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October 18, 2005
Pop Tarts| A Pop Culture Critique: Monday night tv worthless
Monday night has never been a good night for television. Everybody must just sit at home and play Scrabble, because there’s nothing else to do. Eventually, though, you run out of letters and turn on the TV.
After scanning through all the cable channels, the only natural stopping point for mind-numbing entertainment is MTV and its two-for-one punch of Laguna Beach and My Super Sweet Sixteen.
Ah, Laguna Beach, the sunny ocean-side land where good taste comes to die. The show proves once and for all that all the money in the world can’t buy an ounce of class. The premise of Laguna Beach is that it’s a reality television version of The OC, where a bunch of spoiled rich kids spend too much time talking about their relationships. The show is a bunch of boring girls with bleach colored hair trying to steal one
another’s boyfriends.
Somehow, Laguna Beach is in its second season, and the plot is fixated on a guy named Jason and the girls he keeps cheating on his girlfriends with. It’s not exactly must-see TV, but it is a refreshing break from
The Real World. The best thing the show has going for it is the fact that all these people actually go to school together (though they have never been seen there) and are friends with one another when they’re not bitching and sniping. After that, it’s time for My Super Sweet Sixteen.
If Laguna Beach seems at all shallow and superficial, it can’t prepare you for what comes next. My Super
Sweet Sixteen is a reality show about extremely bratty kids whose parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their birthday parties. Each episode chronicles the week leading up to one of the parties and the party itself. The kids are obnoxious, rude and throw tantrums at the drop of a hat, and in the end are generally awarded with a brand new car. Each kid is more horrible than the last, and by the end you’re simply relieved that the train wreck is over.
After watching both shows the moral has become abundantly clear: These people are rich and can do whatever they want, and you can’t. The shows are homage to consumerism. Watching young kids who have never worked a day in their lives riding around in limousines and buying designer clothes is nauseating. Sixteen makes it abundantly clear that the kids themselves believe they’re better than those with less money. They constantly talk about how jealous others are of them and make disparaging remarks about people who aren’t rich. Some take it as far as to make fun of their friends for not being able to afford the things they can.
While the kids and the shows are awful and superficial there is one positive element to them. That is the fact that the audience generally find them revolting. I have a lot of friends that watch the show, and the comments I hear most often are how spoiled they are. I’m sure on some level there is an element of jealousy, but for the most part people dislike the kids and their lifestyle. It demonstrates that people can understand their desire for wealth and at the same time not want to behave like the wealthy; that you can see somebody that has more and realize that they’re not any happier for it. So while the show may cater to the desires for the material, those of us who are watching learn to see the pitfalls that it brings. In the end it’s comforting to know you’d be happier with what you have than you would being rich and hanging with the Laguna girls.
Posted by msveum at October 18, 2005 11:17 AM
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