Реальность TLC: как телеканал превращает жизнь обычных американок в шоу о маргиналах

While society has moved away from the type of freak show that showcases people with unusual physical characteristics, TLC has built a successful business out of putting them on TV instead. From conjoined twins to little people, the majority of TLC’s programming is made up of reality shows about people P. T. Barnum used to display in a museum, navigating a culture that only pretends to frown upon their exploitation. Stay up-to-date with the local arts scene Subscribe to the weekly St. Louis Arts+Culture newsletter to discover must-attend art exhibits, performances, festivals, and more. Even though TLC’s new show Double Lives of Suburban Wives doesn’t feature anyone with physical abnormalities (outside a few elective augmentations), it does focus on a modern kind of marginalized oddity: married women who make online amateur pornography. The suburban wives the show follows all started nude modeling for similar reasons. Basically: their families needed money and their respective husbands suggested they had rockin’ enough bods to be on OnlyFans, which is kind of sweet if you don’t think about it for too long. But online nude modeling is by itself not unusual enough for TLC to exploit. I googled “naked ladies” just to see how common it was and, yep, a lot of stuff pops up. So the aspect of these women that the show frames as its preposterous outlier is that they’re all family-focused, Midwest Christians, offering the type of self-deluded, trainwreck fodder that TLC redneckognizes as ratings gold. Take Macy, for example. A devout Christian and one of the main stars of the show, she regularly speaks to the camera about how difficult it is juggling her faith while helping men sin. Her father is a pastor, and she’s worried about telling him the truth about her career. Her performer name is Church Girl. The show wants you to find this all to be very hypocritical as it crosscuts from her performing in her bedroom to her standing in front of a church. And then there’s Bri, an ex-English teacher with a master’s degree who might be familiar to St. Louis news consumers. She lost her teaching job after her OnlyFans account somehow spread around the high school she taught at. Her firing received widespread media attention, which afforded her a lot of free advertising, helping her to start earning six figures a month in her newfound career. The other featured women’s stories are variations of these same themes. Faith, family, and money are pretty much the only tropes the recent OnlyFans story genre has, and this year’s Apple TV series Margo’s Got Money Troubles (and the book it was based on) already effectively explored these conflicts in earnest. But TLC is less interested in examining these internal struggles than it is in exhibiting people who are challenged by them. They don’t want to dig into the exact reasons why someone becomes an OnlyFans model, they just want to squeeze some thematic drama and intrigue out of their lives, and they will do it as dishonestly as they need to. Take the first episode, when the wives are unexpectedly kicked out of a gym and a producer tells them it’s because the gym staff recognized them as OnlyFans models. The show frames the situation as the women being discriminated against, instead of what definitely actually happened instead, which was the gym recognizing them as OnlyFans models being followed around by an entire camera crew. If you’re a business, and an adult content creator comes into your place with a camera crew, there’s only one thing you’re going to think they’re up to. Here’s a firsthand account of how dishonest reality TV can be: when I worked as a camera assistant on the inaugural season of the reality dating show Farmer Wants a Wife, the producers realized they needed transition footage of the female contestants driving from one dating challenge to the other, but the women weren’t available when they needed them. So instead they put me and another male production worker in blonde wigs and cowboy hats, and filmed the trucks from far away to make it look like the women were in the truck. These shots made it on air, and I went on to become the farmer’s wife. It’s not just the imagery that’s manipulated. While the people on the screen are real, or at least as real as they can be with a camera in their face, the situations, the relationships, the conflicts, are mostly forced, if not completely fabricated. Behind every scene is a series of producers pulling the strings, encouraging on-camera talent to be combative towards each other, even when they appear to be best friends off-screen. In an interview on SLM’s The 314 Podcast, Double Lives producer Amy Marie Yeager acknowledged that manipulating its on-camera talent is an essential part of making these shows. “As producers, we have a certain part that we may be trying to bring out of them, that they don’t even realize we’re trying to get out of them,” Yeager said. But these shows purposely cast people who are extremely prone to the types of suggestions Yeager is referring to. If you don’t seem like someone who is easy to manipulate, then I’m so sorry, you don’t get to be on the TLC porno show. And the dishonesty in this particular show extends to the alleged location. The show is supposedly set in St. Louis, but the only indication the characters live here is when the husbands tell onlookers they’re in a show about St. Louis housewives. Otherwise, none of the locations they visit remotely resemble anything I’ve ever seen. The only location that provides a clue as to where they really live is a chain restaurant Macy eats at with her family called Big Whiskey. But Big Whiskey is not a restaurant that exists in St. Louis. In fact, the nearest location is in Jefferson City, which is more than two hours away. There’s also a big Whiskey in Lebanon, and two locations in Springfield, which are about as close to Kansas City as they are to St. Louis. Pretending the show takes place in St. Louis when the location is actually much more rural speaks to the disregard TLC’s reality shows generally have for all middle America. Shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and 1000-Lb. Sisters depict noncoastal society as a joke, a monolithic hellhole devoid of culture or class; unable to be saved from its squalor, yet salvageable enough to exploit for money. Double Lives of Suburban Wives appears to take aim at Jesus-loving OnlyFans models, but they’re really taking aim at all of us. To TLC, middle America is one big freak show, and we should stop gawking at the reality they’ve invented. Check out Sarah Fenske’s interview with Double Lives producer Amy Marie Yeager on The 314 Podcast.