Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is a TV reality show airing its second season on TLC. Alana Thompson, aka “Honey Boo Boo,” lives with her family in Georgia and has quickly garnered national attention since the show premiered in August 2012.

The show’s popularity has prompted the show to be aired in more venues around the world.

Despite continued criticism of the show, its ratings have consistently been in the millions with 3.08 million watching the second season premier on Jan. 6, 2013.

Alana and her family are known for their crude, unhealthy and dirty lifestyles. June, the mother, is only 32 years old and seems incapable of making wise decisions for her daughters.

Alana’s humor mostly consists of potty jokes and performing disgusting feats like licking a full jar of mayonnaise or eating cheese balls for breakfast.

Alana knows she is being filmed, and to keep the ratings high, the show seems to be pushing her and her family to behave in more eccentric ways in each successive show.

While there is a place for good humor and entertainment, it should not come through the exploitation of others, especially a 7-year-old child.

Decades ago, June’s treatment of her daughters would have been considered child abuse. Now she is being paid to showcase her incompetence in motherhood.

This show, like a lot of reality shows, begs the question: at what cost are we being entertained in America and around the world? Have our standards fallen so low that we laugh at this kind of repulsive behavior?

Today’s entertainment is going beyond cute and funny to outright uncensored crassness. And to what result? While adults might laugh at the “entertainment,” children are also watching and learning that Thompson’s stunts are cute and something they should emulate.

The show casts an unfavorable light on Southerners and stereotypes the disgusting antics of the Thompson family as a Southern norm. In the end it seems that one of the main purposes of the show is to demoralize the Thompson family and boost viewers’ egos.

Viewers are watching the show to gawk at the three-fingered newborn, stare at the overweight characters or laugh at crude language. None of these is an acceptable way to be entertained.

The fact that Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is popular doesn’t mean the show should be tolerated or encouraged.

We need to realize that many popular TV reality shows are overstepping the bounds of acceptable television.

It is time for viewers to recognize that what is entertaining is not necessarily acceptable.