I watch a lot of poor quality television, and while I stand by my Designing Women, one bargain basement I won’t venture into is the exploitative dankness of TLC.
The TLC network is a Bristol Stool Scale of mediocrity and while it stands to reason that eventually, they will choose to replace at least one component of their overweight, pregnant, little person trifecta with actual substance, it now seems more probable that they will just combine them all and mix in the ups and downs of owning and operating a frozen yogurt shop.
But, until they find their new star of Twist and Shout: Pregnant, Obese and Little, they will have to do what they can to glorify pregnancy and parenthood through average women. Reading through the casting description reveals that this will be a “web video series,” which is second only to internet petitions in efficacy, and will likely consist mostly of women displaying their morbid collection of unused baby paraphernalia on suspiciously nice couches.
I admit, my knowledge of TV production is so crippled that well, TLC would probably want to come film it and turn it into a desperate quest for ratings. But, I do know that using women to film their own experiences while solidifying a lucrative deal with Church & Dwight in exchange for closeups of the golden shower that their First Response pregnancy tests will receive is pretty savvy. Savvy here means the same thing it does in TLC’s show description – shameless.
However, in their defense, subtly perpetuating the intrinsic xenophobia and subordination of the Quiverfull movement is a full-time job. So while TLC is still actively searching for ‘triplets or more’ in a casting for Make Room for Multiples, it’s only fair that women who can only produce one uninteresting, non-obese baby at a time film their own “emotional passage to pregnancy.”
The best part though is that they use a gmail address, which clearly reflects all the foresight you can expect from a network that boasts a show dedicated entirely to babies being born in toilets. Come on TLC, I use gmail and it’s usually just to order pizza online. Get your shit together or at least honor this colossal joke with a hotmail account.
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Wow. I gave up TV when I moved 5 years ago. I didn’t think it could get worse. It has.