Call me an idiot, call me naive, but perhaps alone among TV critics, I actually expected Tuesday Night Book Club would be good. The CBS reality series, which debuted last night, follows a set of Arizona housewives as they work out problems in their families and love lives and dish about them over cocktails and trash literature. Sex, booze and half-read books: isn’t that what summer is about?
Call it the Laguna Beach-ization of network TV. It was a chance for a big, mainstream network to pull off, for an older, bigger audience, what MTV has done so well with its "reality dramas" Laguna Beach and The Hills. The MTV shows, about the lives of spoiled, nature-blessed California kids, take raw nonfiction footage and give them the look and emotional kick of scripted dramas, with lush camera work, skillful editing and well-curated soundtracks. (Bravo and A&E had similar successes with Rollergirls and The Real Housewives of Orange County.)
The problem is, CBS apparently decided that its viewers were too dumb to handle the intellectual demands of an MTV show. For instance, Laguna Beach let viewers gradually see the characters unfold: the social cunning of Kristin, the doormat empathy of LC. On Book Club, however, you know right away which of the women is the party girl and which is the trophy wife — you know, because the credits literally identify them as "The Party Girl" and "The Trophy Wife."
And where Laguna Beach and The Hills use a verite structure, showing rather than telling their stories without the help of a voiceover, Book Club has a grating, condescending narrator who sounds like she should be doing feminine-hygiene commercials. "Good friends, like good books, are well-chosen," goes one of her retch-worthy homilies. "They entertain us, offer us insight, and help us make sense of the world. And, if we’re lucky, we find great ones, and they’ll stick with us forever." Other lines are just abortions of sentence structure: "Marital bliss is something that completely eluded them."
It’s a shame, because the stories — newlywed fights, alcoholism, sexual dissatisfaction — have a lot of potential, but the emotional impact is constantly undercut by the insulting narration, which keeps nudging you in the ribs like an annoying date at the movies. (The show also simply feels cheap. Compared with MTV’s striking visuals, it looks and sounds like low-budget daytime TV.)
In the end, Book Club makes the same mistake that bad scripted dramas do: it assumes that its viewers can’t follow it without hand-holding. Believe it or not, it turns out MTV credits its teen viewers with more intelligence than CBS does its grown-ups. My advice to middle-aged Book Club viewers: Watch The Hills tonight instead with your kids. You have a thing or two to learn from them.