I am about 15 years too old to watch The N (Nickelodeon for tween to teen girls) and yet I find myself randomly DVRing reruns of Growing Pains or Saved By The Bell (PS – Screech is writing a tell-all a la Tori Spelling and 90210! Yes!) when summer TV boredom strikes. My secret shame DVRing yielded more than an 80s flashback – I came across the promos for their summer reality show Queen Bees.
Obviously the show is based on Rosalind Wiseman’s novel “Queen Bees and Wannabes” with all the emphasis on the Queen Bees. They placed a group of mean girls in a reality TV house together and then challenged them to open up about their feelings and turn into normal human beings instead of ruthless biotches.
See show trailer below.
Each week brings a new emotional challenge that makes them get outside of their own heads. It’s amazing to realize anew each week how slavishly devoted to their own point of view these girls are – it’s like the idea that anyone else migth have a thought or opinion has never occured to most of them.
Also on a weekly basis one Mean Girl is taken into therapy with the show’s sole judge, Dr. Michelle, for deeper training in self-awareness. Other girls are shown videos from home where their friends, family or boyfriends tell them what assholes they’ve been in the past. One or both of these things sometimes lead to an emotional breakdown.
Initially some of the girls hatch plans to the confessional camera to fake break throughs in order to get gold stars in the weekly judgement ceremony but after being battered with challenges by the show, verbal fights with the other girls in the house, therapy and reality check videos from the people who love them they seem to lose control of the process and realize the only thing they can do inside of this reality TV house is actually become a different person.
This show makes me wonder about the plasticness of a certain portion of our culture overall. Could you imagine if someone took all the girls who’ve been cast on Rock of Love and, instead of creating a show called I Love Money for them to continue to act like assholes on, put them through therapy and made them talk about all the messed up stuff that made them get to this point and then the person who grew up the most wins all the money?
It would be basically the same as the kind of reality TV we watch now, but in some way possibly redemptive to the poor dumb bastards who are being exploited for our entertainment.
