Summer TV

Oh, summer television. How I love you, how I hate you. During the summer, television gives us the eccentric, the unusual, the cheerful, the brightly colored, shows like Eureka, Mad Men, Hung, and Burn Notice. But these great shows are few and far between, highlights in an otherwise bleak landscape of uninspiring reruns, degrading reality programming, and the occasional launch of something new and truly awful.

Into that last category falls a show that just started its second season, and when it first premiered last summer, I thought to myself, “I seriously need a blog so I can whine about how terrible this show is.” Well, The Secret Life of the American Teenager is back, and I am now happily be-blogged, so here goes.

Man, I dislike this show. Truly astonishing in cloying sincerity, the premise is a 7th Heaven rewrite of the current trend of teenage motherhood plots. Poor young Amy Juergens, doe-eyed Disney Princess and unlikely, uncool band geek has been wickedly (wickedly!) tricked into premarital sex by the oh-so-cool, angry, un-Christian, unfeeling, and unpleasant foster child Ricky. She is pregnant. “How could this happen?!” she continually wails, and her wail is echoed by her insipid, dumb-witted, blabbermouth friends, her mother, and at last her father, who finally gets an answer. “How could this happen?!” he wails. “…Sex!” she cries, her giant anime eyes filling with tears.

From band geek to pregnant teenager

Like the soap operas this show so earnestly desires to distinguish itself from, everything that happens on the show looks like it’s being acted in a huge, unmiced theater – in order for the audience to comprehend the plot and the range of emotions, everything must be portrayed in enormous, super-stylized gestures. Upset fathers grip their heads and moan. Friends caught gossiping raise one hand over their mouths and arch their eyebrows, forming Marilyn Monroe gasps of “Oopsie!” In order for Amy’s younger sister’s sarcasm to break through the show’s candy-coating, she appears so sullen that she walks around in a living death, speaking in a chilling monotone with her eyes rolled to high heaven. Perhaps these gestures would be necessary if we were watching them all perform in a packed theater in Victorian London, but coupled with unbearably close shots of everyone’s face, the effect becomes nauseating.

Amy gives birth at the end of the first season, so the second season has to find some new drama (because of course, caring for a newborn doesn’t supply sufficient opportunity for heartfelt declarations and gnashing of teeth). To rehash its previous damsel-in-distress formula, the season two premiere focuses on Grace the Gorgeous Christian deciding to have sex with her hunky football star boyfriend Jack. This fall from grace (harhar) still isn’t quite enough melodrama, and the show ratchets up the stakes by then killing her father in a tragic airplane crash, forcing Grace to believe God has punished her for her sins. As Grace herself articulates in the next episode, these girls are punished for sexuality – Amy gets pregnant and God kills Grace’s dad. Amy brushes this off by retorting that her son isn’t a punishment,¹ but Grace remains unconvinced. “I had sex, and now Dad is dead. And he had a horrible death because I had incredible sex…if I hadn’t enjoyed having sex so much, then Dad would still be alive, and you know it, Mom.” Grace’s character allows the show to exploit an incredibly old paradigm: she is the virgin/whore, simultaneously innocent and lustful, weeping over her dead father while wrapped in the same pink and green striped comforter that was the recent site of her wanton indiscretion. Meanwhile, Amy’s caring but befuddled boyfriend Ben gawps at how much larger her breasts have grown while nursing her baby. The Secret Life of the American Teenager goes to the bank on all this sexy fallen virgin business while couching it in the language of a didactic Book of Virtues. It’s gross, and really unoriginal.

From wanton lover to grieving sinner

It’s also incredibly popular, which is one of the discouraging qualities of summer programming. Summer is sometimes an opportunity to try out new material, to do something different and let a smart, stylish show like Mad Men find an audience. But the same entertainment vacuum that allows people to stumble over Mad Men also builds audiences for shows like The Secret Life of the American Teenager.

¹ Just in case these characters weren’t generic enough already, Amy decides to name her son John. The name sounds forced and strange falling whole out of her mouth, as though she’s perpetually quoting from someone else: “my son, John.”