Jodie Foster, Honey Boo Boo and Rebecca Black
By Emma Teitel - Tuesday, January 15, 2013 - 0 Comments
Alana "Honey Boo Boo" Thompson. (John Bazemore/AP)
Jodie Foster’s Golden Globe speech will be remembered for many things, other than how not to give a speech. We’ll remember the wackiness, the coming out that wasn’t, and, of course, Mel Gibson. Something that likely won’t be remembered and should, is this:
“You guys might be surprised,” Foster said to a gallery of teary-eyed celebrirites, “but I am not Honey Boo Boo Child.”
Foster, a former child actress, went on to explain that she is not like the seven-year-old laughing stock of this continent because she enjoys her privacy. Not only that: she has earned her privacy.
So, too, I think, has Alana Thompson (the person behind Honey Boo Boo Child). Unfortunately, the adults in and outside her life don’t really seem to care. Why? Because we live in a cruel world in which it’s socially acceptable for adults to relive and rewrite their adolescence (follow, unfollow, friend, unfriend). Continue…
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Reality TV about housing makes a post-crash comeback
By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 8, 2013 at 12:51 PM - 0 Comments
Networks are banking on a new cycle of housing shows
Who’s placing the biggest bet on the comeback of the U.S. housing market? Not Wall Street, but cable TV channels that run home-buying shows with titles like Love It or List It. The crash of 2008 wiped out a lot of reality shows about purchasing expensive homes; instead, channels like Home and Garden Television and the Learning Channel (TLC) shifted toward shows like The Unsellables, about people whose homes had become worthless. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, these networks are working on a new cycle of housing shows, though like many cautious owners, they’re starting with cheap homes: HGTV’s future projects include Power Broker and Fixer Upper, about helping young buyers improve their first houses, and TLC is bringing back the show My First Home after a three-year break. Network executives had better hope they’re right about the market. If not, the only people in bigger trouble will be those who actually bought the houses.
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Christian fundamentalism’s cool factor
By Emma Teitel - Friday, December 23, 2011 at 3:16 PM - 0 Comments
kyz/Flickr
A well known hardware store (Lowe’s) and a well-known travel website (Kayak.com) have recently pulled their advertisements from a little-known reality television show (All American Muslim) in order to appease a little-known group of anti-Muslim Evangelicals (the Florida Family Association). Why? Because according to said Evangelicals, All American Muslim—a TLC show about an average Muslim American family–“profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.” In other words, the characters on the show are not grenade-throwing Jihadists. They’re normal. Worse, they’re boring (the show’s ratings are abysmal, even in the midst of the current controversy). Or as Michelle Goldberg writes in the Daily Beast, “The boycott of All American Muslim marks the first time right-wingers have objected to a television show for being too bland and wholesome.”
The weirdest thing about this, however, isn’t that an apparently wholesome Christian group is carping about a wholesome TV show, but that two substantial businesses actually felt the need to listen to them; it’s as though Lowe’s and Kayak mysteriously absorbed some of the massive Tea Party pressure currently facing G.O.P. candidates—a pressure that has turned the United States into the next Twilight Zone. How else do you account for a country in which political incorrectness masquerades as political correctness? Apparently conservative politicians in America–and now big business–are no longer afraid that they’ll offend the oppressed and marginalized: they’re afraid that they won’t.
