Reality TV doesn’t exactly provide the most fertile ground for spin-offs. There is the occasional personality bright or trashy enough to go it on their own (you know who I’m talking about), but Miami Ink‘s Kat Von D never struck me as someone who demanded an hour all to herself. For that matter… I didn’t think another program devoted to fly-on-the-wall tattoo parlor shenanigans was necessary either. Given my general skepticism, it took me a while to finally get around to watching LA Ink.

Kat brings in a whole new clientele after abandoning the now all-male cast of Miami Ink for her hometown of Los Angeles. Where the customers in Miami were often charming, heartbreaking or just colorful, the folks who come into Hollywood’s True Tattoo are predictably vapid and repulsive. And there are also STARS!

Stars like… Jesse Metcalfe! Jesse probably would have never visited the boys in Miami. In addition to beating the living daylights out of him, they probably would have refused his vision of the douchiest tattoo in history. Metcalfe, whose claim to fame is still a five-episode stint on Desperate Housewives, struggled with the idea of committing to a half sleeve for a long time, but he’s confident enough in the state of his career to go ahead with it. He leaves the parlor with a four-by-eight inch naked woman lassoing an anatomically correct heart on his disproportionately large bicep and absolutely no chance of being asked to appear in the sequel to John Tucker Must Die (apparently he survived).

LA Ink is harmless popcorn TV that you can watch when the contents of your DVR are frighteningly sparse, but it’s not without one serious flaw. The oversaturated colors, Kat’s tendency to dress like a noir pin-up and her Betty Page poses in all of the advertisements promise more sex than TLC is willing to dish out. The network that brought upon the earth the D.I.Y. horseman of the apocalypse, Ty Pennington, is unmistakably prude in all of their programming, and LA Ink is no exception. In an odd attempt to appeal to their A Baby Story viewers, not even the stenciled boob on Jesse Metcalfe’s arm is shown in focus.  Come on!