There are two kinds of people : People who take hypothetical questions and Would You Rathers way too seriously, and people who understand the social function they play - that of being icebreakers. I am the first kind of person. But I would like to be the second type.
Both versions of Bharg hate the concept of Guilty Pleasures. It serves no purpose and we should retire it to the same retirement-home we sent boot-cut jeans and slambooks.
If I were pressed to list my guilty pleasure shows/movies...'Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives', 'Indian Matchmaking', 'Desperate Housewives' would make the cut. But I am not embarrassed in having seen these shows. I don't care who knows it. Except maybe the folks at work.
As Jennifer Szalai while writing for the New Yorker put it in a 2013 article:
"If there’s a contemporary idiom that puzzles and irritates me in equal measure, “guilty pleasure” is it. I object to neither the pleasure, nor the guilt; it’s the modifying of one by the other that works my nerves, the awkward attempt to elevate as well as denigrate the object to which the phrase is typically assigned."
Its use is almost always done in a dishonest way. It is a humble-brag. You have only two or three 'low-art' tv shows or movies in your consumption diet, implying that most of what you consume is 'high-art' and pathbreaking and like-you-know-it-has-totally-tapped-into-the-zeitgeist.
Grow up.
Having said all of that...if you enjoy BBC's Sherlock...even as a 'guilty pleasure'...YOU ARE WRONG.
Just kidding.
Not really though. But you know... watch it if you want to...be known as a chump. No no. Just kidding. Or am I?
A really funny video about an adjacently related concept by the GOATs over at College Humor: Defender of the Basic | Hardly Working