I, like most people, have a few guilty pleasures in my life that I'm not exactly embarrassed about, but I'd much rather keep those things secret. One of those things is a TV show called Secret Life of the American Teenager on ABC Family.
Now, I'm only writing this to get it off my chest. Not because I need anyone to agree or disagree with me. Simply, this is something on my mind, I'm going to watch it in about an hour, and I feel like I need to talk about the show.
This show, for anyone who has no idea what I'm talking about, is basically about one main girl, Amy, who got pregnant at 15 by her first time lover, Ricky. She has the baby and right now in this season (3? 4? I don't know..) Amy and Ricky are engaged to be married. Happy ending, right? Wrong.
Although the show follows other characters as well, and though those story lines had brief leading roles above Amy & Ricky, those two seem to be the entire focus of the show. Obviously. Here's a few things that bother me:
1. Amy is 17. Ricky is 18. They are already living together and engaged to be married. Sweet, but not realistic.
2. Amy is a teenager who still acts like a teenager even though her friends and other students are growing up and maturing. To me, it would make more sense that Amy would mature faster because she's a mother. Right?
3. Just Amy in general. It goes along with #2, but she got everything she wanted; Ricky as her bf, now her fiance... Living with him and their son as a family... A wedding she gets to plan and had been bitching about for a long time... And she's still acting like a spoiled brat! It's really frustrating that a mother of a child would act this way when her hubby-to-be is only a year older and acts like he's 30 (maturity-wise). Why would he stay with her? Okay, he loves her, but that much? Really?
4. The show's story line goes all over the place. You think soap operas are bad? Try watching this for an hour and we'll compare notes. This show started with a big issue that involved a lot of drama, so obviously it couldn't back out and just add little things. But come on! Another "main" character, Grace, has a deceased father (Season 1) who ended up having an affair in Africa but wait - it gets better. That affair ended with a son... Better... Who claims that his mother and both Grace and his father met first and that Grace's mom and her family were the actual affair. ...WHAT!? It's crazy and once you're into it, you're hooked.
5. I can't stop watching it. The stories don't make a whole lot of sense lately in realistic terms. Now they're expanding into the gay/lesbian/bi phase with Grace and Adrian (Grace's bff) but that's the most real part of the show right now. It seems like they have taken a serious situation (getting preggo at 15) and morphed a little dramatic bubble around it. It seems like you're in a realistic place, but when you step back and look at reality and how that works versus how the show makes it look like reality works, you realize how abstract and disillusion it really is.
This show makes for good entertainment if you have nothing to do for an hour. But it bugs me that they're taking reality and putting it on steroids.
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