reality tv

MTV’s been having a good summer. In part, that’s because the second season of its reality series Teen Mom has been generating huge ratings for the network—it is this summer’s third-most-watched original cable series in the coveted 12-34 demographic. The show, which documents the lives of four young women after they gave birth to children as teenagers, along with its sister show and predecessor 16 and Pregnant, has already generated a fair amount of cultural chatter on the question of whether the show is a valuable educational tool or just, as most seem to have concluded, regular old exploitation of the young women in question. There’s something to this argument, of course. MTV’s ratings success makes for a strange contrast with the fact that Teen Mom’s stars have been occupying the front pages of celebrity weeklies like US complaining that they are dead broke, doesn’t it?

I’m of two minds about the argument. On the one hand I certainly don’t have much faith in MTV’s dedication to social messaging, at least not enough to believe it extends much further than what advertisers are comfortable with. I’m not the first, for example, to point out that abortion, as an option, is not something that’s seriously discussed in the context of the show. You can spin that fact as having something to do with showrunners needing to have a more extended narrative arc than, "Now I’m pregnant, now I’m not." But Teen Mom does follow one young couple, Catelynn and Tyler, after they’ve given their child up for adoption, so sponsor queasiness seems a more likely explanation.