Down South, where the stereotypes bloom

Ginia Bellefante has an article in The New York Times about Southern women:

This month I had occasion to spend ten days in rural Alabama, on a lake serving as a weekend redoubt for the swells of Birmingham to the north and Atlanta to the northeast. The local restaurant, elegantly rustic in the manner of a dining spot in Aspen or Jackson Hole, offered a hickory-grilled rib-eye for $38 and an appetizer constructed around heirloom figs. Not far away, the only grocery store in town carried farro, interesting cheeses, and a line of artisanal pickles from a fashionable Brooklyn purveyor that I am unable to find at my own neighborhood supermarket in that very borough.
Evidence of blue-state urbanity abounds, in fact, in the new New South, but you will find virtually none of it evoked on television depicting life anywhere downward of Virginia. The cable channel CMT began in the early 1980s with the purpose of showing country music videos but, like MTV, which has cursed us with The Hills and Jersey Shore and so on, it has long since morphed into something else: a pop cultural juggernaut that serves as an aggressive promoter of regional bias. When CMT isn’t showing reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard, it is broadcasting reality shows like My Big Redneck Wedding, whose title suggests that when the cakes are cut, they are unlikely to be sheathed in fondant.
In recent weeks CMT has delivered Sweet Home Alabama, whose choice of theme song does not turn out to be counterintuitive, as well as Texas Women (photo), two series that bow to, among other stereotypes, the notion of the Southern woman as hyper-feminine merely in costume. Beyond the hair and sundresses is an ace shot, a master of the lasso, and an individual whose chief priority on a Saturday in the fall is catching every game of the Southeastern Conference. Texas Women portrays four women who, when not out in tight mini-dresses, are bucking bulls, barrel racing and pursuing careers in country singing. This is not Sex and the City Lone Star-style, because here the altercations among female friends can get physical.
A more finely honed conceit underpins Sweet Home Alabama (shown on Thursdays). Here Devin, a pretty, blond student in a cowboy hat at the University of Alabama, is made to select from twenty bachelors, ten of them “country” and the rest mostly from the Northeast or Los Angeles. (One contestant, a personal trainer, comes from Las Vegas and asserts the distinctions between himself and his pastoral competitors early on: “As a personal trainer, I lift weights to stay in shape. And what’s different is that they do a lot more hard labor— probably chopping down trees, pulling on alligators, pulling your sister out of a hole, I don’t know.”)
Country, in the show’s definition, largely means Southern, and Southern is reflexively equated with an affinity for hunting and fishing and playing quarterback at Clemson. The city boys are caricatured just as absurdly, with one, an employee of the Creative Artists Agency, leaving the show of his own volition because he cannot handle the heat. The Green Acres shenanigans are set in Fairhope, Alabama on Mobile Bay, where the temperatures are serious enough that it is easy to sympathize with him. His departure seemed assured, however, the moment we learned that he spoke French.
The series offers little hope of cultural bipartisanship, as Devin has already made clear her allegiance to the kind of amorphous down-home values she finds incompatible with Ferrari driving and careers in finance. By the end of the first episode last week, she had shown a distinct preference for a horse whisperer from Franklin, Tennessee and an entirely understandable resistance to a musician who had dated Snooki.
These series make the conclusion of Friday Night Lights feel even more lamentable. Set in a fictional working-class Texas town, Friday Night Lights made it its business to upend the snooty presumptions of coastal provincialism. It felt like an assault, then, that the Style channel unveiled its latest reality escapade, Big Rich Texas, on the same weekend that Friday Night Lights ended after five triumphant seasons. Where was the respect for the dead?
It is wasting the time you could otherwise be spending trying to excise the Style channel from your cable system to tell you that Big Rich Texas (shown on Sundays) revolves around low-cut necklines and cavernous kitchens. Claiming to be a look into the exclusive world of Dallas society, the series has irritated at least one Texas blogger who cannot get past the fact that the country club, around which much of the narrative transpires, isn’t even in Dallas; it’s in Fort Worth. A lot of what happens initially involves the question of whether a newcomer will be allowed to join. This requires you to ignore that a country club founded in the 1970s and open to the presence of reality-television cameras is likely to have a membership policy that would admit Mr. Ed if he could pay the monthlies. Further insulting us is the notion that the show purports to be about mothers and daughters (and at least one godmother and goddaughter), among them a rabid beauty pageant coach and a woman who gets her child to remove a vulgar tattoo in exchange for the gift of cosmetically enhancing her lips. If it were honest, Big Rich Texas would change its name to Big Bloated Anatomies.

Rico says ya gotta love Texas, dammit, even these twisted television versions...