by Lucas Mann
—
Tell me. Tell me again. Tell me better. That’s what a producer asks for. What happened? How did it feel? No, really, how did it feel? Be honest. Be yourself. Be more yourself.
M is a midcareer producer at this point. She’s bounced around, but she’s working steadily on Black Ink now. It’s a show that I think is just okay, but she informs me that it’s the second-highest-rated show on all of VH1. Black Ink is about black tattoo artists who, despite the professional and personal dysfunction among them all, are running a successful shop in Harlem. The show draws simultaneously upon two themes that have proved continuously successful: tattoo culture (Ink, Bad Ink, Best Ink, Epic Ink, LA Ink, etc.) and black people fighting in a particular shared setting (take your pick).
I ask M if it’s a fun show to work on and she says it’s crazy. Crazy and exhausting. It requires a lot.
“A producer is always a therapist,” she tells me.
“Yeah, but a therapist who’s filming,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says.
“So not really like a therapist,” I say.
“No, not really, I guess,” she says. “A little. Okay, for me, I can say that I try to be there as a friend.”
“But a friend that’s filming,” I say.
We go on like this for a while.
The only reason M got this particular job is because production needed a shake-up. This is season 5 they’re filming, and relationships between the cast and their original field producers were growing combative. Early seasons provide a particular passion, openness and camaraderie stoked by the newness of opportunity. But when that withers and the cast stops trusting, the original dynamic with the original people is screwed. Fresh blood, fresh trust, fresh performance.
M was told it was between her and a black guy to fill one of the new positions, and the question was who would draw what reaction? It came down to implied solidarity versus the what-the-fuck remove of M, a chalky pale stranger who’d spent most of her career working on cooking shows.
M wears her hair in prairie-girl braids to work. Sometimes she dances poorly for the cast before a big shoot, so they may laugh at her before she looks at them. They call her Lightskin now, which suggests trust. All good things. The give-and-take, the real-life rapport, is needed to foster any material worth watching.
“Sometimes I don’t even really have to prod much anymore,” M says. “It’s just, like, Boom. They are so loud. And you can’t make up baby-mama drama, it’s just there, and I’m just like, Sweetie, how does it feel when your baby daddy goes to prison again? And she tells me. Again. Stuff like that.”
She smiles, chuckles into her Starbucks. “It’s crazy,” she says. “I’m, like, a crazy manager. Part of me wants to be like, Honey, don’t say that, you don’t want that out there, but then it’s like, maybe she does? And we need that out there for the show.”
I ask M if the power dynamic ever feels weird—handling the footage of someone else’s self-performance, in general, and particularly being the white person tasked with filming these black stars at their most combustible.
“No, I film everybody the same,” she says. “There’s no difference. I film people; I don’t film color.”
I make a joke that doesn’t land about a new kind of retro reality show being shot in black-and-white. Then we sit silent for a moment.
I believe her intentions; I hear no malice in her voice. But good intentions, or really a lack of any stated intention, will inevitably be complicated by the all-important question of what makes for good material. That’s what we’re talking around here—a question that eventually falls at the feet of the viewer and is always preferable to ignore: What do we want out of the dramas of these specific lives?
We’re on the Upper West Side, where M lives just twenty blocks or so from where she shoots, across one of New York’s most famous racial borders. Tomorrow she’ll head back to the set in Harlem, which, despite gentrification, still seems to play nationally as a stand-in for all blackness, to continue the work of providing her viewers with the shoehorned, anthropological-ish drama of a world meant to appear familiar to some, foreign to others, certainly foreign to her, but that doesn’t matter because you don’t need to understand a place to know how it will play.
The ambient noise of the packed Sunday Starbucks fills in the silence. I push my recorder closer to her on the table.
“Noncontrolled environment,” she says. “I know how that goes.”
I ask M if she’s proud when she sees the show. She tells me she never watches, just gathers. She’s heard all the stories; she doesn’t need to tune in for extra saturation. Watch too much of this stuff, she says, and you start to worry about the state of the world.
13
[REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:
Hello my name is______________ I have three daughters two of which are twins and one single. My family is full of clowns and characters which is never a dull moment in our home. I myself as the parent make people laugh even when not expected. it is always drama with my girls because people always forget my oldest daughter and own the twins as if she don’t exist. anyways on to a day and life of me and my girls we have a motto that everyday we on a diet witch is a saying then by the end of the day I reply we will diet tomorrow lol as the kids say mama we say this every day. I tell them one day we will be rich and can have all the diet food that our heart can offer back to our life all we do is fuss daily because everyone wants to use the others clothes, shoes. make-up etc….I feel as if you use me and my girls you will have a treat to deal with.
—from www.castingcallhub.com
Yesterday I returned from a run and described to you a little girl I ran by who was still in a church dress, with fake-diamond earrings, leaping with joy in the gutter in front of her family home, like a full-on human except much smaller and less encumbered by self-awareness. You asked for an impression and I did it, my weight shaking the house as I tried to convey what had looked like weightlessness. You told me you liked the fact that I noticed and remembered.
Last week a baby rested its head on your shoulder, and hours later you said, I’m gonna cry, before trying to describe the warmth of its cheek, and then you did cry and said, This is so stupid. I told you it wasn’t stupid at all and held you.
Sometimes you say, I snap too much, I lose control, and I’ll never be able to treat a kid with the patience they need. I tell you that’s not true.
Sometimes I say, I worry that I’ll take my failures out on a kid, like I don’t have the capacity to wish better for them than I wish for myself. You tell me that’s not true.
I read an essay by a writer who was raising a terminally ill child and I panicked all day, but I did not show you the essay, which I allowed myself to think was an altruistic gesture.
So many conversations feel like all speculation, which is a new rush, voicing still-unreal selves, but also a new anxiety. During commercials, more and more, we tell each other about the people we want to be in the future, people who seem like composite characters. I run our faces through that insta-aging app, and we laugh and then pretend to cry at the image, which covers nicely any temptation to really cry.
Love is expectation is exhaustion is excitement is fear, is the most common observation to make.
Sometimes you say, Let’s be done talking for now, and unmute the lives on-screen, and I don’t acknowledge the relief when the volume returns, always a little louder than I expected.
* * *
—
On The Little Couple, Bill and Jen went to China to adopt a baby boy. We were waiting for this episode, and it delivered—shots of these white-bread Texans with two distinct types of skeletal dysplasia wandering around the Forbidden City. Then there was a lovely climactic scene of the new family of three on a giant hotel bed in Beijing before flying home. The baby they named Will had just fallen asleep after a da
y of screaming, and Jen and Bill stared at each other silently over his soft, breathing body, with a mixture of love and terror. In the following season, they went to India to adopt a baby girl—less fanfare since some of the novelty was gone but still solid TV. Bill sat next to the baby on the way to the airport, and she had giant, coal-black eyes, but she wouldn’t look at him no matter how he tried, which would have freaked him out the first time around, but this time he just laughed it off.
Jen wanted to be a mom the natural way, but she’s three feet tall and very narrow hipped, so there’s a great chance her frame would prevent her from carrying a baby to term. Watching her discuss the painful journey toward motherhood is inspiring, excruciating, wonderful.
We have, while watching her, described Jen as adorable, which is deeply condescending and wrong, particularly because her accomplishments and her resolve are more herculean than anything. But the show depends on the balance between the two—the heartstring-tugging juxtaposition of her admirableness and her otherness: There’s her squeaky doll voice, and also a personality that seems, well, adorable—self-effacing, goody-goody, relentlessly and sincerely optimistic. But then there’s the hugely impressive fact that she is a brilliant neonatologist, though of course we’d be less interested in the scenes of her brilliance if they didn’t show her doing rounds in her toddler-size white coat. Unadorable are her hospital scenes as she stoically discusses the rare cancer in her uterus, yet somehow it is still an adorable visual when the camera focuses on a wigmaker measuring the dimensions of her newly shaved head.
Jen seems to be (is?) so thoroughly good. We watch her sometimes explicitly for a reminder of the goodness in people. We speak about our own hypothetical future as parents, or more fully realized professionals, or better people in an unspecified way, and we speak to her as the ultimate model. Her goodness feels good to discuss. But there’s always the background knowledge that we would not watch her goodness if it didn’t come attached to her pained, abnormal body. We would not watch her goodness if it didn’t feel, in its wonky scale to the world, like it was saying something about our attempted goodness, like if she can achieve such kind, competent humanity at three feet tall, why can’t we when the world is built for us?
We feel and we gawk. Or we feel through gawking, which is maybe worse. We feel for Jen and Bill because there they are trying to put together a crib, like parents in a bland commercial, but the bars are so big in their hands, the directions spread out across the floor of their den like a carpet.
* * *
—
In the most recent season, Bill’s doctor tells him he needs to exercise more because his knees are bad. Bill groans good-naturedly because that’s what he always does, but he acquiesces. What follows is a shot staged to mimic a healthy natural activity: the family walking the dogs. C or M would call this a life pickup, a shot that a postproduction team says it needs to fill in whatever life stories are addressed in a particular episode, while reinforcing the theme.
The shot opens on Bill, flanked by his children, asking if they’re ready to go. They’re on the sidewalk outside their suburban Dallas home. The grass on the lawn is browning. There’s a man in the distance working on his car in a driveway, leaning down over an open hood. Bill narrates the beginning of the scene, reminding his children that the doctor said it’s important to exercise, important for everyone but for Daddy in particular. There’s dirty water in the gutters of the street, and his son, holding one dog’s leash, keeps stumbling uncomfortably close to the water.
“Say, watch out,” Bill tells his son, and his son mimics him with screechy imprecision.
The dogs, scraggly Chihuahuas, tug ahead, and the children totter behind holding leashes, and then Bill, face slightly pained, lumbers behind them. Behind him appears Jen, who has been picking up the dogs’ shit, and is now holding a sagging plastic bag, hurrying to catch up. Everything is moving very slowly but feels very fast. There’s a camera in front of the family, rolling away from them as they move. It’s low enough to the ground to capture them at waist level, so we can see their knees moving as they walk. This adds to the scale of everything above them—the giant homes and trees, the parked cars. It all looms. It’s impossible for me to watch without thinking about the difficulty of capturing this family face-on, and the possibility that someone may have just plopped a camera on a skateboard or something, and that the family has to walk along like it’s a normal evening, despite a skateboard camera contraption winking at them, always a few yards ahead.
Nobody in the family, not even the toddlers, gives any physical or facial suggestion that they’re aware of the camera, despite the fact that their actions appear so specifically choreographed to move along with a camera suited to their particular circumstances. They’ve walked a single, short block, and they stop at the corner. They stand in a bunch in front of a blue fire hydrant, and the shot lingers for just a second, emphasizing the contextual enormity of the fire hydrant. They make small talk about the way leashes get tangled with legs. Bill does a funny thing where he pretends the leashes are reins and the dogs reindeer; then his son copies him. Jen laughs.
There’s a beat to allow us to soak in the sweetness of it all, but also the sheer exhaustion—a single block conquered by six tiny bodies in a two-minute odyssey. The shit bag looks heavy in Jen’s hands. Bill looks sore. The children are tired and distracted, and the odds of them not wandering into the gutters seem to be diminishing quickly. The camera is moving around them. The guy fixing his engine is still visible in the background. What a grueling apparatus this is, yet they bear it with such quiet grace.
A good scene, we decide together. Simple, clean, yet still weighty. We’re reveling again in the bland dignity of the completely functional yet specifically challenged. We’re reveling in the spectacle of the unspectacular—walking the dogs along a sidewalk next to browning grass, holding a plastic bag full of shit.
* * *
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Back at the restaurant in Brooklyn, C pushes her hash browns around on her plate and tells me that it’s the same thing as when babies are first parked in front of the TV.
When she was breaking into the business, she was at a production company that did a lot of kids’ shows, and she got mentored over lunches by this powerhouse kids’ TV producer. This was back when TeleTubbies was the undisputed king, and the producer told C there’s a reason why all the kids shows feature characters that are brightly colored and not quite human but still look like a baby. In the focus groups, you could actually see babies go through the journey to identification. They would point at the screen and say Baby, over and over, but at first it was unclear if that meant anything deeper than when a baby points at a car and yells Car!, waiting to be praised. At a certain point, though, when the babies began to take on that totally docile, almost boneless posture, fully enraptured by the screen, they started to point at their own chins, the way parents teach them to do, and say, Baby, and then back to the screen, Baby, and then they’d crawl a little closer.
C mimics this to me over the table, touching her chin, reaching out to mine, saying, Baby. We laugh. But, she tells me, that basic idea, babies crawling closer to the screen after touching their own chins, has helped inform the way she sees her own work. She understands that it’s the same mechanism. She’s trying to make adults crawl a little closer.
“That’s all we’re doing,” she says. “We’re seeing a bright image dancing around on a screen. But it’s shaped enough like us, it makes sounds that we make, it emotes like us. Baby.”
* * *
—
Honey Boo Boo might be coming back to TV! I’m not sure when or exactly the form the new show will take, but Mama June posted to Facebook that the wait is soon going to be over. She thanked us for our support.
Whatever the new show is, it probably won’t be on TLC anymore, since TLC issued that statement after the sexual-abuse scandal that their p
riority was the family’s “ongoing comfort and well-being.” Some channel, it seems, was brave enough (or unscrupulous enough, or greedy enough) to take the plunge, though. Some channel recognized what the people (That’s us! We’re the people!) wanted, and it sure as shit wasn’t the comfort provided by privacy.
If I had to guess what’s going to happen on the first episode of the family’s triumphant return, it would involve someone, and probably multiple people, farting. I look forward to this. Not since Blazing Saddles has the communal fart joke been so well employed. I assume the producers of the show were thinking of Blazing Saddles in some of the earlier fart scenes because they’re constructed almost like an homage—bodies spread around in a lumpy circle, near-unbelievably Southern accents competing with the sound of proud, brassy toots.
We love farts. Who doesn’t? People fart and it’s almost always funny. Baby, right? And we love the celebration of fart loving, I suppose because it’s still titillating to see someone unembarrassed by the bodily. Sometimes we provide that opportunity for each other. All the Brussels sprouts gas us up, and we are so at ease that we can lie on the couch after dinner, release, and share a giggle, jog the still-potent memory of the first time you farted in bed, how the progression from your horror to our collective laughter felt like a milestone.
By my count, there are three human behaviors that are still taboo in public—fucking, farting, and eating unabashedly. Honey Boo Boo’s family eats and farts (that’s most of the show), and when there’s even a suggestion of fucking, between Mama June and Sugar Bear, the incongruity seems even more transgressive, so I love it even more.
Remember that scene when Mama June and Sugar Bear get massages for no reason? Such an easy shtick—people like that getting massages?
Sugar Bear says, You droolin’ on the pillow yet? Mama June says, Not yet; I’m droolin’ but I’m just tryin’ to suck it back in. Her masseuse stays admirably silent and continues to run her knuckles down Mama June’s bare back, forming grooves of freckled flesh. After the massage, Mama June and Sugar Bear stand outside, reflecting on the experience.