Friday, May 6, 2011

TV: Pregnant in Heels

As much as I enjoy watching skill-based competitive reality shows, I have to say that overtime I have grown to actively dislike non-competitive shoes, the ones whose purpose exists to follow a person or group of persons around in their everyday life. Too often it feels like the genre attracts the worse sorts of people and too often becomes train wreck programming.. I caught the beginning of this after an episode of Top Chef Masters and intrigued/horrified, I hit DVR to record the rest. Last night I sat down and watched the rest.

Genre: Reality, Non-Competitive

The Description:
Rosie Pope is a "Pregnancy Concierge" (read: overpriced lifestyle coach) whose job it is to help women with too much money and ego prepare for the trails and tribulations of motherhood. In her own words, " "Women are bitchy anyway," Rosie says. "So, take a rich, bitchy woman, and put a baby inside of them, and then you've got my client."

The Review:
Let's get the little good right out of the way: I like Rosie Pope. Perhaps not the sharpest tool in the tool box, her heart seems to be in the right place and she seems blessedly ego free. Although I find the notion of hiring a coach for this kind of thing to be a bit on the silly side kudos to her for finding a way to make what's probably a fair amount of money off her clients have more money than sense.

The bad: the clients. These clients are every bit as awful as you'd expect them to be. The first couple are Michelle & Gary who clearly aren't the most talkative. Why you may ask? She's Catholic, he's Jewish, and yet somehow they never managed to discuss how they're going to raise their daughter until she was 37 weeks pregnant. And then, her "discussion" was basically "In Catholicism, the child is the religion of the mother. This is my child. She will be Catholic." Not their child. Her child. In fact, the word "mini-me" even came out of her mouth. Poor girl. No matter how much Rosie seems convinced that Michelle was starting to get the idea that this is a child of them both, you know the mother is going to raise her to be a clone and that the father is too spineless to do anything about it. She did at least resolve the conflict by bringing in a therapist and getting them to compromise at least about the first ritual - the girl would be baptized and then they'd hold a Jewish naming ceremony after the fact at home. Given the rather vast chasm between the two religions still not sure how this thing is going to work. Let's hope that they're both "Christmas/Easter/High Holy Days" kind of religious so the poor kid isn't totally confused. There was also some minor subplot about not wanting to cook or clean, but given her desire to not clean and how spotless the apartment was, you just know that they've got a maid anyway making the whole segment rather moot.

The other client: Mina, makes me weep for humanity and why we can't require licenses for reproduction. Clearly, she sees the pregnancy as the creation of a new toy to play with. She ordered hand-embroidered sheets from London ("But they're stuck in customs!" complete with sad face). She had a BABY GARMENT BAG for the onsie that she'd bring home the child in. She'd painted the baby's name on the wall, but hadn't bothered to convert her "office" ("But you don't work!" The best line of the night) to a true nursery - they'd added a crib and a changing table (but the pad wasn't yet secure and she insisted on waiting for the handyman to do it because she's never touched a hammer and wasn't inclined to do so now) and left all of the rest of the clutter intact. Gods know how she's planning on finding the kid in the crib at 3 am without killing herself. She'd never held a baby before, thought the nurses were going to do all the work at the hospital, and hadn't planned on changing a single diaper - she'd already had plans for a non-live-in nanny. I guess the plan was to let the kid starve and sit in its own waste after hours? She also had to have it explained to her why it's not a good idea to have a dog's pee pad on the same floor that your kid is going to be scooting around on. The dog had never been trained to not pee inside so the obvious answer? "I'm going to hire a dog trainer!" We even had a segment of her going to pick up her "push" jewelery - an oversized gaudy diamond thing that's supposedly supposed to be given to women for giving birth? No idea. And, as Rosie points out, she doesn't even have to push as Mina was having a scheduled C-Section.

A real baby is brought in to give her practice at holding a baby and changing a diaper (the look on the mother's face is rather hysterical and one of the best 'bitch please' looks I've ever seen) and the like and supposedly Michelle gets it and the whole bonding thing. At the end of the episode you see her holding the baby...albeit awkwardly. There's hope she'll get the mom thing. Maybe. I'm not holding my breath.

This show is both a trainwreck and sickens me. These people are so self-absorbed and so self-centered that they're last people on the planet that should having kids. It makes Rosie's personal story (she's using IVF to get pregnant, only to result in an ectopic pregnancy) all the more tragic because these people who clearly Don't Get It can and are having kids.

Maybe these people will turn out to be good parents, but odds suggest that they'll end up raising another generation of people just like themselves, though to be fair the husbands seem like better people...if only they'd grow spines.

There is no purpose for this show and if you're any kind of rational, you'll likely only end up depressed. Don't waste your time, and Bravo, stop wasting our intelligence.

The Grade: D

1 comment:

  1. I haven't watched the show "Pregnant in Heels" but it seems a little crazy. I loved your review by the way that. What she said is true but I wouldn't have put it in those words. MY co-worker from DISH watches this show all the time and she loves it. I think I'll just check it out and see what it is really about. Be sure to watch "Pregnant in Heels" with DISH and save your money rather than waste it on any other company! www.BestTVForMe.com

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