I should start by saying, I do not watch the E! channel. None of the shows appeal to me, aside from the occassional True Hollywood Story, but when I saw the commercials for the new show Bridalplasty, I knew I was going to start watching E!. And after seeing an episode, I’m unsure whether I made a good decision or not.
For those who are unfamiliar with the show, here’s a brief summary:
Brides to be (some already married? i guess) are living in a house together and competing in wedding related challenges (dress, food etc) to win plastic surgery. Each woman has a list of surgeries and each time she wins a challenge, or is the “top bride”, she gets some work done. At the end of each week the three women who scored the lowest on the challenge are summoned to an RSVP ceremony where one of them, the “bottom bride”, is voted off. Eventually there will be one “top bride” who will have received all the surgeries on her list, and wins prizes/money design her dream wedding.
As this series is still going on, I will refrain from lengthy analysis, as I intend to continue watching(how could I not) as to provide a more accurate analysis when the show finally has one “top bride”.
But let’s just look at the RSVP ceremony.
The set is a decked out banquet hall, as though it were actually someone’s wedding. Each of the 3 “bottom brides” sit at their own table, and the other brides stand across the dance floor from them. The hostess calls each bride forward and she must cross the dance floor and chose which table she will sit at. The “bottom bride” is the one with the least amount of people at her table, and is then sent home, with these parting words: “Your quest to be the perfect bride has ended. Your wedding will still go on, it just won’t be perfect”. Not only did you lose the popularity contest, but because you did not get ALL the surgeries on your list, your wedding will be less than those of the women still left in the house.
I will be curious to see if any of the challenges focus, at all, on the actual relationships that these women are in. While cake decorating is an essential skill in marriage building, I would think that maybe working on the actual marriage might be just a little important to, well, the marriage.
3 Comments
Yes, but healthy human behavior isn’t good for ratings!
You know, I get a little sick of people posting about how anti-feminist a show is… all the while saying how they watch it religiously or will continue to keep watching it.
You do know that’s how these shows stay on the air right?
I agree…it’s really hard to engage in feminist analyses of blatantly anti-feminist shows w/o contributing to their success. Sometimes, you just have to understand that the fodder watching the show might give you isn’t worth the ratings you are adding..
Same thing when people write really outrageously sexist things on the web and someone posts it to a feminist blog.. I almost never click through becuse I don’t want to contribute page views. Instead, I have to rely on third party appraisals, which has its own set of limitations.