Quotes of the Day
Want a new you?" asks a promo for TLC's midday block of makeover shows. "You're not alone!" For once, an understatement in advertising. America is the home of the new you, the uncharted land where pilgrims, convicts and Gatsbys set out to remold themselves from scratch. We ran out of uncharted land, but we didn't run out of the urge for self-reinvention. So we turned that desire inward in ever tighter circles, expressing our idealized selves through our homes, our clothes and our bodies.
Television has followed a similar pattern. A few years ago, led by the TLC hit Trading Spaces, came a new breed of home-makeover shows that were really homeowner-makeover shows. A designer would look into your soul and give you a living room that expressed your true nature — all on a $1,000 budget! Now TV is giving out new wardrobes, new lifestyles, new careers and even new noses in an onslaught of makeover series that use reality TV's titillation and tear jerking to offer a new you, vicariously, dozens of times a week.
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This new genre, like America itself, received most of its seed from overseas — the BBC's cruel-to-be-kind hit What Not to Wear, now in reruns on BBC America. "There are things not even your best friends will tell you" about how you look, say fashionista inquisitors Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine. "But we're not your best friends. And we will." For instance, those track pants make your rear end look like a watermelon. Your overtight bra makes you look as if you have four breasts. And that casual outfit is "a little bit Mr. Garbage Collector." What Not subjects win a £2,000 ($3,300) shopping spree, with a catch: they have to turn themselves and their closets over to Woodall, Constantine and a battery of hidden cameras for a detailed, unsparing, public dressing down.
The show works, however, because the duo, two fashion journalists, are blunt but never mean. They represent opposite poles of the female form (Woodall is a twig, Constantine is Rubenesque), and they are as frank about their own bodies as about their victims'. There's a towel-snapping, locker-room sexuality about them — they spend a lot of time grabbing their guests' and each other's breasts and butts — and real heart behind their snippiness.
Deep down, What Not is not about fashion; it is about accepting your limits and your mortality. Almost every episode identifies the point when the subject got too old, busy and tired to update her look. "People hold on to the era when they felt most beautiful," says Woodall as the two dissect a fortyish woman whose wardrobe is frozen at the time of Charles and Diana's wedding. (Of course, if this were the '80s, they'd be preaching the figure-enhancing wonders of the shoulder pad.)
TLC recently launched an American What Not, with greater emphasis on the subjects' life stories. "I consider them the stars of the show," says executive producer Michael Klein. "We're watching them turn into butterflies." Unfortunately, just as Americans took scones and supersized them into catcher's mitts, TLC doubled What Not into a bloated, tedious hour, and hosts Wayne Scot Lukas and Stacy London deliver showy put-downs ("She looks hip-py, not hippie!") and lack their British forebears' acuity. If there's a real candidate for the American What Not, it's Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which makes its debut July 15 at 10 p.m. E.T. It is also shameless, but in a more original, less creepy way. In each episode, a heterosexual man is schooled in fashion, design, culture, grooming and fine dining by five gay guys. Its unspoken premise, provocative but true, is that gay men are the new black people: the oppressed minority whose subculture defines what is cool. "After all these years of deciding whether to beat us up or borrow our outfits," says Ted Allen, Queer Eye's food and wine expert, "[straight men] are choosing the latter." Yes, the show's queen-tet embody stereotypes — try pitching a show on which five Asians help people with math — but they are clever, funny and self-aware. As Allen puts it, "If you want to stereotype me as someone who dresses great and can whip up a mean risotto, that's fine with me."
Yet another set of reality shows make over identities. On E!'s forthcoming Facing Fame, subjects are made to look like their favorite celebrity. On ABC Family's Switched!, a teenage rodeo queen swaps lives with a New York City girl.
But why inhabit a new lifestyle if you have to do it in that dumpy old body? Extreme Makeover, the only one of ABC's late-season blitz of reality shows to make fall's prime-time schedule, has petitioners beg, Queen for a Day style, to win packages of plastic surgery, cosmetic dentistry and sundry other injections and deletions. It's not surprising that Extreme is crass, but it is also maudlin. (As is TLC's plastic-surgery show, A Personal Story. In its credits, words float across the screen: LIPOSUCTION ... SELF-ESTEEM ... BREAST AUGMENTATION ... DIGNITY ... RHINOPLASTY.) A stay-at-home mom on Extreme describes her surgery as a reward for years of self-sacrifice ("This is something Mommy's just gotta do for me"). One hour and one mostly bloodless depiction of surgery later, she's gone from looking like a Dorothea Lange Dust Bowl photo subject to looking like a talk-show host, as if not just her face had been lifted but her social class as well. When she presents her new self at a family dinner out, her kids clap warily for this woman who says she's Mom.
It's a sign of the great democratization of plastic surgery that her unveiling can be portrayed as a family event — like a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, only slightly more disturbing. "Having work done" was once something rich people did, quietly, and everyone else whispered about, cattily. Then came Botox — the relatively cheap and painless gateway drug of cosmetic work — and plastic surgery was being touted in women's magazines and on talk shows. This has been a boon to surgeons, but it has turned plastic surgery into the new Las Vegas: once laced with glamour and vice, now opened up to boring normal people.
TV producer Ryan Murphy wants to put some of the shame back into plastic surgery. His drama Nip/Tuck (FX, starts July 22, 10 p.m. E.T.), about two plastic surgeons, one cynical and one idealistic, includes one of the most gruesome scenes outside pay cable: a tour-de-force facial reconstruction that includes a doctor whacking a chisel into a patient's nose. In part, Murphy sees Nip/Tuck as a counter to the bust-boosting boosterism of Extreme et al.
"Those shows are very disturbing to me," he says. "There's usually a one-minute interlude where the patients question, 'Did I do the right thing?' but they're groggy and on painkillers. Then the bandages come off, and they're transformed. That's not the truth." Nip/Tuck is a heightened version of the truth (there's an outlandish plot in the pilot involving a Colombian druglord), and it can be heavy-handed. But the show nicely complicates its morality — the "bad-guy" doctor is charming and perceptive, while the "good guy" is a clueless father and husband — and it's a timely, unsparing psychological look at, well, the psychology of looks. "All I want to do," Murphy says, referring to the J. Lo — inspired buttocks-implant fad, "is explore the reasons you would dislike yourself so much that you would have plastic dress shields shoved up your butt."
What people really want shoved up them, the makeover TV genre says, is a new identity. But people also need to believe that this glamorous new self was really inside them all along. Whether these shows remake your house, your wardrobe or your chin, they cater to the same fantasy: that if someone with a gifted eye took the time, that person would see your beauty and uniqueness, would probe past the lie of your drab exterior and bring the shimmering true you to the surface. We used to call that kind of penetrating gaze the look of love. Today we just call it television.
- James Poniewozik