“The WETA Guide to Montgomery County.” Hmm. If that’s not a numbing combination of words, I don’t know what is.
(Oh, relax. I have nothing against MoCo. Some of my best friends live there. I’ve spent many delightful Saturday afternoons sitting in traffic on Rockville Pike, haven’t you?)
But I do have a little something against WETA on this one.
I realize the station has a mission to gin up some local programming, but rather than produce a meaningful documentary on the county’s history, its preeminence and its future (or portray life as it is really lived by the million or so residents of one of the nation’s 10 richest counties), WETA has chosen the rah-rah path, straight up the ancient Piscataway trail that eventually formed Route 355. It has produced a long infomercial for paradise.
The people who live in and near Montgomery County have already discovered it (it’s not hard) and many of them, as we know, need no help achieving a certain pride of place. So is this documentary meant to be shown to new arrivals, who’ve simply never heard of Montgomery County? If so, then welcome, space aliens. (There’s an hour’s wait for an outdoor table!)
Though this redundant, peppy piece of service journalism does ramble, it is also packed with information that many will indeed find useful. Debuting Monday night, “The WETA Guide to Montgomery County” is a 90-minute road trip from one end of the bucolic Washington megaburb to the other, with plenty of stops for wine tasting, nature hiking and outdoor blues concerts. It’s a journey to the center of the bland, as told by and about and to the bland.
We hit all the usual locales: Great Falls, Glen Echo Park, the Olney theater scene, the C&O canal, White’s Ferry, the AFI Silver Theatre, the beautiful Strathmore. The soccer options, the galleries, the endless thrills. All across the 301, it seems, folks sip chardonnay and enjoy live bands performing under outdoor tents.
“Get up! (Get on up!) Get up! (Get on up!),” a rock band’s singer croons during a James Brown cover, to an audience of older Gaithersburgers who are seen resolutely seated in their metal folding chairs.
This sort of visual/textual disconnect plagues “The WETA Guide to Montgomery County”: It spends much of its time telling us how much fun people are having, but the footage doesn’t necessarily bolster the case. The people of MoCo appear pleasantly bored out of their gourds. Lots of white people helpfully explain how much they love the county’s diversity. (The county became majority-minority in the last decade.) It’s strange that this program doesn’t show us more direct examples of it.
Where’s the real Montgomery County? Where are the speed-trap cameras? The political spats? The hothouse-flower children sweating out their SAT scores? The weirdo liquor store laws? The nanny-state vibe? The ode to private-public funding and the wonders of taxation with lots and lots of representation? Where’s the MoCo ennui I know and love, and why won’t my local PBS station make that sort of documentary?
WETA can use its resources better, and does. However, in addition to producing “The PBS NewsHour,” “Washington Week” and a variety of good documentaries (such as last year’s “Washington in the ’70s”), the station for some reason feels it must fill a void left long ago by “P.M. Magazine.”
Thus WETA has taken a shine to producing extremely mild-mannered tour guides: “Breakfast in Washington” was one, which inspired my hope that there’s always a better waffle out there, some of them being served way beyond the Beltway. There have also been WETA guides to area Christmas celebrations and fine restaurants.
I’m not sure why nonprofit WETA is after a piece of this action. With the rise of smartphone app culture, no U.S. metropolitan area goes wanting for instant lifestyle guidance, whether compiled by professionals or crowd-sourced by consumers. Offhand, one can think of a dozen Washington-area publications and multimedia outlets (The Washington Post among them) that relentlessly disseminate such info, in hopes of commodifying their authority. Best hamburgers, best yoga studios, best grocery stores, best petting zoos.
I’ve always said that if you can’t find a place to get your kid’s face painted on any given Saturday afternoon — especially in Montgomery County — then you simply cannot be helped. Even by WETA.
(90 minutes) premieres Monday at 8 p.m. on WETA.