People who know me well know I can be very particular about my choices in entertainment.

For example, I much prefer to listen to my own music at the gym because pop music just makes my skin crawl.

However, I recognize that working up a sweat to neo-Americana folk music is definitely not everybody’s jam.

I’m also slightly snobbish about books and go for literary fiction most of the time, occasionally branching out to revisit the classics.

When it comes to TV, I am not interested in some of the most popular shows on the networks, of which the Big Bang Theory, Sunday Night Football, the Walking Dead, Dancing with the Stars and American Idol consistently score high on the ratings with millions and million of viewers every week.

No, I like TV shows which I formally acknowledge are much, much worse than all of that.

I’m talking trashy reality TV.

Think Real Housewives in all their incarnations: from the bronzed New Jerseyites to the blond Orange County cast.

I also like those corny home improvement shows, as predictable as their formulas are.

Another one I’m partial to is Come Dine With Me, based on the British series of the same name, wherein five strangers take their turns hosting dinner parties for the others and they secretly score one another. The winner gets a whopping $1,000 at the end of the week.

Reality TV is a genre chronicling the interactions of strangers in various scenarios which absolutely exploded in the late ’90s and early 2000s. They can take many formats, two of the most popular being competitions and simply following the characters as they live their endlessly fascinating lives.

(Did you know the U.S. Survivor is still going? It’s on season 29. In fact, dozens of countries have or have had their own versions of the show: Sweden was the first to make it to TV in 1997, but there are versions in Israel, Italy, Russia, Serbia and Bulgaria, to name just a handful.)

With the meteoric rise of reality TV came the backlash of its interpretation of the word “reality.” After all, a week of these characters’ lives can’t be condensed into an hour or half-hour of TV without plenty of editing.

Some of these programs also involve producers who “direct” what they need for the dramatic arc of the show from its cast of characters.

For example, a real housewife might be asked to confront a cast-mate over an expensive lunch at a fancy restaurant. While the script isn’t written out, the final program that goes to air is not a straightforward recount of the week’s occurrences.

I acknowledge that a penchant for reality TV is not exactly an endearing quality, so I would like to clarify that it’s not something I make a point of sitting down to do. It’s background noise, which a person can easily tune into (and more importantly, out) while doing something more productive — cooking dinner, cleaning the house, whatever it may be.

There is one new show starting up which even morbid curiosity couldn’t sway me to tune into.

It’s called the Ultra Rich Asian Girls of Vancouver. It stars, you guessed it, four girls of Asian descent whose parents are extraordinarily rich.

However, they’re also making their own way in the world. Each of the cast members is finishing post-secondary school and launching a career in Vancouver.

It’s an odd time for producers to start a show like this, when ratings for its companion programs showcasing the ridiculously luxurious lifestyles and petty problems of unlikable characters are on the steady decline.

The show premiered on YouTube on Oct. 26 and the web series is planned for a full 13 episodes.

Reality TV is like intellectual junk food — you know it’s not good for you, but it’s just so easy to reach for.