I Spent a Week Married to As-Seen-on-TV Products and One of Them Betrayed Me

There was a time in America when you couldn't prove you were awake at 2 a.m. unless you could recite the shipping and handling fee for a device that juliennes a pineapple in four seconds. That era is dying. The gadgets live on TikTok Shop now, sold by 19-year-olds with ring lights, and the romance is gone. The infomercial was theater. It had a narrative arc: sad person struggles with ordinary egg, dramatic music, then — transformation — happy person, perfect egg, applause from a studio audience of one host named after a boat.

So in the name of science and unresolved childhood longing, I ordered a week's worth of As-Seen-on-TV classics and tested every single one. Here are the results, ranked from 'why' to 'genuinely fine.'

5. The Motorized Butter Stick

A plastic wand shaped like a stick of butter that, when loaded with an actual stick of butter, spreads it via a spinning nub. That's it. That's the product.

It worked, technically, for about ninety seconds. Then the motor — powered by batteries I had to supply, which is the true scam of every product in this genre — started making a sound like a dying bee. My toast ended up buttered in one diagonal streak, like the toast itself had given up. The infomercial version of me would be weeping. Last place.

4. The Shammy Towels

You know the bit. Guy spills an entire liter of cola on carpet, panics, then a second guy appears and says 'use a ShamWow' like he's been waiting in the wings for this exact moment. The towels themselves? Honestly, they work. They absorb things. They're weirdly durable and slightly less weird the more you wash them.

The problem is the emotional aftermath. Every time I use one, I hear the pitch cadence in my head. I can't dry a dish like a normal person anymore. I dry it like a man with a headset and something to prove. Four stars, minus one for psychological damage.

3. The Egg Cooker

The little dome. The measuring line for 'soft, medium, hard.' The piercing pin on the bottom that everyone ignores and then wonders why their eggs explode.

Folks, the egg cooker is the most honest product in this entire lineup. It does one thing — steams eggs — and it does it while you stand there doing literally nothing else, which is the exact energy the infomercial promised. My hard-boiled eggs peeled like a dream for the first time in my life. I felt powerful. I felt lied to by every stovetop method before it.

2. The Herb Slicer / Rolling Chopper

A little manual rolling blade that minces herbs in a curved dish. No batteries, no motor, no dying bee sounds. It's just a good design that solves a real problem, which is the rarest thing in this entire genre. The infomercial would've hated it — not enough drama, no sad herb owner at minute one.

1. The Snuggie (Honorary Champion)

Yes, I already own one. No, I'm not ashamed. The Snuggie — a blanket with arms, as one legendary article once put it — remains the genre's crowning achievement precisely because it stopped pretending to solve a problem and just admitted what it was: a robe worn backwards, marketed with such aggressive confidence that we all went along with it. It's not a gadget. It's a lifestyle. It's still in my living room right now.

What We Lost When the Infomercial Died

Here's my actual takeaway from the week. The products were never really the point. The point was the format — the before-and-after, the 'how much would you pay' escalation, the host dramatically revealing that yes, there's more, call in the next ten minutes. It was a shared national experience. Everyone's grandma knew the ShamWow guy. Everyone's uncle had opinions about the Slap Chop.

Now the same gadgets get sold in 30-second vertical videos with no narrative, no sad-egg opening, no arc. The butter stick still fails. The egg cooker still works. But nobody's bonding over them at 2 a.m. anymore, and honestly? That's the only thing on this list I couldn't fix with a battery I had to supply myself.