Two Ladies Ramble About Teen Mom 2
by Tess Lynch and Angela Serratore
I. INITIAL THOUGHTS ON TEEN MOM 2
TESS: Reality shows become a different animal after one hit season. The cast becomes protective when they know what to expect, insulating themselves not only from defamation but from being swept aside into the c-plot — the sandlot barren of endorsement deals/relevance. If you’re on a reality show, you may want some control over the puppet strings, and the only way to yank them from the production team is to pay attention to your storyline. This is what appears to be have happened on Teen Mom 2, one of the strangest fame machines of all (and whose finale aired last night), where teenagers with soap opera lives team up with a franchise that supposedly lowers the teen pregnancy rate (virtuous, interesting) while at the same time trading Amber Portwood’s dirty left hook for tabloid covers (parasitic, terrible).
ANGELA: Few things are less real than television, but a good reality show makes us forget about line producers, editors, and ‘script coaches.’ This was the big accomplishment of Teen Mom the First. This season, each episode felt less like a video journal of each girl’s life path and more like an after-school special: We got the Boyfriend episode, the Dad episode, the School episode, the Party vs. Baby episode. The difference between Teen Mom 1 and Teen Mom 2 is the difference between documentary and The Hills, which, does that make it easier to watch? Perhaps yes, because Jenelle’s antics are less real than Amber’s, but perhaps no, because Jenelle is still a Real Person, and seeing Amber “do her,” while horrifying, can’t come close to watching Jenelle try to “do her” and “do Jenelle” at the same time.
2. MOMS OF MOMS OF MOMS OF MOMS
TESS: Because I love teenagers and try to think of all the Teen Mom mistakes preserved forever on DVRs and the internet as somehow fluid and to a degree excusable because of inherent teenage-ness, I find myself particularly appalled at the the adults’ (grandparents’) behavior on this show. Dr. Drew, dispenser of canned wisdom, accused season one’s teen mom Catelynn’s mother of abuse; season two’s Jenelle and her mother were visited by the police in one tense episode (they’re all tense episodes); and who can forget season one’s Farrah and her mom-inflicted shiner? Maybe there’s something valuable to be learned from inspecting parent-teenager relationships under considerable duress — seeing yourself, as an adult in the heat of battle with an adolescent, has got to be a powerful thing. But to what extent do these adults use conflict as a way to insert themselves into the show? I don’t want to believe it! This show makes your skin crawl and then on Tuesday afternoons you find yourself craving that creepy-crawly feeling! Why?
ANGELA: This is the Suzi problem. Suzi, as you well know, is the mother of Kailyn, possibly the saddest of all the sad Teen Moms. She was emotionally and physically unavailable during Kail’s pregnancy, thinks packets of jelly are toys for babies, and acted like Mother Teresa when allowing Kailyn and baby to move into her home this season. This relationship, more than any other on the show, makes me uncomfortable, because we’re watching a cause of teen pregnancy, which is to say, parents who withhold love and cause their daughters to seek it elsewhere. Suzi and Catelynn’s awful mom, and to some extent Jenelle’s mother, often tout their own struggles as single moms. Are they jealous of the attention their daughters get? Are they interested in seeing their offspring fail so they can point and say, “See! It’s hard! You won’t succeed as a teenaged single mother, because I couldn’t do it! It’s undoable!” Also, does MTV provide these girls with health insurance with decent mental health benefits?
3. WOMYN’S ISSUES
TESS: Hey, have you heard the haunting media refrain about a woman’s responsibility to consider her temperamental biological clock, weighing it against her professional ambition and/or love of silent stretches of blissful evenings spent playing video games alone? I really hate that refrain. At least Teen Mom can maybe be seen as a counterpoint to that, when reduced for hours over a low flame to a syrup consistency: Having a child does require the sacrifice of whatever adolescent lint clings to your soul, no matter your age, and the ending montage of young women staring out of rainy car windows usually leaves me with a new appreciation of 24-hour Sims binges or the unfinished, aged glass of wine by my bed, ovary clock be damned.
ANGELA: A few weeks ago, I felt a little jealous of Teen Mom Leah. I don’t want to have twins, and I can’t imagine how devastating it must be to watch your own child be diagnosed with countless mental and physical conditions, and also I don’t ever want to be proposed to in a fishing boat, but! I’m a soon-to-be graduate student, and realistically, I won’t be in a financial or emotional place to have children until I’m at least 35, and who knows what the status of my reproductive organs will be at that point? Leah, I surmised (OK, I was a little drunk, but Teen Mom is a show best watched with one hand on the remote and another wrapped tightly around a glass full of booze), has a big part of Societal Womanhood locked down. She’s a mother! If she decides to go to nursing school, or become a teacher, or open an Etsy shop that sells glasses made for babies, she won’t ever have to think ‘am I going to be able to have children and have this career?’ because she already has children. Is Teen Mom a teaching tool about sexual responsibility, or is it another piece in the large maternal-industrial complex designed to remind us that as women, WE HAVE TO GIVE BIRTH, OR ELSE.
I got over this feeling when one of her twins peed on the carpet, but still.
Tess Lynch and Angela Serratore are writers in Los Angeles.