With All Due Respect to Chaps, Antonio Brown Just Headlined the Worst TV Show of All Time

And so ends Antonio Brown’s day in the only appropriate way possible: By being the big reveal at the end of the worst hour of broadcasting since Philo T. Farnsworth invented the television.

We’d all been bombarded with the ads for The Masked Singer every time we turned on Fox. Joe Buck and Troy Aikman cringing as they were being forced to awkwardly banter through the promos for what looked like the stupidest concept of all time. Allegedly famous people pretending to sing through shitty mascot costumes from some discount theme park while the funny Asian guy from The Hangover, the hottest Pussycat Doll and Donny Wahlberg’s anti-vaxxer Playboy model wife tried to guess who they are. Every time it felt more like some fake promo for a satire show Jack Donaghy was producing on 30 Rock than an actual network show. But it was real. And yet, when the show became reality Wednesday night, it was somehow worse that anyone could’ve possibly imagined.

And in the end, when the celebrity who had been caterwauling from underneath a hippo costume like a the least sexually desirable ticket holder at the Furry Convention all night took off the big gray head, it turned out to be Antonio Brown. Which seemed weirdly perfect, given everything else that has happened over the last week or so.

Just since New Year’s Eve we’ve discovered that Brown quit on his team. That he threw a football at his quarterback at practice. Skipped a Saturday walk-through. So they faked a knee injury to cover for him. And he asked for a trade. That he and fellow disgruntled ex-Steeler James Harrison toyed with the idea of Mystery Science 3000-ing their way through Mike Tomlin’s press conference:

And that, when ex-teammate Ryan Clark called him out, Brown called him “Uncle Tom”:

So yes, it’s only fitting that the day would end with Brown being the surprise ending of the worst TV show ever conceived.

As it turns out, Clark was right. All that money did turn Antonio Brown into a monster. A square-headed hippo with a fucking terrible singing voice. It couldn’t be happening to a better football franchise.