Here comes Honey Boo Boo! (Bluewater Productions)

There is probably not a human being on this earth who believes that Honey Boo Boo is being given a healthy amount of attention with her TV show and constant face-slapping, president-endorsing appearances on the late-night circuit. We know, deep in our bones, or hearts, or whatever, that the blonde pageant star has another 6½ minutes left--at most--on the Andy Warhol clock. But is it really necessary to make a whole comic book about her upcoming irrelevance?

Bluewater Productions, the graphic novel version of TMZ.com, which has brought you stories on politicians, princes and Kardashians, thinks so. But even it is having a hard time defending its position.

From the 15 Minutes: Honey Boo Boo website (where you can now pre-order the comic):

You better redneckomitize! Bluewater Productions continues it's examination of the under belly of FAME in the second installment of their new "15 Minutes" biography comics line that focuses on the stars of reality television. Alana Mitchell better known to the world at large as pint sized pageant queen "Honey Boo Boo. Join writer/artist Michael Troy as we uncover Honey Boo Boo's rise to FAME from her breakout appearance's on Toddlers and Tiara's to landing her very own reality series. Discover why self-named Honey Boo Boo has garnered the attention, if not the hearts from Anderson Cooper to The White House.

Okay, so it's a history of Honey Boo Boo and her rise to fame? Fine. We mean, how many pages could this subject possibly fill, even in illustrated form?

But already, Bluewater's publisher is defending his recent product as sort of a preemptive strike against anyone offended by the comic, which makes us think that besides putting a countdown timer next to her name, this book has other dirty tricks up its sleeve.

First, a message from the author:

“Andy Warhol's quote about 15 minutes of fame is one of my favorites, and as a pop culture junkie, I jumped at the chance to put my spin on spoon-fed America's latest reality obsession, Honey Boo Boo,” said writer/artist Michael Troy.

And then the head honcho:

“Clearly this one was meant to be fun for people and not to educate society,” said publisher Darren G. Davis. “There are some of these biographies we do for strictly the entertainment value.”

Ooooh. Okay? Thank you for the clarification that your comic book about Honey friggin' Boo Boo is not meant as some larger critique or thesis about our culture's celebrity obsession.

For those who watched, the fun of first catching young Alana on TLC’s reality series Toddlers and Tiaras was that the then-5-year-old pageant contestant was the ultimate long-shot. Chubby and moon-faced, with a manic energy that was the opposite of her too-perfect opponents’, “Honey Boo Boo Child” was appealing because her confidence seemed so utterly unreasonable, given her humble background and lack of polish. The chasm between Ms. Thompson’s princess dreams and her apparent reality was double-wide, but her childlike, un-Vaselined smile was wider still.

And her fairy tale may be just beginning.

Aided by her fairy godmothers at TLC, Ms. Thompson, now the star of her own show, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, landed higher ratings among the key 18-to-49 demographic than any cable or broadcast network’s coverage of Paul Ryan’s address to the RNC. The third-highest-rated show on the network, it’s become popular enough to get its own Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas specials, as well as to earn a South Park parody (a coveted sign of cultural touchstone-dom). And the family that once subsisted on a chalk miner’s salary is now rolling in it, comparatively speaking: According to TMZ, a recent raise brought their take per episode—of which there will be many more—to between $15,000 and $20,000. And there’ll be many more episodes. Though we need her right now, Ms. Thompson’s show ended its season just over a month ago. “We want to make sure there’s her school,” said the President of TLC and Discovery Networks Eileen O’Neill of her pint-sized star. “We need to make certain we manage audience expectations as series comes back in the spring.”

For those who’ll be jumping into the series then, the Thompson clan lives in rural Georgia. In addition to Alana and her mother, they include dad Mike “Sugar Bear” Thompson, a pet piglet named Glitzy, and three older girls. “Pumpkin is the craziest,” as Alana puts it. “Anna is the pregnantest. And Jessica is my favorite—like my BFF.” The family gathers for a portrait in the credits sequence of each episode, rather like the Kardashians of cable network E!, who brazenly pretended to be famous until they made it. But, skewering any hint of pretension, someone in the family (Mama gets the blame) then passes gas. The Thompsons may be crass, yes. But have you ever even seen a Kardashian sweat? (Outside an unauthorized sex tape, that is?)

In an exhausting era in which the ego reigns supreme for every would-be star (which is, basically, everyone), it’s refreshing to see people so comfortable with themselves. It’s not the class distinction that separates the Thompson family from the rest of us; it’s their self-belief and lack of shame. New York neurotics, hammered by economic uncertainty and lashed by storm waves, have a lot to learn from Mama June and company.

Between Alana’s mugging, her generosity of spirit (Glitzy can be gay “if he wants,” she declared in one episode) and her unorthodox cuisine (heavily caffeinated “Go-Go Juice,” and spaghetti in a ketchup-and-margarine sauce), she’s sui generis. Her catchphrase, “You better redneck-ognize!” could not be more apt.

We do redneck-ognize, Alana. We do.

Since, say, the end of Roseanne, popular television has shown America what it wants to be: the affluent urbanites of NBC’s Must-See lineup from Frasier to Friends, not a one of them worried about making the rent; the doctors and lawyers of an endless parade of hourlong dramas; even the wealthy “Housewives” who migrated from an ABC soap (where they were Desperate) to Bravo unscripted TV (where they were Real) without losing a single spangle off their miniskirts.

You don’t get much more real than Mama June, who was revealed to have once been arrested for contempt of court stemming from a charge regarding an older daughter’s child support. But she’s handled the press revelations with characteristic savoir-faire and minimal rumination, owning up to a past mix-up and moving past it.

While young Alana may not quite realize it—or care—her popularity heralds a welcome validation of a long-term strategic shift for the network she calls home. The onetime “Learning Channel” has, over time, morphed into a window onto the surprisingly bizarre lives of everyday Americans—or maybe onto the surprisingly mundane lives of various cultural outliers. Whatever it is, it’s working.

Not for TLC are those outsized, high-living housewives of Bravo or the garish, entitled Kardashians. Everything about TLC’s various hit series is fundamentally normal—but for one little twist. For instance, the typical suburban mom at the center of the program may have eight kids and is undergoing a divorce, as with Jon and Kate Plus Eight’s Kate Gosselin, the network’s first true breakout star. Or the suburban mom may be a national politician who unwinds by felling the odd caribou, as with Sarah Palin’s Alaska. Or she practices polygamy, as on Sister Wives. Or belongs to a small religious sect (Breaking Amish), or has weddings just a bit more over-the-top than the ones to which we’re accustomed (My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding) or conducts breezy chats with the dead (Long Island Medium).

Whatever their unusual lifestyle situations, what these characters have in common is their wonderful banality. Honey Boo Boo is at once TV’s only utterly normal child (sorry, Modern Family kids, but you’re in the uncanny valley) and its greatest comic creation. Her self-acceptance is practically revolutionary. (At one point she reminds her mother to be sure and spray the tan-in-a-can “under my fat roll.” Lena Dunham couldn’t have said it better.)

After four years of economic stagnation, it’s starting to look like aspiration has lost its sparkle. While the flailing broadcast networks continue to focus on unreasonably wealthy and sophisticated young adults (even CBS’s 2 Broke Girls live in a nice loft), cable has increasingly showcased characters whose financial struggles mirror those of their audiences. Walter White only “breaks bad” and begins cooking and selling meth because he lacks the money to pay his medical bills and support his family. When the once-chic idlers on Downton Abbey face the Great War, they do so in the spirit of shared sacrifice, allowing their dresses to go out of fashion and their house to be overrun with soldiers. The Girls of HBO are all underemployed, and Hannah can’t even count on her parents’ support anymore. And even the surface aesthetic comforts of Mad Men paper over the fact that its central protagonist was born a poor farm boy and faked it till he made it. Dick Whitman became Don Draper; Alana Thompson became Honey Boo Boo. Both have achieved the American dream, but Don Draper’s is flavored with ennui. Maybe he just needs to take a trip due South.

How did we find this angel? Reality TV, at least on TLC, wasn’t always so in tune with the zeitgeist. “The management prior had moved toward a formatted, contrived, celebrity-oriented area,” said said Ms. O’Neill, the TLC/Discovery executive (the corporate siblings are based in Silver Spring, Md.). Jon and Kate were the key to a whole new strategy. In 2008, when the suburban Pennsylvania pair were plucked from TLC’s corporate partner Discovery Health and their show’s title changed from Surviving Sextuplets and Twins, they became personalities and not just medical test cases. When Jon and Kate announced they were separating, the show set the all-time record for TLC programming, with 10.9 million viewers, despite the fact that, sadly, the split wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary for the American family.

The “old TLC” spotlighted home decor, clothing and weddings (some examples, like What Not to Wear and Say Yes to the Dress, endure). But shows like A Baby Story and A Wedding Story, which feature a different cast enacting essentially the same 30-minute narrative on each episode, don’t ring nearly as true as Honey Boo Boo heaving herself down the “redneck slip ’n’ slide” or Theresa Caputo, with her blonde bob and long French-tip nails, delivering a spontaneous psychic reading on a strip-mall sidewalk.

TLC’s programming has not been universally embraced. Some viewers find it exploitative and crass. The Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman called Honey Boo Boo “peculiarly reprehensible,” even by the standards of “this country’s most socially irresponsible channel.” Time critic James Poniewozik referred to the series as “fartsploitation,” noting banjo music cues he found insulting, and claimed that an unnamed TLC producer was “shaking his head smugly” at the Thompson family. (He had praise, though, for the wit and charm of Honey Boo Boo herself, and her “Coupon Queen” mother.)

TLC’s general manager Amy Winter dismissed such criticisms. “We’re not mean-spirited in our approach with people on our air and the content we have,” she told The Observer. “There’s a distinction between making fun of people and having fun with people. For the most part, if there’s some sort of comedy or something humorous, the people involved in that realize that there’s something funny in that.”

Maybe it’s the critics who are condescending, then, in refusing to recognize that the series’ subjects are in on the joke.

“The way that we appeal to our audience—we appeal to the type of person who is curious about lives that are unlike theirs,” said Ms. Winter. “They’re open-minded and open-hearted about that. Going into gypsy culture, to a family of polygamists, family from rural Georgia—you have to be intrigued and curious, because there’s something very different about each of the characters. Once you dig in, people do fall in love.”

Sooner or later, they have to. As the deeply perceptive Mama June—who washes her hair in the sink but still thinks she’s looking good—said after an etiquette coach proposed remaking the family into one befitting a future Miss America, “I think that she’s what we call a ‘square,’ and we’re kind of like a lopsided, obtuse, triangle, oval all put together like a, like a deformed shape.”

So too, right now, is the squeezed, stressed-out and now waterlogged TV viewer. Alana isn’t likely to become Miss America. But for a role model with an unshakable belief in her own potential, our down-in-the-dumps electorate could do a lot worse than this kooky 6-year-old.

The future of America (ABC)

http://youtu.be/qorkigPPbvU

Considering that Honey Boo Boo definitely has more cultural cache than Lindsay Lohan, this should definitely lock up the election for Obama in the red states. Why even bother holding it now?

On a different note, has June Boo Boo (or whatever her last name is) been getting media training? She was surprisingly well-spoken and completely intelligible in this segment. They didn't need to have subtitles or anything!

You go, Paul Ryan. (TIME Magazine)

– Just in time for the vice presidential debates, here's Paul Ryan looking like Zach Morris's stand-in during a TIME Magazine photo shoot that teased him by saying it was considering naming him its man of the year. Yeah, right!

– The reason Lindsay Lohan was fighting with her mom on Tuesday? Apparently it had something to do with a $40,000 loan Ms. Lohan gave to her mother to keep her Long Island home from being foreclosed on.

– Last night was the New York premiere of Seven Psychopaths. Watch Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell and Colin Farrell reenact a scene from Here Comes Honey Boo Boo last night.
http://youtu.be/NzIsz3fU9xQ

– Here's how you know you've been hanging around brooding British vampires too much ... you start referring to yourself as a "miserable c**t." In Marie Claire of all places. Oh, K-Stew!

Illustration by Mark Hammermeister.

Thank heaven for little girls.

Annie is storming back onto Broadway, and if history is any guide, the Depression-era rags-to-riches tale of a girl and her dog will make as much money, and as quickly, as did its lucky heroine: the original ran for a staggering 2,377 performances, and touring companies and regional theaters have made the show ubiquitous throughout the ensuing years.

But what of the political fallout? Will Team Romney’s October Surprise be a carrot-topped cutie pie?

After all, beneath its irresistible melodies and exuberant choreography, Annie is at root the story of America’s ongoing attempt to grapple with the wealth gap—or to brush it aside. It’s last week’s presidential debate set to music, in which the economic vision of Mitt & Co. (a survival-of-the-fittest society in which only the pluckiest 47-percenters can improve their station) easily edges out Obama’s underfunded entitlement economy.

Even as it lionizes FDR, whose New Deal provides the show’s rousing finale, it offers up the most tender tycoon since Bill Gates, a HNWI with a heart of gold. Daddy Warbucks has his tax shelters—bet on it—but for the right orphan, he cheerfully opens his home and his wallet. And somehow the message about building a social safety net for Annie’s fellow orphans is always forgotten in the fairy tale of one little girl and her diamond-decked sugar daddy.

Annie is the perfect show for our dire economic moment, just as it was when it debuted: It alit on Broadway on April 21, 1977, mere months before the Bronx burned amid the blackout and looting that summer. The Clash had just released their first album, and Saturday Night Fever, a bleak vision of the outer-borough underclass, was among the year’s biggest hits.

When little orphan Annie belted out her big show-stopper, insisting that “the sun’ll come out tomorrow,” audiences could, at least momentarily, ignore the national economic and cultural “malaise” of the Carter administration and imagine a happy ending, however long in coming (there’s the rub: it’s always a day away). Annie’s chance encounter with a wealthy loner who eventually adopts her—having fallen in love with the ragamuffin after a single magical night in the city—represents the great American dream of transcending one’s circumstances not by dint of hard work (because that would be hard) but due to an innate spark of goodness that admits one into the charmed circle of wealth and power.

Annie is by now an American sacred text, a retelling of the beloved fantasy that class in America is not largely fixed, that the poor, through whatever miraculous turn of events, can actually become rich overnight. It’s a notion that still animates our politics today, torn as they are between a democratic vision in which citizens “feel entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it,” as Mitt Romney put it in that infamous video, and a conservative alternative, in which the state gets out of the way and lets the market do its thing.

By the time the show’s original run ended, Ronald Reagan (accompanied by his own curly-haired gal in a red dress) had convinced the nation it was “morning in America.” There was no more need for Annie’s old-fashioned tale of upward mobility. That future of prosperity was here (and it expressed itself, on Broadway, in frivolous, Baroque bombast like Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, ever-more-expensive entertainments for young children, the music of a nation amusing itself to death).

One can trace the shifting national mythology of personal improvement by looking at how Annie’s story changed over time. The original, “Little Orphant Annie,” an 1885 poem by James Whitcomb Riley, was intended as a moral fable instructing children to be good; Annie, in Riley’s telling, is an industrious junior charwoman. “Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay, / An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,” he wrote. She bettered her circumstances by getting herself a job, not by becoming cherished as a family member, and her industry was rewarded: Annie was the only child in the verse not snatched away by goblins.

Years later, the poem formed the basis for the comic strip (which ran from 1924 to 2010), with its famous, uncanny hollow eyes, zombie-ishly free of pupils. Interestingly, creator Harold Gray was deeply critical of Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he viewed as an inappropriate incursion of government power into private life—a notion that will sound eerily familiar to anyone who caught the recent GOP convention. Gray turned Annie into a traveling street urchin and added the character of Daddy Warbucks, among others; meanwhile, he gave up on teaching children about good behavior and instead focused on indoctrinating an obsession with the power of a wealthy man. In the funny pages, Warbucks’s wicked wife takes Annie in and exploits her, leaving it to Daddy to come to her rescue, at least when he’s in town. (More often, he’s off producing munitions and, it has been speculated, bonding with other Freemasons.) So much for Annie working her way up with her broom and dustbin!

That version of Annie also seems unrecognizable now, although her humble beginnings have remained constant. The stage incarnation of Annie will eternally be associated with the compellingly dingy orphanage at which she begins her tale, but she seems out of place there, and not just for her fiery red hair; necessarily, whichever little girl plays Annie will be the most charismatic by a mile. (The show is now in previews; we’ll wait for the opening to evaluate this production.)

Annie’s hollow eyes have seen a great deal, but she remains the eternal little girl, an emblem of Americans’ inability to shake off childish hopes. She’s even confident enough to speak to the president! The show is “a great message of hope in the worst circumstances,” Katie Finneran, who’s playing Miss Hannigan in the current production, told The Observer. “Right now, people are having trouble feeding their families. People feel like they’re not being heard, and this is the story of a little girl who goes into the White House. It’s obviously a fantasy—but it’s about being heard.”

More now than at any time since the 1970s, we seem to be taking comfort in the notion that somehow the future will be better, even if tomorrow just keeps getting further away and the safety net looks increasingly threadbare. While the show gives an explicit endorsement of Roosevelt’s efforts, its real message is that charity begins at home. After all, Annie is saved by a super-rich capitalist hero, whereas the orphanage, presumably part of some Big Government program, is a social-services nightmare run by an administrator, Miss Hannigan, who makes the Republicans’ worst idea of a ACORN pencil-pusher look like Mother Teresa. Daddy Warbucks may be able to phone up the president, but he’s hardly emblematic of the Depression’s shared sacrifice: in a startling number, Annie meets dozens of hardworking maids and butlers at the Warbucks mansion and declares, “I think I’m gonna like it here!” (James Whitcomb Riley made Annie’s servitude seem virtuous, whereas the musical frames true virtue as being served.) For a poor girl, the kid certainly seems to the manor born—the hauteur of the wealthy is easily learned, given that plutocrats, then and now, are the object of national fixation.

What, exactly, Warbucks does to make his fortune is unspecified in the show—he’s the sort of job creator whose extraordinary good luck makes him seem like the wisest man in the room. Annie composer Charles Strouse told The Observer that he couldn’t recall why Warbucks’s occupation had been changed from the comic strip—but that it was fortuitous, given that in the post-Vietnam era, turning out armaments looked a lot less like doing one’s patriotic duty and a lot more like showering napalm on innocent villagers. “He was kind of, in today’s liberal attitudes, a real villain,” Mr. Strouse noted of the comic-strip Warbucks. “He made money from war and things like that.”

What makes Annie’s story appealing is not that government aid helped her better her lot but that she was one chance meeting away from fortune. It’s a nice fantasy—that the next elevator pitch or audition or the scratch-’n’-win ticket will finally be the winner, if not today, then tomorrow. The character of Annie owes something to the work of the 19th century children’s novelist Horatio Alger, whose characters’ fortunes were also often dependent on the kindness of wealthy benefactors. But where the typical Alger boy must still work hard to make his fortune, Annie gets hers handed to her—which is perhaps why we’re still watching Annie and no longer reading Alger.

These days, Annie has more competition than ever: tales of everyday Americans who transcend their social station clog the airwaves, even as their fans seem to fall ever deeper into debt. As the economy tanked, unemployment rose and foreclosures skyrocketed, we soothed ourselves with decade’s worth of survivors and American idols plucked from assembly-line jobs or cruise-ship singing gigs and handed small fortunes. If Jay-Z can move from the projects to global fame in a single lifetime, maybe there is something to hope for. After all, Hova sampled “Hard-Knock Life” on his third album, and now he’s playing a shiny new arena of which he’s part owner. As he boasted on “Umbrella,” he has more than enough money to ride out any global recession: “When the clouds come, we gone / We Roc-A-Fellas / We fly higher than weather.” (Then again, he's said to be a Freemason too!)

But even he can’t hold a candle to Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson, the baby-faced pageant queen and newly minted TLC reality powerhouse, whose charisma and indomitable optimism has enabled her, like Annie, to transcend her humble circumstances. Alana’s family would seem the ultimate exemplars of the American dream deferred: Mom, who assists young Alana in her pageant habit, has become a master of couponing to make ends meet and entertains her family with such diversions as a “redneck slip ’n’ slide” (baby oil on a plastic tarp in the backyard). Like Annie and her fellow orphans, the Thompson clan seems to have struck a nerve because, despite their apparent struggles, they keep on smiling, facing life with all-American pluck and good humor. They might not be glamorous, but then neither was Annie, especially. “People loved her because she was direct and confident,” Ms. Finneran pointed out. “It wasn’t because she was a beautiful princess.”

Like Annie, Alana Thompson is living out a classic fairy tale, being transformed before our eyes from long-shot pageant contestant to cultural touchstone and TV superstar, whose newfound wealth will change her life if not her giddy personality.

Favored myths are endlessly cyclical: audiences first met Alana in Toddlers and Tiaras, the reality series about the world of preadolescent beauty pageants that owes more than a little, when you think about it, to the breathlessly hyped audition cycle that brought the world the original Annie. Young Andrea McArdle was the lucky contestant back in 1977, beating out some 150 other girls for the role of a girl so appealing that Daddy Warbucks loves her practically on sight. Another former Annie: Sarah Jessica Parker—who was still seeking her Mr. Big a few decades later.

The winner this time around is 11-year-old Lilla Crawford, but no matter how well she puts over numbers like “Maybe,” she’s likely to be passed over for the new screen adaptation reportedly being prepped by Will Smith, who himself once played a tough-luck kid with a rich benefactor in TV’s Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. (Like any good plutocrat, he is hoarding wealth, and is said to be building the production around his progeny, daughter Willow.)

Still, she’s gotten her golden ticket with a starring role onstage. The real challenge is how long she can make it last. In Annie, the curtain falls before the sort of recriminations that tend to accompany get-rich-quick stories kick in: the Alger lad who has to keep up his hustle or fall behind, the American Idol winner whose debut album tanks, the voter who realizes post-election that, well, the rich really are different from you and me.

But if Annie and Alana can keep hope alive, well, so can we. “The poor man would like to think that there’s a munificent rich man out there,” said Mr. Strouse, when asked about the appeal of the musical he helped to write. “But I don’t know!”

He was certain of one thing: “I feel blessed by it!”

Alana, or "Honey Boo Boo Child"

The summer's reality juggernaut, TLC's pageant-queen-at-home series Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, has been renewed for a second season as well as three of what the network is terming "HOLLAday specials" for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo has made an impact on the culture perhaps not seen for a TLC series since the halcyon days of Jon & Kate Plus 8. While that series focused on a family in disarray as they faced public scrutiny, the Honey Boo Boo clan, as evidenced by a ride-along profile on Gawker today, are united and relatively sanguine in the face of fame.

"Reality TV don't last more than three years," the matriarch, June, said to Gawker's Rich Juzwiak. "People have a good run for about three years. Some people fizzle out within a couple of weeks. We've had about 10 weeks and if it stays for the next three years, great."