Monday, January 21

The Week the Women Left

Tonight I watched the first show in a series called "The Week The Women Left." It is a reality show about a social experiment conducted in Hardisty, Alberta in June 2007. During one week in June, this small Canadian town of just over 700 people saw 85% of its women embark on a week long vacation.



The television crew filmed the cocky husbands (please excuse this unfortunate pun) talking about how they would do just fine provided that they remember how to sweep up the crumbs and work the washer and dryer. Maybe one honest fellow admitted that he was going to miss his wife. This, of course, is the irony of reality TV.

The people who film, edit and choreograph the lives of these unwitting actors have much more creative control of real life than they are willing to admit. Consider your family's version of Uncle John or Aunt Jane who acts like a complete moron as soon as the video-cam captures them in its viewfinder. It is the rare person who acts normally on the other end of the camera. You can bet that I don't walk around every day with a hand in front of my face trying to shield myself from the glances of innocent strangers, yet see me on tape....

The women were a little more honest in their vulnerability. They appeared much more insecure than the men. More worried that they wouldn't be missed. Worried that their roles were, at best, supporting actors to their husbands. Worried that the most valuable contribution to their household was as the family's own private maid service. It was sad...no...disappointing how few men seemed to verbalize the importance of their spouse.

I recognize that this town is cowboy capital of Alberta. I sense too that machismo is the prodigious bullfrog in the family gene pool flicking its tongue at the pesky flies of sensitivity and compassion. Surely these men must understand how much currency they would earn from telling their life partner how important she was and how much she would be missed. There seemed to be little evidence of that. I'm not certain whether that is more a reflection on the men of Hardisty or the filmmakers. I'll choose to blame the filmmakers because I really dislike reality TV.

I'm looking forward to next week's episode.

3 comments:

don said...

The problem I see with so called reality TV shows is that they usually don't seem real. Go to an island and then play team games that are totally contrived and vote people off of the island. What's real about that ?

The only reality show I've seen that I liked was a documentary called The Farmer's Daughter on PBS. It was about a young couple who took over a family farm in Kansas if I remember.

The Wordpecker said...

I agree. Reality TV -- as a rule -- is unreal.

Despite my dislike for the genre, I'll watch the next episode and see how it plays out...

Diane Lowe said...

PBS does good reality shows. I liked Frontier House but only because it was in Montana and near where I went to school. So it was relevant to me.

I don't care for reality T.V. either, but I do think that it reveals a lot about humanity.

We're still a bunch of animals. It's pretty sick.