for we’ll all miss it when it’s gone. In the immortal words of Spencer Pratt, process that shit, bro!

Like hip-hop in 1988 or physics in 1905, reality-TV trash is reinventing itself so fast that there’s a new rulebook every couple of weeks. A few months ago, I thought Keeping Up With the Kardashians was as good as it got, but now it seems quaintly coherent compared with the truly avant-garde Denise Richards: It’s Complicated. You know how when the sandwiches at Starbucks are sold out, there’s a little message on the shelf: “Wow, this was popular! There’ll be more tomorrow”? A similar sign must hang in Denise’s brain.

While the reality-TV world keeps exploding, the rest of pop culture has to struggle to keep up. On one level, there’s a new season of MTV’s Making the Band, continuing the story of Danity Kane, the girl group formed by Diddy. On another, there’s a global megastar like Amy Winehouse, who may have learned her vocal tricks from Aretha and Whitney, but learned stardom from The Osbournes. She keeps producing new episodes of her screwed-up life, with her voice as a suitably tragic soundtrack. She sang about rehab before any of us had heard of her—it took Whitney years to go from “Greatest Love of All” to “crack is wack”—but it’s like Amy decided to start right out with a musical equivalent of Being Bobby Brown. I mean, let’s say your doctors just told you that you’ve got emphysema, and all that crack smoke has burned huge holes in your innards, and only 30 percent of your lungs are left. How do you react? If you don’t answer, “Jump on the nearest festival stage and seize the opportunity to punch out a fan midsong,” you are probably not Amy Winehouse.

But even Amy at her scabbiest and screamiest could never be as scary as Dina. It’s been hard to care about the post-Osbournes celebrity-family garbage: Snoop Dogg takes his Father Hood to E!, Gene Simmons has to settle for Family Jewels on A&E. But that Dina, she’s something special. She comes on as primo puma, a cold-blooded manipulator of her pubescent meal ticket and a nonstop gusher of maternal wisdom. When Ali has a rough day at school, getting teased about Lindsay (“They walk down the hall and sing the ‘Rehab’ song!”), Dina confides to the camera, “It’s such a tough age, you know, these teen years, but everyone deals with it, you know?” Ah, yes, Lady D, we know.

As for Denise Richards: It’s Complicated, I’m in awe. Let’s face it, when you hear the word complicated, the first name that springs to mind is Denise Richards, revered in the science community for playing a wide-eyed nuclear physicist named Dr. Christmas Jones in one of the dippiest James Bond movies ever. She may be remembered by ’90s-trivia-night bar patrons as the naked girl who splashed in the motel pool with Neve Campbell in Wild Things, though to me, she’ll always be the beauty-pageant princess in Drop Dead Gorgeous who sang “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” to a statue of Jesus on the cross. The problem is, she has a Richie Sambora–shaped stain on her name (you don’t mess with Heather Locklear’s man—you just don’t), not to mention a charlie tattoo on her ankle.

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