Enter
organization mounted a successful
campaign to halt CBS’s production
of The Real Beverly Hillbillies, in
which a poor rural family would be
relocated to Hollywood, with cameras recording the resulting culture
clash for cheap laughs.
“Every community has aberrant
people, easy-to-exploit exceptions
for reality television producers
looking to put reckless behavior on
display,” said Davis. “All of the producers of these shows say that they
are trying to augur some authenticity, but in the end, they end up using their subjects for ridicule.”
“There are certain people who
they feel they have permission to
ridicule,” Davis added, and the rural poor are one such group.
Davis echoes one of Buckwild
original critics, University of Kentucky philosophy professor Alexandra Bradner, who wrote about the
show for Salon back in January:
MTV would have us believe
that the kids of Buckwild are
free and creative in ways that
alienated, urban kids with
cellphones will never be. But
there are deeper reasons why
Grandee says: “I don’t have no
phone. I don’t have a Facebook.
I don’t have none of that Inter-
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IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
05.12.13
net stuff.” If we were to interrogate those reasons, we would
have to care about him and
help him. And that’s no fun.
The non-Appalachian viewing
audience needs this manufactured other, in order to see itself
as sophisticated and cosmopolitan — as better. Bradley
and her more urban peers seem
to need their “country boys” in
There are responsible
ways to document the reality
of rural life without having
to sacrifice the dignity of the
larger community.”
this way as well. Without the
foil, we would have to face our
own poverties, our own barbarism, our own shelteredness,
our own actual lack of sophistication.
There are responsible ways
to document the reality of rural
life without having to sacrifice
the dignity of the larger community. Back when we first took up
the issue of Buckwild, Huffington
Post politics editor Paige Lavender