Television frightens the beegeebers out of me.

I won’t claim complete ignorance, but I don’t typically watch TV and I don’t really know what goes on inside that little black box that sits in my living room. Or at least, I hadn’t until I was genuinely sick a week ago and couldn’t do much more than use the remote controller for an afternoon.

I’m familiar with shows like “Joe Millionaire” and “the Bachelor.” Those shows took over the entertainment sections in my daily news and I couldn’t help but be inundated with updates as the seasons moved along. The schoolteacher? The foot fetish girl?

Where was Anna Nicole Smith during all this?

The former Playboy Playmate and Guess? model has her own special-edition “bachelorette” show. In the commercials for the live telecast she whines, “I wanna hump him NOW!”

Who? Joe Millionaire? The Bachelor? A contestant on American Idol?

Just about every channel wants to cash in on the “reality TV thing.”

MTV, boasting its trend-setting “The Real World” in 1992, gave television birth to the Osbourne clan eleven years later.

Now we have such cultured shows as Sorority and Fraternity Life. (Side note- a childhood friend of mine that attends the University of Buffalo says that the show misrepresents her school and she begs people not to watch it. Dutifully, I will follow.)

When the big three, ABC, NBC and CBS joined in, they went the game-show route, which scares me even more than a bunch of cameras following around famous people all day. NBC went with just one “reality” show — “Fear Factor.”

But from what I gather, most people only watch it when models or famous people are involved. Nothing says “cool” than a bikini-clad Playboy Playmate swimming in ice-cold water, supposedly.

CBS has become the “15 Minutes of Fame” factory. Winners and losers alike on “Survivor” end up in low-budget films or guest-hosting Talk Soup on E!

They also have two other shows called “the Amazing Race” and “Big Brother,” but those are apparently stale bread at this point.

ABC seems to have found their niche with hooking up single people, or freaking out America by airing Michael Jackson specials once a week.

Every week the schedule reads: “The Bachelor,” “The Bachelorette,” “The Mole,” and then more Michael Jackson.

I could always ask the washed-up actors and singers of yester-year when they appear on “Celebrity Dates,” a show created by E! that hooks them up to an average Joe Schmo. It’s only a matter of time before they get bored of airing Robert Blake’s snooze-filled preliminary trial and try to get him a young, hip new girlfriend.

Good for Blake and the rest of the country. I, however, am turning the TV back off and will be gearing up for baseball season.