When my girlfriend flew from Brooklyn to Las Vegas to visit me in early March of 2020, neither of us knew it would be the end of our long-distance era. For our entire relationship, we’d lived thousands of miles apart, with dozens of red-eye flights and lots of jet lag, weekends packed with a need to do as much as we could together before we didn’t see each other again for a month or sometimes two—and suddenly we were confined to a one-bedroom apartment. With long quarantine hours to fill and no idea how to cohabit, we filled our downtime by watching other people live their lives on TV.

Enter: the Animal Planet show My Cat from Hell, hosted by cat behaviorist Jackson Galaxy, affectionately referred to as “Cat Daddy.” The premise of the show is simple: Cats behave badly. Sometimes they bite people or defecate on clothes or on white carpeting; they hate new partners and new siblings; and sometimes they simply don’t express their love adequately for their owners. Regardless of the symptom, the cause is the same: an unhappy house. Luckily, Galaxy generally has an antidote.