TLC's 'My Crazy Obsession' is addictive TV

REALITY PREMIERE "My Crazy Obsession"

WHEN | WHERE Wednesday at 10 and 10:30 p.m. on TLC

REASON TO WATCH Here's proof: There are people nuttier than you.

WHAT IT'S ABOUT We've all got one. I confess, I can't stop collecting Christmas TV episodes. I've got hundreds, both store-bought and home-recorded, and I add dozens more every year. I might need them to update my 2006 book "Christmas on Television." Or maybe I got started and, OMG, I can't stop!

Same with the folks on the first episode of "My Crazy Obsession," not to be confused with TLC's "My Strange Addiction" (third season ends Sunday at 10 and 10:30 p.m.).

Maryland's Pat and Joe Prosey have 5,000-plus kids -- which is what they call their Cabbage Patch Kids horde. (Never "dolls.") The "kids" house is 10 times the size of the couple's own double-wide (that's a "manufactured home"), and the brood has cost them at least a million (that's dollars). They talk to (and for) the kids, take them shopping, read them bedtime stories.

"We never expected it to be like this," says Joe, illuminating the slippery slope upon which we all wobble.

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The claim's the same for Hollywood's Kitten Kay Sera. (That's say-RAH, like the Doris Day song.) "I am so obsessed with pink," she titters, in her pink apartment, with the pink dog, pink phone, pink piano, pink vacuum and pink blow dryer. (Horrors! Black curling iron!) She wore something pink 28 years ago, and got compliments, and one thing led to 967 more.

MY SAY Consider this the PG version of "Strange Addiction." Instead of people eating drywall, growing foot-long fingernails and having sex with their cars, "Crazy Obsession" gives us benign compulsives who mainly come off as amusing.

BOTTOM LINE It's also less unsettling than "Hoarders" or "Freaky Eaters."

GRADE B