Television networks like TLC and MTV can’t keep mining poor rural Americans for show ideas and then act surprised when their stars implode.
Honey Boo Boo and Mama June.
AP John Bazemore
When TLC's Here Comes Honey Boo Boo — a spin-off featuring the family of Alana Thompson, one of the breakout stars of Toddlers & Tiaras — premiered in 2012, critics called it repellent and disturbing, which was not a completely unfair assessment: The family's favorite meal is a mix of butter and ketchup that Honey Boo Boo's mother, who is known as Mama June, microwaves into a red slime and pours on to spaghetti for the girls. They call it "sketti."
It was also a show, however, about a family that enjoyed spending time together and, despite their issues, seemed to genuinely love each other. The majority of the episodes are shockingly mundane — as the show goes on Alana doesn't even do beauty pageants very often. It seems like the only really outrageous thing about Here Comes Honey Boo Boo was that TLC had the gall to a let poor family from Georgia show the rest of the country how they lived. American audiences gawked along at a family that hung out in garbage dumps and ate roadkill. Its first season was one of TLC's highest-rated shows ever.
But gawking at the real lives of rednecks is only entertaining if it's not too real. The news that Mama June is dating convicted sex offender Mark McDaniel was a bridge too far; TLC canceled the show last week, shelving an entire completed new season of episodes. TMZ also learned that TLC is offering to pay for counselors and tutors for the children. The day after the show was canceled, Alana's sister Anna — now 20 — claims she was allegedly sexually assaulted by McDaniel when she was 8 years old. She told People magazine that McDaniel "would try and touch me and all that stuff."
It's an extreme case, but this isn't even the first legal issue for Mama June; in 2008, she was charged with theft of child support payments. None of this legal murkiness is that unusual in the pantheon of hillbilly reality television, which takes as its starting point the premise that it's OK to watch poor (usually white) people from the American heartland struggle to cope with the realities of modern life.
The phenomenon hit its stride in 2012, when Duck Dynasty, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding, and Buckwild all came out within months of each other, and followed on the heels of the success of shows like 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom, and Toddlers and Tiaras. All of these shows raise the same question: With 45 million Americans living below the poverty line, are we supposed to laugh at these people, pity them, or relate to them? Why — when several of these shows have imploded under the weight of their subjects' own struggles — do they keep getting made? Is the pressure of being the "right kind of redneck" too much to bear?
Universal Studios
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