In retrospect, it was inevitable: Facebook now streams original content that is actually good.
Nearly 70 percent of Americans have a Facebook account, and the whole platform is made to like, watch, and share “content.” With the fog light of hindsight, it’s amazing that Facebook didn’t capitalize on their captive audience sooner.
Amazon and Netflix both set sail with scripted TV in 2013. Facebook Watch launched 2017 but has focused on sports and 10-30 minute talk or reality shows, i.e. stuff Facebook didn’t have to pay for, until late 2018, when the company cast its bean counter into the basement and spend handsomely to launch the drama “Sorry for Your Loss” and renew the comedy “Strangers.” That these shows are all free to access for anyone with a Facebook account hints that the platform will only steamroll through 2019.
As younger audiences shift to Instagram (already owned by Facebook) it makes sense that the social media’s grand dame should beckon its original audience back with smart programming. Lord knows they’ve captured enough data from us to figure what we gravitate towards.
Unlike Netflix or Amazon, Facebook is already set-up for sharing. If one watches “The Real Bros of Simi Valley” for instance and you actually like the bro-culture satire, you can instantly see how many people agree with you in the form of shares, views, and likes. And Facebook is already a repository of personal videos. Why record on another platform and hook everything up separately to watch a home video when you can stream your own life on your own TV via Facebook?
If you suspend the justified social and political concerns over this conflation of personal and consumable scripted content, it’s fun to look at Facebook’s latest offering, its artistic birthday-suit, if you will, into the ring of scripted content from streaming services lead by Oscar winners.
“Queen America”
First up is “Queen America.” Set in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the world of beauty pageants, the series stars Catherine Zeta-Jones as Vicki Ellis, a chain-smoking, vein-popping, arms as solid as the state’s love of guns pageant coach. Not just a coach, but a living legend whom mothers beg to work with, and whose platform is to make girls better versions of themselves, even as she commands tanning spray up their butt crack, prays a blood test shows her star to be “just the right amount of sick,” has them run to the point of near-hurling, or commands them to perform in front of a pageant board with “the confidence of a frat boy on trial.”
The dark comedy would turn ridiculous if it weren’t for the incredible dimensions in Zeta-Jones’s Vicki Ellis. She hails from trailer country (still inadvertently uses “ain’t” when visiting her sister) but has built herself into an impregnable fortress of feminine self-possession. She’s a force of nature yet turns to Jell-O at the volatile affection of her niece (for various reasons I won’t spoil), is powerless around a teenage flame, has dreams of her own that cause use to ache, even if by and large she is selfish, manipulative, and screams at a nine-year-old for eating too much candy.
When her star pupil Hayley Wilson, Miss Tulsa (Victoria Justice) ends up compromised after being crowned Miss Oklahoma, she’s forced to turn to a nobody from the small town of Claremore.
Samantha Cole (Belle Shouse) is a 19-year-old who works at a bakery, has no remotely wealthy parent(s) as the other contestants (top pageant coaches charge around $1,000 a day) but does have a thigh gap like the Pont du Gard. She’s unschooled, but sweet and determined to succeed. Shouse manages to be naive without the saccharine flavor typical of an ingénue. Her faux-pas aren’t manufactured as so many stories do with young people seemingly out of their element.
As Vicki reluctantly coaches Samantha, the show’s look of class, ambition, and sincerity comes into relief. Its most incisive moments come when Vicki fights to keep her own trailer history submerged.
One regrettable aspect of “Queen America” (besides a few Roswellian accents) is that its people of color are kept as entertaining side pieces. Teagle F. Bougere plays Nigel Hill, a stalwart black man in a heavily red state who’s the hair and makeup arm to the Vicki Ellis machine. His main story of resigned loneliness in a sea of heteronormativity seems tired, as does his covert relationship with a white suburban dad. Yet Nigel’s challenges (not struggle—he’s set on being too cool to struggle) ties into the show’s look into the maintenance of appearance and secrets, as well as the deep cost of both.
Rana Ray plays Mary Clark, a 25-year-old former Miss Tulsa who (of course) has a drinking problem. The laconic beauty is a devout yet unhappy maidservant to Vicki, whom she idealizes and occasionally hates for controlling her self-esteem. Mary is a supplemental coach to Vicki, the pusher to the visionary. She tells Samantha of the “science” to the pageant walk, that she’s to give the impression that she “inspired the music into existence.”
The star power is a key ingredient the success of Facebook Watch. Along with the spitfire of the “Chicago” star, we’re offered Judith Light as Regina, Vicki’s old benefactor who took her from trashy darling to quasi-socialite. Tom Ellis, the star of “Lucifer” and engaged to the show’s creator Meaghan Oppenheimer, appears as a prospective partner, single-parent, and man about the kitchen.
With 8 of the 10 episodes so far out, Oppenheimer’s vision, clever writing, and evolving matrix of each character makes the show binge-worthy. Director Alethea Jones makes remarkable use of cut shows, lighting, and close-ups to make the actors make the most of the propulsive script. Entire histories are conveyed in a single shot. In a show whose characters obsess over the perfect walk, “Queen America” comes close to transcendence.
Another show about pageants?
Beauty pageants have garnered scorn and intrigue since Miss America started in 1921. The competition seems to mix everything Americans admire – self-improvement, beauty, wholesomeness, youth, stability, talent. But underneath each of those perks is a web of racism, consumerism, superficiality, sexism, classism.
Thanks to the infamous “Rule No.7,” anyone of non-white ancestry was forbidden to compete until 1970. Contestants have been jettisoned for rumors of pregnancy, intoxication, or secret husbands.
On the whole, it seems obvious that beauty pageants are bad for everyone. Yet bad situations often make for great stories. Pageants are an inherently dramatic arena that lends itself well to major films like “Miss Congeniality”, “Little Miss Sunshine,” and “Drop Dead Gorgeous.”
It’s like we know it’s all bad but can’t help watching. We like to compete. We like winners. We like our feelings churned by losers and our blood simmered by betrayal. Could it be that pageants, with their winner-takes-it-all structure, mirror the world we willy-nilly call home?
There’s been an uptick in streaming content about beauty pageants. In Aug 2018, Netflix launched its controversial camp-delight “Insatiable.” The show follows an obese teenager, Patricia Bladell (Debby Ryan) who enters pageant competitions for revenge after a jaw-accident leaves her svelte and Raquel Welch-ready.
In December 2018, Netflix launched another take on beauty pageants, a far more family-friendly film called “Dumplin,” starring Jennifer Aniston. Like “Insatiable,” the locus of competition (Willowdean Dickson, played by Danielle Macdonald) is obese and seemingly beyond the possibility of ever winning. In fact, she doesn’t win. None of the movies or TV shows actually feature a winner.
The message seems to be that in the vortex of impossible standards, it’s the striving that matters, the push for self-improvement. Each show dangles out the carrot, confident that it will never be reached. Paradoxically, we are to appear content without ever being fully nourished. “Sing at them,” Vicki Ellis commands Samantha Cole, not “sing for them,” as if talent is to only be used to forward appearance rather than connection.
What if a lead in one of these shows actually won? Would our sympathy vanish? Would these well-written shows suddenly seem like a fairytale? We’re helplessly aware that winning one of these races is fiercely improbable and would only happen in a passing cine on Hallmark.
All of these pageant shows require a substantial layer of comedy. We can’t take this sort of competition seriously. It’s hard to think of beauty pageant drama being successful as say Natalie Portman’s ballet-drama, “Black Swan.” Those that have tried, like Sally Field’s earnest 2000 drama “Beautiful,” have fallen flat.
Perhaps it’s too on the nose. We all care about appearance but caring to that extreme calls attention to the preposterous nature of caring about something that is as de facto as the weather. For shows about beauty pageants to be palatable, they have to be coated with a fair amount of humor, especially dark humor.
They also have to continue that Protestant ethos of hard, honest, striving. It’s telling that Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” opens both Facebook’s “Queen America” and Netflix’s “Dumplin.”
“Queen America” is more cognizant and serious (dare I say respectful) about the dark side of perfectionism. Under its strains, the common reactions are alcohol, depression, eating-disorders, chain-smoking. The opening series to “Queen America” is a sepia-infused montage of white women shrinking their waists, injecting their lips, practicing a morbid walk in-front of a mirror. It’s all flashed while a few women make eerie, open-mouthed chants as if they’re ready to let their bodies be carved into the picture of success.
More than its competitors, “Queen America” is aware of pernicious side of the American dream, i.e. an obsession with self-improvement and a winner takes all mentality. It’s a ridiculous dream, as each of these shows candidly admits, but there’s also some validity. The winners are nowhere to be found, but there’s always something more personal to claim: self-esteem, self-acceptance, a sort of patience with a deeply unjust and superficial world. And above all, there’s always the chance of winning.
For a world ruled by neoliberalism, beauty pageant flicks, with all the criticisms of pageants built-in then placated, are an understandable object of fascination. We know these competitions are ludicrous. As several of these characters say; we may even hate the system we’re allured to. Yet every day we choose to enter the competition.
