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Pippi
Supporter
Username: Pippi
Post Number: 1849
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 - 10:21 am: | 
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I have never watched a reality show, but I might watch this one...
It will either be really well done, or a train wreck and a mockery of what it should be (can the same be said for all reality shows, I wonder?)
http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/TV/03/01/blackandwhite.ap/index.html |
Kiba
Citizen
Username: Radical_kiba
Post Number: 46
Registered: 12-2005
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 - 11:51 am: |
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I normally hate reality shows and find them insulting to our intelligence, but seeing an add for THIS new one really got my curiousity. I plan on watching it for sure. |
Pippi
Supporter
Username: Pippi
Post Number: 1875
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 8, 2006 - 1:38 pm: |
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A review from today's NY Times
March 8, 2006
TV Review | 'Black. White.'
Reality TV for Those Infatuated With Passing
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
If reality television can be said to be about anything at all, it seems to be about impersonation and the odd and increasingly tenacious hold it has on the American psyche. The crooked-nosed are made over and play the genetically good-looking. Heiresses get out of their $200,000 sports cars and enact the habits of the agriculturally inclined. A vegan mother from Boulder trades houses with an evangelical wife in Mobile, is encouraged to care about scripture and breakfast sausage, and essentially tries to pass.
Reality television, as we know it, in fact, could exist only in a culture infatuated with passing — a world where white suburban boys dress to look more like Nelly and Punjabi girls from Queens wear blue contact lenses to link them closer in appearance to someone who might trace her lineage four generations in Laguna Beach.
Without question, "Black. White.," a new six-part series making its debut on FX tonight, arrives with the cleverest conceit reality television has offered to date. A joint venture between the documentary filmmaker R. J. Cutler and the rapper Ice Cube, the show addresses the subject of passing in the most literal sense, altering the appearance of the black Sparks family of Atlanta to become white, and the white Wurgel-Marcotulli family of Santa Monica, Calif., to become black. Part of the premise is that the Wurgel-Marcotullis — Carmen Wurgel; her husband, Bruno Marcotulli; and Carmen's teenage daughter, Rose Bloomfield — and the Sparkses — Brian; his wife, Renee; and their 17-year old son, Nick — all share a house, in Tarzana, Calif. Renee might go to a coffee bar as a white woman; Bruno and Carmen to a black church as their alter egos. At home, the families, for the most part, confront each other in their own skins.
"Black.White." is most impressive as a feat of cosmetology. Brian, a handsome man with a shaved head, emerges from his racial reassignment looking as if he might run public relations for Nascar. Carmen goes from bearing a vague resemblance to Judy Woodruff to bearing a vague resemblance to Pam Grier. (As The Star reported this week, removing the makeup took each of the show's participants an hour a day and required scrubbing with an oil-based cleanser.)
Carmen belongs to a certain kind of California stereotype. She wants to appreciate difference and honor the things she doesn't understand; she wants to learn; she wants to love. This, of course, makes her terribly irritating. Of her husband's transformation she says: "I love black Bruno. Visually, and heartwise, there's that warmth." Carmen and her talk of "the beautiful black physique" leave Renee feeling vaguely sick to her stomach.
But it is Bruno himself, a racism denier, who exists as the show's most incendiary figure. A middle-aged schoolteacher, he is unwavering in his belief that racial prejudice is merely invited by transgressions of style. "My life is, I get joy because I put joy out," Bruno theorizes. "I don't get suspicion because I'm not looking for it." Bruno believes that he has had a happy time of it, in some part, because when he goes shopping, he puts on golf clothes and a smile and comports himself in a manner that is relatively unthreatening.
The problem with "Black.White." is the extent to which it inadvertently supports the foundations of Bruno's reasoning, searching for examples of racial discrimination, as it does, almost entirely within the world of the consumer marketplace. The participants are too often sent out to stores to take the measure of race relations in America. "Black. White." would have felt far more substantive had it sent Brian and Bruno, in their racial guises, out on a mission to procure high-end medical care or mortgages, say, rather than trousers and shoes.
When Rose and her mother, as black women, go out with an African-American friend, all pretending to look for jobs, they do so not in the offices of a small insurance company but in clothing stores in a swanky shopping district on the West Side of Los Angeles. The women are told that managers are absent or applications not in stock. (Leaving aside the possibility, however remote, that the responses were honest ones, it might have been faintly interesting then had the producers sent Carmen and Rose, as themselves, out to look for jobs in hair extension salons in Compton.) At any rate, the suggestion you're left with — one similar to a point made some years ago in a controversial essay by Patricia Williams, an African-American law professor — is that the worst injustice a black person can suffer is to be denied the best treatment at department stores or the chance to sell expensive jeans in Santa Monica.
The most emotionally compelling moments in "Black.White." occur outside any matters of racial politics. Confronted with Rose, a happy and self-possessed young woman, the Sparks parents realize how far their son, Nick, has to go. And as Carmen becomes someone less daffy, she seems to realize more powerfully what a tedious blowhard her husband really is. You wonder about the fate of their marriage, and you don't think for a second that Bruno is going to start making donations to the N.A.A.C.P.
Black. White.
FX, tonight at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.
R. J. Cutler, Ice Cube and Matt Alvarez, executive producers; Keith Vanderlaan, makeup effects artist. Produced by FX Networks, Actual Reality Pictures and Cube-Vision.
WITH: Brian Sparks, Renee Sparks, Nick Sparks, Carmen Wurgel, Bruno Marcotulli and Rose Bloomfield. |
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