REBA
TV NOTE 1
I have of late been watching everyweekday, an episode of Reba, an alledged sitcom about a monoparental mother with three children. I say alledged because the life situation Reba is living through strikes me as particularly humiliating and difficult. Her ex-husband lives a few houses down with his new wife and child while Reba is expected to march in solitary maturity. Country singer Reba McIntyre holds the title role, and the scene is upper middle-class Texas.
In real life, artists often do not hold university diplomas because their lives and work are the stuff that intellectual reflect on. William Shakespeare does not need a degree in English, as it were. Reba M. the accomplished singer may well be a match for a philandering dentist husband and then some but Reba the character in the sitcom is the poor soul who worked putting hubby through dental school only to be repudiated for a younger woman and a second family. This is serious business.
Brock the husband is in a semi-depression: the sub- text here being that he may have smoked pot in college and now finds himself in a pleasure deficit situation althoug his objective situation with Reba is excellent, and his second family all that a man might wish for.
So how are the two women to accept each other: with great difficulty.
The children are also a handful, the elder daughter pregnant in high school, and eventually to stay with Reba as the teen-age husband moves in. Implied here is that she might have gotten pregnant to 'catch' him - he is from a rich family - or worse, that there is a strange link with a father she finds more real than her mother: isn't that what the psychology of illegitimacy is meant to be. The'fat'her gets his assistant pregnant, a large 'fat' blonde reminiscent of the daughter.
So this is the set-up, along with a middle Wise-guy daughter with better marks at school, and a young male child. Maybe disconnecting from the father was the best way for Reba to stop having children.
So what does the show make of all this: in fact, not much. Six years of episodes merely shows it to us, under different lighting.
I like the set, which is always the same and has the feel of a theater set. The actors are also very much theater actors, especially the teen-age husband. There is Shakespearian ebullience in a lot of what goes on. And a lot of talk about positive emotion, family solidarity and the like. Reba is making the best out of an unliveable situation, the abnormal is presented as the new normalcy.
Reba likes to drink; that is her charming fault. I don't know that I am particularly charmed.
The critics of the show I have read on the web make much of Reba's relationship with the second wife, the very statuesque Norma Jean. The whole seems to be a gigantic digestive exercise, coming to grips with class difference, different cultural models of the family, different intelligence levels, communication between age groups.
Television is candy. I would not want this to be a weekly show I would be waiting for. There is an episode every day and I am starting to catch shows I have seen before. I also know that Reba's predicament is unreal. No Texas housewife would surf such a series of arrangements. All the elements are present in north American life but not together. And I am happy they are not.
TV NOTE 1
I have of late been watching everyweekday, an episode of Reba, an alledged sitcom about a monoparental mother with three children. I say alledged because the life situation Reba is living through strikes me as particularly humiliating and difficult. Her ex-husband lives a few houses down with his new wife and child while Reba is expected to march in solitary maturity. Country singer Reba McIntyre holds the title role, and the scene is upper middle-class Texas.
In real life, artists often do not hold university diplomas because their lives and work are the stuff that intellectual reflect on. William Shakespeare does not need a degree in English, as it were. Reba M. the accomplished singer may well be a match for a philandering dentist husband and then some but Reba the character in the sitcom is the poor soul who worked putting hubby through dental school only to be repudiated for a younger woman and a second family. This is serious business.
Brock the husband is in a semi-depression: the sub- text here being that he may have smoked pot in college and now finds himself in a pleasure deficit situation althoug his objective situation with Reba is excellent, and his second family all that a man might wish for.
So how are the two women to accept each other: with great difficulty.
The children are also a handful, the elder daughter pregnant in high school, and eventually to stay with Reba as the teen-age husband moves in. Implied here is that she might have gotten pregnant to 'catch' him - he is from a rich family - or worse, that there is a strange link with a father she finds more real than her mother: isn't that what the psychology of illegitimacy is meant to be. The'fat'her gets his assistant pregnant, a large 'fat' blonde reminiscent of the daughter.
So this is the set-up, along with a middle Wise-guy daughter with better marks at school, and a young male child. Maybe disconnecting from the father was the best way for Reba to stop having children.
So what does the show make of all this: in fact, not much. Six years of episodes merely shows it to us, under different lighting.
I like the set, which is always the same and has the feel of a theater set. The actors are also very much theater actors, especially the teen-age husband. There is Shakespearian ebullience in a lot of what goes on. And a lot of talk about positive emotion, family solidarity and the like. Reba is making the best out of an unliveable situation, the abnormal is presented as the new normalcy.
Reba likes to drink; that is her charming fault. I don't know that I am particularly charmed.
The critics of the show I have read on the web make much of Reba's relationship with the second wife, the very statuesque Norma Jean. The whole seems to be a gigantic digestive exercise, coming to grips with class difference, different cultural models of the family, different intelligence levels, communication between age groups.
Television is candy. I would not want this to be a weekly show I would be waiting for. There is an episode every day and I am starting to catch shows I have seen before. I also know that Reba's predicament is unreal. No Texas housewife would surf such a series of arrangements. All the elements are present in north American life but not together. And I am happy they are not.
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