Well, two of the most genuinely moving things I've seen on televison recently happened to be on VH1 of all places.
I was not surprised to find myself moved by the first one--I was just surprised anybody made this at all, much less showed it on VH1. Bling'd: Blood, Diamonds, and Hip-Hop is a really stunning documentary that I just happened to record on what I think was the only showing. It's an amazing piece of work that they really should be showing more often. They took Raekwon, Paul Wall, and Some Reggaeton Star I'd Never Heard Of to Sierra Leone to learn about where diamonds come from and the civil war there, etc. It's so powerful that I can only stand to watch it in ten or fifteen minute segments, but it's so compelling that I keep turning it back on. Yesterday I watched as these guys could barely get out of the bus at the amputee camp. What I don't know, because I haven't reached the end, is whether the trip had any effect on how these guys think about diamonds. There's one terribly embarrassing moment near the beginning where Raekwon is trying to explain the hip hop fascination with diamonds, and he's saying, "When I was growing up, we didn't have much, my Mom couldn't afford to buy us new clothes, and now that I have something, I want to show it off." He says this to a room full of guys in Sierra Leone who clearly know a lot more about having nothing than Raekwon ever has. Still, I give the guys a lot of credit for making the trip and seeing all this stuff first hand, and I give VH1 a lot of credit for financing this and making it. It really is an incredible eye-opener. I don't get why they show "Morons Make Unfunny Jokes About Stuff" fourteen hundred times a day, and they've only run this once, as far as I can tell.
I was really shocked to find myself moved by the season finale of Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School. The show has been a guilty pleasure of mine for weeks, but I always felt it had a little bit of an exploitative quality about it. That is to say, while it's nominally about teaching these women to show a modicum of class, you really watch it for the catfights and backstabbing. I thought a lot of the challenges they did were kind of silly in terms of actually teaching them anything, but, lo and behold, I was wrong wrong wrong.
When I used to belong to the gym, there would sometimes be this show called Starting Over playing, and I was always too nervous to ask the lady on the next machine if I could please change the channel so I could ogle Kelly Ripa for a few minutes instead, so I ended up seeing way more of this creepy show than I ever wanted to. Basically they took a bunch of women who had screwed up their lives and threw them in a house together with a couple of scary "life coaches" who infantilized them and controlled their lives until such time that they deemed that they'd learned their lesson. It was supposedly about empowerment, but it always seemed cultish and disempowering to me. Like, the way to get your life back on track is to sign over your decision making power to some scary authority figure. I never took the Kool-Aid on that one.
Whereas on Charm School, they had stupid lessons and challenges and stuff that seemed designed only to get the women to do some camera-friendly fighting and complaining, but at the end, everyone actually did seem to learn something and make their lives better. Becky, Saaphyri, and Leilene all made these really powerful, heartfelt speeches about what they'd learned, and I really bought it. Because, let's face it, you don't go on Flavor of Love in the first place if you have even a shred of self-esteem, and having these women stand there and talk about how this show had actually shown them that they were worthwhile was genuinely moving. And there were few dry eyes in our house as Saaphyri talked about being homeless and what winning would mean to her.
It was just such a weird thing to sit down and watch this show I felt slightly guilty about watching and find that it actually did some good.
