The Big Makeover
by Farrell Childe, licensed television critic
Daytime television is always full of women being made over. For years the producers of daytime shows have known they can always interest women in watching other women get a new hairstyle or makeup or clothes.
Then Jenny Jones started to offer makeovers as a cure for personal problems – for example, teenagers who were behaving irresponsibly were given makeovers with the idea that if you made them look more responsible they would start to act more responsibly. In recent years, though, makeovers have gone even farther than that.
Makeovers reached their pinnacle with Starting Over, a syndicated reality series which this year won a daytime Emmy. Starting Over makes women over inside as well as out. Unhappy women take up residence in a mansion where they are trained – by a clinical psychologist and two so-called life coaches – to lead new, more rewarding lives. The show has described its mission as healing America one desperate housewife at a time. And although most of the makeover is mental and emotional, the gals still get a traditional makeover when they "graduate."
I must acknowledge that the show is reasonably responsible. It doesn't promise instant happiness, nor does it claim that once women have been made over by the show their problems are over. What bothers me is that it is always women who have to be made over.
Iyanla Vanzant, one of the two life coaches, has said the show doesn't make men over because men still haven't realized that it's safe to have feelings. Well, lack of feeling would change the show somewhat. Kleenex must constitute a considerable portion of its budget. Ms Vanzant's point, though, seems to be that men are less likely to realize they have problems.
Well, perhaps that is why the prisons are full of men – they just don't get a grip on their problems in time. On the other hand, maybe men aren't as likely as women to believe that there is a correct way to behave and that failure to behave that way will cause you problems.
For that is the message of the show. The use of the term coaching is revealing. Women are not given advice, they are told how to behave. The troubled women on the show are taken out of the everyday lives in which they have problems, and the coaches are not part of those everyday lives, but the coaches still believe they can tell the women how to deal with their problems. The problems, that is, are considered to arise not out of the other people and the pressures in the women's everyday lives, but out of their own failure to behave in appropriate ways. Just as one doesn't wear white after Labour Day, one doesn't indulge in low self-esteem. One must be a Good Girl.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, though, and Starting Over does publish on its website reports of how graduates of the program are doing. If these reports are accurate, some of the women have indeed initiated important changes in their lives (whether they're desirable changes is another question, of course, as is whether they would have made these changes anyway). Most of the women, though, seem to have gone back to the life they led before – back to school, back to work (two are bartenders, a fact which interests me if no one else), "catching up with family and friends."
As you have probably guessed, I have mixed feelings about this show. I fear, though, that the issues I have mixed feelings about are irrelevant to the show's popularity. I fear that the chief attraction of Starting Over is that of many other popular daytime shows – it gives the audience someone to feel superior to. The show's practice of showing clips of some of the women gossiping about the shortcomings of one of the other residents makes this possibility seem more likely. Starting Over's feel-good sappiness also frequently gets out of control, which gives the audience someone to laugh at.
As La Rochefoucauld wrote, we all have enough strength to survive the misfortunes of others. And now you get Emmys for it.
May 25, 2005
The Big Makeover © John FitzGerald, 2005
