oo doggie, how ‘bout them Southern tee-vee stereotypes?
Reality TV’s explosion of Southern stereotypes
(Zach Dilgard/ ) - History's \"Swamp People\"
The cable reality show landscape is is crawlin’ with them these days, with epithets like “hillbilly” and “redneck” prominently displayed right in the titles.
In dozens of shows — ranging from “Hillbilly Handfishing” and “Swamp People” to “Bayou Billionaires,” “Rocket City Rednecks” and “American Hoggers” — sons (and daughters) of the South make moonshine, chase wild hogs, stuff dead pets, carve duck calls, wrestle alligators, catch catfish with their bare hands, mess around in swamps and generally hoot and holler.
While these shows often play it for laughs by highlighting the antics of their rural stars, TV executives say the shows also appeal to viewers who want to see regular folks on television.
“We haven’t received any negative response at all,” says Marjorie Kaplan, president and general manager of Animal Planet, home to the popular “Hillbilly Handfishing.” “These shows are not painting people in a derogatory way, because they’re affectionate. I think some people see themselves in the show, but for others it’s reflective of an iconic way of life.”
The shows are popular because of “the desire to connect back to something that’s a little more raw and a little bit more real,” Kaplan says. “And hillbillies are the epitome of that — no artifice, living in the moment, the real deal.”
Dolores Gavin, senior vice president of development and production for Discovery Channel, who produced such hits as “Moonshiners,”“Ax Men” and “Sons of Guns” for the network, says they come out of the “voracious appetite” of elusive male audiences who crave “people who are salt of the earth, and work with their hands, and say what they mean and mean what they say.”
Still, Ted Ownby, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, says “people of the South get frustrated at the narrow range of representations.”
Ownby says it’s easier for TV producers to “build on preexisting stereotypes, so they don’t need to build characters. There’s the assumption there’s something about the character of these people that are already in a lot of viewers’ minds already.”
But TV executives insist the stars of the shows are authentic, such as the toothless Turtleman of backwoods Kentucky, Ernie Brown Jr., who is enlisted to ferret out possums and racoons from rafters and storage sheds on Animal Planet’s “The Call of the Wildman.”
Like the folks featured in “Swamp People,” “American Hoggers” or “Billy the Exterminator,” Turtleman is depicted as a problem-solver who is much closer to nature than the cosseted viewers in air-conditioned homes, whose closest brush with wildlife comes in navigating highway traffic.
Of course, producers don’t hesitate to add twangy music and edit the shows to emphasize the broad physical humor found in grabbing an armadillo by the tail, as the Turtleman will do, and then capping his achievement with a rebel yell.
On CMT’s “My Big Redneck Vacation,” which is set in the Hamptons, it is Tom Arnold who pops up in scenes to make a wisecrack about the obvious rubes. But it is often the city folk who are made to look foolish — for example, the lady in the store who doesn’t know that “camo” is short for camouflage.
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