Bad Acting/ Bad Dialogue
I came across this clip on youtube today….
If this doesn’t prove to you that bad acting and bad dialogue don’t mix then I don’t know how to convince you. In this clip Ricky is talking to Amy’s sister on the phone. Honestly, I have been a teenager and I have been in high school. 14 year-olds (the sister) and 16 year-olds (Ricky) just do not have these types of “mature” conversations. I mean, C’MON!
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UNREALISTIC?
The relationships on this show prove that it is too unrealistic to continue on this way. Brenda Hampton needs to make a change and soon before there is even more of an uproar from parents and before teens start making the mistake of having sex and thinking it is ok because the kids on Secret Life of the American Teenager do it normally and without much consequence. Yes, Amy had a kid, but she leads a normal, stress-free life in regard to her son Jon and that is very uncommon with teen mothers. The show needs to change its content by adding more information of the negative consequences of having sex, doing drugs, and being a teenager. The focus needs to be on the seriousness of these issues with youths.
Here is what an article from Suite 101 had to say about the show’s unrealistic nature:
“Negligence and Contradictions
For a show which portrays the importance of emotionally supportive parenting, it is contradicting itself by resolving the very complex difficulty of an unplanned teen pregnancy by fantasizing that a mother, who is still a child herself, is capable of providing a baby with security and guidance. There are girls in this situation who, most likely with the help of family, successfully raise the baby, but the situation written for Amy is even more extreme than usual.
While there might be a way to overcome all difficulties, the show seems to irresponsibly disregard how different the lives of Amy and her baby will be if this child is being raised by make-do means, and even more irresponsibly, through the character of Amy’s sister Ashley, the idea has been suggested that it would be poor mothering to consider adoption.
Worst of all is the fiction the show has created to resolve the immediate problems of financing and caring for the baby. It is possibly that the local church could provide Amy with an after-school job and perhaps, day care, but it is absurd that French-horn player Amy would be given a job teaching music at the church daycare center. Miracles can happen, but this is the sort of job adults would find difficult to obtain. It would be more realistic to show that Amy must sacrifice her music activities and take a skuzzy job.
Ben and Amy
It is most unrealistic to show that pregnant Amy has found true love with a boy who is unconcerned about possibly having to miss the prom due to his girlfriend having another boy’s child.
The characters of Ben and Amy make a lovable couple, but they are too devotedly intense in their relationship for two fifteen year old children.”
Read more at Suite101: Considering Secret Life of the American Teenager: Parental Guidance and Teen Motherhood http://primetimetv.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_secret_life_of_the_american_teenager#ixzz0k5EZijQv
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Real Life
“She was walking across the sand, marching over the dunes of Avalon last summer, when she saw him. Them. Er, it.
It involved Ethan, her 14-year-old son — “a good-looking kid, a sexy kid,” Allison calls him proudly. Anyway, she explains, “He was lying there on his towel, and lying right on top of him was this girl.”
Allison explained that re-creating Boogie Nights here on the beach, in front of their friends and several hundred members of their income set, was perhaps not the most appropriate activity for him and his young female companion. Ethan grunted, groaned, then spun around and assumed a more PG-rated position on his towel. Crisis over. For now.
But as she tells the story, Allison’s voice mingles incredulousness and anxiety. She mentions everything else she’s found herself dealing with — the drunk kids showing up at her house, the oral-sex offers Ethan has gotten, the other parents who just seem so clueless about it all — and she sighs. ‘It’s the rodeo,’ she says. ‘It’s the Wild West out there.’ ”
This story, from PhillyMag.com- Philadelphia Magazine- describes what really goes on with teenagers of the millenial generation. Although it may be too graphic for T.V., if ABC Family is changing its image as it is to focus on being more modern, why doesn’t it focus on being honest then too? Show what really goes on in teens lives: what their parents have to deal with and the drugs and alcohol and peer pressure that also accompanies the sex. IT ISN’T ALL ABOUT SEX.
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Teens and Sexual T.V.
Here is an excerpt from a World Magazine article about the show: “According to research conducted by the independent, nonprofit firm RAND, watching television programs with sexual content not only makes teens more likely to engage in sex, but also increases the likelihood of pregnancy. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Pediatrics asked 2,000 12- to 17-year-olds to keep track of the television shows they watched that contained sexual content. Those who watched a high amount of such programming were twice as likely to get pregnant or to get someone else pregnant.”
Oh really? And Secret Life has sex in every piece of dialogue. How is this helpful again? Maybe, if the show actually incorporated hardship consequences in these kids sexual actions, it would send a message. However, it does the opposite.
More from the article: “Said Rebecca Collins, the psychologist who headed the 2004 study, “This is the strongest evidence yet that the sexual content of television programs encourages adolescents to initiate sexual intercourse and other sexual activities. The impact of television viewing is so large that even a moderate shift in the sexual content of adolescent TV watching could have a substantial effect on their sexual behavior.”
Want to read more about this? Go to: http://www.worldmag.com/articles/15042
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Sexual exploits of “Children”
“According to a statement from ABC Family, the show ‘deals honestly and directly with the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy in a non-exploitative manner and explores how the core character’s relationships with her mother, father, sister and friends are affected. . . . We hope the show encourages teenagers and parents to open up a dialogue about issues important to them. . . .'”
-LA Times article: “Secret Life of the American Teen explores teen pregnancy”
Ummmmm?
Reviewer Kathryn Darden would contradict that statement for sure. And I completely agree….
Let me prove to you that it isn’t just me who thinks that ABC is being hypocrytical by airing this show all about sex..
Read this excerpt from her article in 2009 called “Secret Life of the American Teenager Season One is Sex and the City for Teens”:
“The Secret Life of the American Teenager: The First Season was so focused on the sexual exploits of children aged 15 and 16, I wish I had thought to count how many times the word “sex” was mentioned in each episode. The series begins with a parental advisory stating it is not appropriate for younger viewers. So, WHY then is it on the ABC “Family” channel, and WHY did it recently win a Teen Choice award?”
The word SEX is constantly used on this show, let’s count!
The writer of this article is also proof that everyone isn’t “doing it” as expressed on the show…
She says, “Let me speak frankly: I was a virgin when I married in my 20s — a healthy, reasonably attractive virgin, just like my friends. Not everyone “does it.” As a result of not engaging in promiscuous sex, I have never had an STD, never worried about getting pregnant out of wedlock, only took birth control for a short time so I have never had to worry about side effects. I was not cheated in any form or fashion by not having numerous sexual partners or starting an active sexual life at 15; in fact, I am quite thankful I DIDN’T have numerous sexual partners. I have only had ONE sexual partner, and I resent the fact ABC “Family” titillates our youth with sleazy programming like The Secret Life of the American Teen dished out as “Family” fare which teaches young people that having sex at 15 is NORMAL.”
There are many more people who are the same way! Why encourage teens to have sex with shows such as this one?
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MTV tells the real story
So this is a show about teen pregnancy and being sexually active in school. However, Secret Life of the American Teenager fails to express how hard it really is to raise a baby while you are only a high school student. For Amy Juergens, her parents are unbelievably supportive of her keeping the child at only 15 years old and her (ex) boyfriend Ben wanted to raise the child as his own and marry Amy and blah blah blah. Yet, Ben isn’t the kid’s father. Ricky (a.k.a. The Bad Boy) is the father who takes full responsibilty and recently agreed in trial to take the kid every other weekend because he wants to be such a good father so bad at that young of an age. Is it really that easy to have a kid so young? NO! And in my opinion this show is only making it look glamourous and acceptable for someone so young to have a kid with no struggle at all.
MTV’s show Teen Mom shows just how hard life can be when choosing to be sexually active while still a young teen. In my opinion, that show does what is best to really influence teens to stay abstinent or use birth control of some kind. Every person featured on this show has their life turned upside down after having a child and not in a good way.
Teen Mom is a spinoff of the hit show 16 and Pregnant on MTV which follows young girls from when they are pregnant until a month or so after they give birth. Teen Mom allows it’s audience to view the real trials and tribulations young women go through when having a child so young.
From an article in the LA Times [Forget ‘The Hills’: Audiences embrace the harsh realities of ‘Teen Mom’] about the MTV show:
“Morgan J. Freeman, the show’s executive producer, began working with the girls on [Teen Mom] during “16 and Pregnant” and said MTV sought out so-called normal girls who ended up in an abnormal situation. “The goal was to try to find a typical, middle-class teenager who should have known better,” recalled Freeman. “The mandate was ‘get the truth. Let’s see the real challenges, what pressures it puts on in high schoolers, what the sacrifices are.’ ”
In the article, teen mom Macy Bookout, featured in the show, adds, “‘This show really hits people hard. In Juno or The Secret Life of An American Teenager, things are kind of glossed over and they don’t really show the hardships,’ said Bookout.”
Now, back to Secret Life. What is the point of all this? Well, many of these girls featured in the MTV show are normal girls like Freeman states above, who had their lives turned around when they got pregnant, just like Amy Juergens. So why isn’t Brenda Hampton, Secret Life‘s creator and executive producer, showing what really goes on. If you are going to create a show about teenage sex, targeting teenagers, you should at least be honest about what goes on in high school and not just the “sweetened up” version of it. What do you think teens are getting out of the show? That it is ok to have sex? That sex is the most popular topic at a high school and that everyone seems to be doing some form of it? Do you really want more teen moms having problems as documented by MTV?
All those are questions that Brenda Hampton should take into very deep consideration. What is your audience getting out of this poorly acted and twisted show?
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One Million Moms know whatsup..
If you are reading this blog and thinking, “what is all the fuss about?” then I am going to let the moms explain. One Million Moms is an online project of the American Family Association. Although I view it to be extreme, it certainly gets the point across with testimonials and facts from mothers whose only concern is for their children. One Million Moms, also known as OMM, is known for its campaigns against certain entertainment media where concerned parents can voice their concerns about television shows, etc.
Now to the good stuff! Coincedentally, OMM has a campaign AGAINST Secret Life of the American Teenager! Imagine that! These moms may be against it in a different way, however they sure do get their point across. Let’s go over what they have informed us about regarding this show:
*** The mothers went on against Dairy Queen when they threw a huge amount of advertising dollars in support of one of the episodes. The OMM site describes the episode with some of the following innapropriateness:
“S*x and oral s*x discussions among students.
• Two s*xually involved students talk about having multiple s*x partners, but better not get caught.
• Younger sister of teen mother wears an inappropriate low cut, skin tight dress to first day of high school while keeping her cell phone in cleavage.”
(Although on t.v. these days all this stuff is normal, having it aired on a familly network on a show that is supposedly showing teens that they shouldn’t have sex is innapropriate).
After creating the above fuss about Dairy Queen supporting the show, OMM ended up succeeding. Taken from their website is the following:
Dean Peters, Director of Communications and Public Relations of Dairy Queen, just contacted OMM and said they pulled their ad from “Secret Life” and no additional units have been purchased to advertise during this rotation. DQ has added “Secret Life” to their “Do Not Air List” and their “Restricted List.”
If you want to see more about what OMM has done to campaign against the promotion of Secret Life, there is another article about Hershey’s supporting the show at: http://www.onemillionmoms.com/IssueDetail.asp?id=316
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Don’t know, don’t want to know.
For some reason I have episodes of this show on my DVR. I get curious, so I watch them. Maybe I just want to see what rediculous episode airs, I don’t know. Nevertheless, I recently watched the idiotic episode titled “Just Say Me.” Now, I would say to get your head out of the gutter, but in this case the show wants your head to be in the gutter.
“Just Say Me.” Why Brenda would allow such an episode to air is beyond me. Maybe because she has allowed the rest of the episodes of this show to air.
What is this episode all about you wonder? Well here is a brief summary:
In this episode, Grace has discovered masturbation. She decides to tell the rest of the girls how great it is to take care of yourself and they decide to boycott boys and sex. She terms masturbation as “Just Say Me” and creates a school wide campagin. -I don’t know about you, but in my school that would never have been allowed, ever. – Soon enough, buttons and stickers are being passed around and all the girls are sticking together while the guys are pissed off because they aren’t getting sex. This episode goes far enough to show the girls in their beds right after they satisfy themselves with a happy look on their faces. As the episode goes on they start getting bored with it and soon the campaign is over and its back to sex!
Ok, do I really have to say it? Do I really have to ask what ANYONE would take from this episode? Now I may be 20, but it wasn’t too long ago that I was a teenager watching these types of shows with my parents. Would I really want to watch this as a family? A show about masturbation. 1. It’s embarassing. 2. A school wide campaign about how pleasuring yourself is better than sex? It is still sending the message to participate in some sort of sexual activity. Brenda, do you really think that teens are going to watch this episode and not want to have sex? Yeah right. If anything, they will want to have sex more or just start masturbating. Or better yet, they will think the show is so freaking rediculous they will stop watching it, like me. This is the episode that did it for me. That really made me despise this show so much that I wanted to write about it. Just see for yourselves.
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What does Brenda have to say?
So, we’ve heard enough about the show so far, now lets turn to Brenda Hampton, the show’s creator. I found a video interview of her on youtube and I would like to share it.
Listen to what she is saying, “fairly representing Christian teens”- has she ever watched the show? If anything they do they opposite and exploit these types of people making them completely stereotypical. Not only that, but this “comic tragedy”, as she puts it, basically condones teenage sex with bad advice from poorly acted characters. Some teens may be watching this show and look up to these characters, who are all having sex, and think that maybe they should have sex too. If they do get pregnant, they can just raise the baby like Amy Juergens. Wouldn’t that be nice in some fantasy land. My question to Brenda is why isn’t this show focusing on the consequences of sex? What about STD’s or the real pitfalls to raising a child while you are still a child yourself? What it is really doing is showing the drama that will occur when teens have sex with one another, or even that your boyfriend will dump you or cheat on you if you don’t have sex with him. Now, I’ve seen a lot of the episodes and I can vouch for my own comment and say that this is what goes on in the show.
Looking around for more opinions and information about the show, I came across a very interesting article which bluntly states what the show does wrong. The idiocy of the show was even recognized in January of 2009 by Rebecca Grace, a writer for AFA Journal.
This is what Grace has to say:
“the show is brutally honest about teens and sex. But be it honest or not, it’s over the top so much so that it condones teenage sex and adultery.Here are some examples:
▶ Teen pregnancy – As a solution to Amy’s pregnancy, a friend advises her to: “Date Ben. Get Ben to fall in love with you, have sex with him, tell him you’re pregnant and then get married.”
▶ Adoption – It’s discussed but not favorably.
▶ Abortion – Amy decides to have an abortion but backs out before the procedure. Amy’s mom then tells her that abortion is a personal choice, not a religious thing. Not having an abortion was the right choice for Amy’s mom years ago.
▶ Sex – Most, not all, of the excessive sexual content is expressed through graphic dialogue in which the teens candidly discuss everything from oral sex to “loving yourself in a physical way.”
▶ Adultery – The parents’ lives are characterized by sordid love affairs. Amy’s sister Ashley says of their father’s affair: “Why can’t you be like normal parents and get addicted to Internet porn or something? Why does it have to be with other parents?”
▶ Gay marriage – George, Amy’s dad, asks his gay co-worker about the legality of same-sex marriage. The gay character replies: “Marriage is more than a piece of paper, George; it’s a commitment.”
▶ Christianity – A reviewer for Ted Baehr’s Movieguide finds the presence of Christian values on the show refreshing and surprising, but says the Christians are wooden and their faith shallow.”
All I can say is if you still don’t believe, watch an episode for yourself. Any episode. And you’ll see what I mean.
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And the plot thickens..
A new episode of the Secret Life is on today. I am officially boycotting it. At first, it was funny, now it is just a waste of an hour to watch these awful actors portray unrealistic characters while the producers hope to promote abstinence. Oh, give me a break.
I was interested in seeing who else feels the same way about this stupid show, other than my mom, who gets just as riled up as I do, and I came across an interesting commentariat blog entry by a woman named Josephine Ruiz-Healy. My all around hero when it comes to this topic.
First, I would like to start with a comment to her post that says the show is a spoof to over emphasize teen stereotypes. Obviously the person who wrote that comment to Ruiz-Healy’s post has never seen the show. When has ABC-Family made a spoof about sex? HAHA. Yes, ABC overexaggerates teen stereotypes, but it sure isn’t funny.
Now, to this woman’s blog entry: “This one time…at band camp… I got pregnant!!” That is how she describes the show. The writer of this blog is just an average TV viewer, like me, and she got the same message out of the show as I did. I am slowly realizing how idiotic my generation is to sit through shows like the Secret Life of the American Teenager. It really has to be rotting our brains because to watch something with such a lack of substance is just plain dumb.
I want to clarify something in my last blog entry. I am not saying that a 14 year old can’t get pregnant and have a baby with the school bad boy. I am saying that having a “smart” 14 year old have sex for the first time with a boy she doesn’t know while she is at band camp and not using protection is plausible, but the aftermath? Not probable.
The aftermath to Amy Jergen’s pregnancy is a love triangle with her, the baby’s father- Ricky, and Amy’s boyfriend, Ben. Ben is 15. He wants to marry Amy and raise her baby with her and blah blah blah. NO 15 YEAR OLD IS THAT MATURE. Now, this all goes on before the baby is even born. Around the 5th episode of the series. I haven’t even gotten to the good part.
They all decide to get fake ID’s so that it will show that they are 16 and can get married at a random chapel. Adrienne (who has casual sex with Ricky at her mom’s apartment), Grace, Jack, Amy’s two annoying friends and a few others hear about this wedding and decide to invite themselves and get fake ID’s as well. The show had me at “I do,” but not in a good way. It turns out that Amy and Ben can’t really get married because their ID’s were fake and had the wrong names on them. WOW. SHOCKER. However, Ben still refers to Amy as his wife and that he’s her husband. That lasts for a few episodes. Stay tuned for what teen mom’s have to say.
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Secret Life: Brenda Hampton 