Taste Expectations: Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo

“Obviously, people watch because it is so awful. You can’t believe it and so you keep tuning in. But is it right to watch? Only to the extent that it is acceptable to accompany strangers to the restroom” (Parker). So says Washington Post critic Kathleen Parker of The Learning Channel’s (TLC’s) Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, a spin-off of their hit pageant series Toddlers and Tiaras starring seven-year-old Alana Thompson, better known as Honey Boo-Boo, and her self-proclaimed redneck family from Georgia.  My own first judgment, based solely on the commercials I had seen for the show, was that Honey Boo-Boo was yet another trashy reality television program.  Like Parker, who compares the show to “carnival sideshows of [her] childhood [like] the bearded lady…or the fat lady,” I assumed people only watched the program for the same reasons one gawks at a car wreck—one simply cannot look away out of pure astonishment.

Neither Parker nor I watched an episode in its entirety prior to making our assessments, yet we felt we were justified in making them, especially when our harangue was echoed by many, in a variety of media from humorous jabs in the monologues of late-night talk show hosts to harsh invectives that could be classified as downright bullying posted on social media sites.  According to People Magazine, in addition to its lack of cultural substance, “the show has also drawn criticism for what many see as promoting southern stereotypes and an unhealthy lifestyle” (Tauber). I could never understand how so many people had found this unfiltered, vulgar, ill-mannered family so endearing as to warrant them receiving their own show.  But when so many people consume one diversion, can it truly lack cultural substance?  Do people only enjoy it because it offers them an opportunity to marvel at—or even pity—another’s freakishness? Or is there something more to glean from the antics of Honey Boo-Boo and company? After greater investigation, I discovered my original distaste was not my own individually formed opinion but, as Carl Wilson suggests in Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, “a symbolic association [I] use to set [myself] apart from those whose social ranking [I perceive to be] beneath [me]” (Wilson 89).

I suspect my aversion to Honey Boo-Boo began with my disdain for reality television in general. To me, it is a system that rewards stupidity and values outrageous behavior, regardless of its damaging effects on culture and society. One can almost feel the brain cells rotting away with every staged argument, fistfight, or other source of drama that these shows attempt to pass off as entertainment. People are famous simply for being famous, and networks can make easy money because they don’t have to pay writers to produce any original material.

Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, in particular, combines elements of several other popular reality shows, a fact that draws many viewers in while driving me away. For one, it still holds the “What are those parents thinking?” appeal of its parent show, Toddlers and Tiaras.  Alana’s older sister, 17-year-old Anna “Chickadee” Shannon, was pregnant when the show began and now has a daughter named Kaitlyn, a development that draws in the fans of MTV’s Teen Mom. Their mother, June “Mama” Shannon, is also an avid couponer, a popular phenomenon idolized on TLC’s Extreme Couponing. And, of course, the family as a whole oozes redneck charm with their frank divulgences of bodily functions and general lack of any decorum—to the point that in the second episode, Mama must hire an etiquette coach since Honey Boo-Boo’s lack of refinement cost her victory at a pageant. So there is also something for audiences enthralled by the redneck lifestyle of Swamp People, Hillbilly Hand-Fishing, and the new Buckwild.

Amber Ring, an 18-year-old college student from Waukesha, Wisconsin who grew up in much the same habitat as me, sees the show differently.  Contrary to what Parker believed, she does not watch Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo because it is so awful, but because it makes her laugh.  When asked whether she was laughing at the family or with them, she answered, “Both, I guess, because they laugh at themselves all the time. They know they’re not perfect, and they enjoy not being perfect and don’t care about having tons of things.  It’s refreshing to see” (Ring).  Fans like Amber may also be drawn to the judgment-free environment of the family home; Mama “teaches her kids that beauty comes in all sizes. ‘I tell my girls all the time that I would still love them if they were 1,000 lbs.,’ she says, ‘and I know that if I weighed 1,000 lbs. they would still love me’” (Tauber).  Ultimately, as Amber puts it, the show is about “a real family, different from the other stuff out there because they aren’t rich or spoiled… They don’t live in LA or drive nice cars; for fun, they do things like go to the corn maze” (Ring).  And for fans like her, this makes them more authentic and strengthens the connection audiences feel towards them.

The above-mentioned points seem as valid as any reason for which people enjoy any type of entertainment, and it forced me to question my own system of evaluating taste.  For some, Honey Boo-Boo speaks to the human condition as much as any Charles Dickens tome, perhaps more so because it is more applicable and relatable to today’s society.  Is one any less insightful, or in some way inferior to the other?  Considering that Dickens originally published his stories serially and wrote them as much for suspense and entertainment as for social commentary, future generations may look upon our reality television programs as similarly revealing of contemporary truths. According to Joel Brattin, Professor of English at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in an article on PBS.org, “Dickens was always a social critic, because he was always aware that we live in a society and must treat one another accordingly. He was eager to reveal the often shameful ways in which we behave, and to make careful judgments about how we might act with greater decency, generosity, and fairness to one another.”  In the spirit of this pillar of the scholarly literature canon, Honey Boo-Boo challenges the judgments we make about people who differ from ourselves.

Bourdieu, as explained by Wilson, maintains that “tastes are the result of the interaction of habitus [meaning both your home base and habits] and fields [social institutions through which we pursue our goals]—attempts […] to prevent ourselves from ever being mistaken for someone of a lower status” (Wilson 90).  This seems applicable in my case: though I am not from the South like Honey Boo-Boo, I am from Wisconsin, which can also be similarly stereotyped as podunk, hillbilly, or redneck due to its large agricultural industry. But I do not live on a farm—I live in the largest of the few cities in the state. Milwaukee and its surrounding suburbs, collectively called the Greater Metro Area, and the bucolic remainder of the state has always dissociated themselves from one another.  Consequently, I have been conditioned through my socialization and habitus that somehow people who do live a more rural lifestyle are inferior.   This, combined with my current immersion in the world of academia, which considers itself highbrow and generally looks down upon so-called low-brow forms of entertainment, is perhaps what caused my distaste. In other words, before embarking on this reflection, disliking Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo was just another way in which I try to distance myself from the supposed lower status of the so-called redneck—somehow in my mind I equated liking a harmless, rambunctious seven-year-old with being “white trash”—a disparaging slang term for an impoverished white person, especially one perceived to be ignorant or lazy. I now see that my condescension towards Boo-Boo and its fans was a judgment without qualification that something was inferior or trashy simply because it was different from my own socially-constructed opinions.

Having become aware of “my blindspots [which] were a regional and cultural bias,” I could attempt to cast those aside and reexamine the show (Wilson 15).  Though it is by no means my new favorite program, I can now watch the show and find the family’s antics—such as toilet papering the house to celebrate their parents’ anniversary—mildly amusing, worthy of an eye roll and a chuckle rather than a judgmental condemnation of inferiority. Because deep down, haven’t we all secretly giggled at a fart or picked our nose?  Out of reverence for social etiquette, we don’t admit to or perform these actions publicly, but just because others are more open and care-free does not make them lesser in any way. After challenging my first opinion of something, I now understand this, and I am no longer “so selfish as to exclude other tastes from legitimacy” (Wilson 155).

Works Cited

Brattin, Joel J. “Dickens: Social Critic.” Dickens. PBS, 2003. Web. 18 Apr. 2013.

Parker, Kathleen. “The trouble with Honey Boo Boo.” Washington Post, The Sept. 0001: Newspaper Source. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

Ring, Amber. “The Appeal of Honey Boo-Boo.” Online interview. 10 Feb. 2013.

Tauber, Michelle. “Much Ado About BOO BOO.” People 78.11 (2012): 58-61. Academic Search Complete. Web. 18 Feb. 2013.

Wilson, Carl. Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. New York: Continuum, 2007. Print.