The half-hour program, which concluded its first season on the TLC network tonight and is under negotiation for a second season, centers around a self-described “crazy redneck” family.
The star of the program is Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson, a 7-year-old beauty pageant contestant. Her family includes her parents, June (Mama) and Mike (Sugar Bear), along with sisters Lauryn (Pumpkin), Jessica (Chubbs) and Anna (Chickadee), who is 18 years old and recently gave birth to a baby with three thumbs.
Millions of viewers have tuned in each week to watch the family eat roadkill, play in the mud, toilet paper their house and gather around the kitchen table to watch their piglet defecate on it. What? With names like Honey Boo Boo, Sugar Bear, Chubbs and Chickadee you were expecting Downton Abbey?
It is, claims the general manager of TLC, “completely unfiltered, a picture of their everyday life in rural Georgia. This family is 100% authentic. They are who they are, take it or leave it, but you couldn’t make this stuff up.”
Which leads to the obvious question: “Why would anyone want to?”
Which leads to the obvious answer: “Ratings.”
The show’s first two episode drew more than 2 million viewers, many of whom presumably found “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” and “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” to be too cerebral. Its fourth episode outdrew the Republican National Convention.
With so much bad television from which to choose, it’s probably not fair to single this one out for ridicule. It may be nothing worse than a 21st Century version of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” at which we all snickered when Granny, Jethro, Jed and Ellie May gathered around the “cee-ment” pond.
But not everyone is laughing. One review called the first episode a “horror story posing as a reality television program.” The Hollywood Reporter declared, “you know this is exploitation. TLC knows it. Maybe even Mama and HBB know it, deep down in their rotund bodies.” The Georgia Chamber of Commerce, one would guess, probably just hopes the program goes away as soon as possible. Or that the family moves to Alabama.
The good news, though, is that watching “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” will not necessarily rot your children’s teeth.
What it might do to their brains is another matter.
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