In Defense of Relentless Positivity
Sometimes at the end of a long day, you just want to turn off your brain, turn on the old idiot box, and veg out. Over the past few years (I’m sure I couldn’t say why) I’ve found myself, more and more, repelled by serious TV fare and drawn towards what I’ll call fluff. I was feeling a need for some positivity – documentaries, news shows, and much reality-based fiction weren’t offering it. Now I will say, there’s fluff, and there’s fluff. I understand – sobre gustos, no hay nada escrito. But the sordidness of many reality shows depresses me, which is the opposite of the goal.
Recently though, my girlfriend and I started watching Queer Eye, and it’s just what the doctor ordered. The show features five gay guys who are experts in different lifestyle fields: interior design, hair and makeup, fashion, food, and culture (which, as far as I can tell, often amounts to counseling). Each episode, a deserving person (the “hero”) is nominated by a loved one to have their life spruced up for a week by the Fab Five. In its first manifestation, in 2003, the show was called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy – the heroes were always straight men – but presumably the showrunners realized that they were severely narrowing the nominee pool for no good reason.
Each of the Queer Eye hosts is talented in their own right – Antoni, the gourmand, always comes up with a clever and accessible dish for the hero to learn; Tan, the fashionista, works wonders with a French tuck and layers; Jonathan, the stylist, trims locks and years off of the hero’s life with a new ‘do and grooming techniques; Bobby, the interior designer, transforms a tired living space into something out of Architectural Digest; and if all of that isn’t enough to send our hero’s once sagging self-esteem soaring, Karamo, the culture expert, finds a way. Queer Eye is a showcase for its hosts, and though all enjoyed some measure of success before the show, it has obviously given them an additional springboard. Chopped fans might recognize the host, Ted Allen, from the original QEFTSG.
The enthusiasm of the Fab Five is infectious. Jonathan is the most over-the-top of the bunch, with his androgynous ensembles and constant hamming it up for the camera. If the Queer Eye gang were a hip hop group, he could be the hype man. Others, like Tan or Bobby, are more reserved. Sometimes our hosts get out over their skis a bit, like when Antoni lectures on flautas and taquitos to a group of Hispanic high schoolers, who humor him with a knowing silence. But in the end, relentless positivity carries the day – the point is to lift up people who really deserve it. And boy, do the heroes deserve it.
There is Wesley, a paraplegic who doesn’t buy items at the grocery store that he can’t reach; Joey, a program director at a children’s camp, who lives in a dilapidated RV on the premises; Deborah, a barbecue proprietress, who covers her mouth when she smiles because she can’t afford to replace her missing tooth; Kathi, the music director at Jonathan’s former high school, who works fifteen-hour days and hasn’t updated her clothes or mullet hair style since the 80s; or Kenny, the lovable retired bachelor, in mourning over his parents and dog, who hasn’t had guests to his cluttered home in years. There are no sad episodes, but there are sad initial situations. Maybe the saddest is Jess, the 23-year-old whose adopted parents kicked her out at 16 for being gay.
Although Queer Eye is reality television, it’s still television, within the contemporary American fairy tale genre, whose premise is that a person’s life can be turned around in an instant by a TV network’s deep pockets. Undercover Boss comes to mind, along with any number of game shows, which often favor contestants with sad stories. The risk of these shows is that the systemic problems at the heart of our heroes’ struggles get papered over, that one person’s makeover serves to mask deep societal failures, that ultimately, our entertainment distracts us from what should be our collective shame. As in everything, proportion is the word. The shows can help all of us, not just the contestants, not just the hosts. It’s like the airplane oxygen mask rule – you’ve got to put yours on first before you can assist your neighbors with theirs. Enjoy the show, laugh, be uplifted, be diverted at the end of a long day, and realize that this episode’s hero represents millions of forgotten others.