The television show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is the chronicle of a precocious young woman, a child of relative wealth and an aspiring writer, who along with three close friends explores the emotional contours of twentysomething life in Brooklyn, New York. It has been alternately lauded and mocked for its frank approach to gender, body type, and sex.

Exploitation looked to be the show’s spirit at its premiere last August, but somewhere along the line that began to seem less of an inevitability. A funny thing happened: the characters transcended the format, and they kept doing that, all through the season. But how long can it last?

Another of these gimmicks is the producers’ resistance to editing out interview moments that they otherwise would—when Mama June has a sneezing fit, for instance. Instead the camera lingers. But the most infamous trick is the use of subtitles for the family, who have thick, though not incomprehensible, southern accents. This induced in me a kind of extreme saltiness when a subtitle sported a copy error—an occasional occurrence. (A misspelled seriously, for instance. Who’s the idiot now? I thought about yelling at the screen.) Even that game turns out to be rigged: A 40-minute special looking back on the first season includes a viewer participation opportunity called “Guess What They Said,” wherein we watch a clip and then decide, from a multiple-choice menu, what the line was. One of these is baby talk: literally somebody talking at a baby. It’s not supposed to make any goddamned sense.

Harsher evaluators of the show seem to side with its producers—a weird confluence—in finding the characters gross and detestable. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Tim Goodman managed to work a hefty number of fat references into an early review condemning TLC for giving audiences “a green light to laugh at rednecks and fat people.” He suggested June might be “too dumb to be savvy enough” to exploit the stereotype that she’s clearly exploiting, but one wonders if he’d feel the same way now: June, who, as I mentioned, is a champion couponer, said earlier this year that the money the family makes from the show goes directly into a trust fund for her four daughters, untouchable but for emergency and education until they’re 21. Goodman described Alana’s “apparent seriousness” when she says, obviously joking, “I hope Mama don’t eat Glitzy,” her gay pet pig.

Will Alana keep competing in pageants? She’s a natural ham, but some of the TV show’s most uncomfortable moments come while she’s in the midst of a pageant: a fake reality within a fake reality within a TV. This isn’t anybody’s natural environment, but it’s especially not Alana’s or June’s; as Willa Paskin wrote shortly after the first season premiered, “The stank eye June gets from some of the ‘classier’ mothers and judges during these competitions is a piece of minutiae with endless implications about class in America.”

Wed 8 PM

TLC

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