Saturday, October 05, 2013

Obsessed With the Dress

As much as I love Project Runway, and I will always admit I watched five seasons of Say Yes to the Dress in about a week, I don't want to admit how much I was addicted to this show.

I'm railing against the idea of "guilty pleasures" lately because well, you shouldn't feel guilty about enjoying things and you shouldn't feel like you have to pretend you don't ACTUALLY like something to avoid getting attacked by close minded jerks. I should be able to stand up and say I enjoy Kelly Clarkson without shame or ridicule, thank you very much.

And at first, my reason for not talking about watching the show was a bit of a "serious film people can't admit they watch reality shows, for shame!"

But I know plenty of people that are crew on shoots like this and it's what people want to watch so whatever. There's no shame in it. But now? The reason I don't want to admit I watch the show is because by the end of the six episodes of the show I realized that there were only two possibilities of what was going on: either it was completely scripted and everything was trumped up for drama, or every single person on that show (save one) is childish, immature, unprofessional, and doesn't deserve any success or notoriety they're getting from the show.

Yet I kept watching. It was an accident at first, there was nothing on, and my best friend and my sister were over and we wanted to just put the tv on something random. Then there was a preview for the next week that was enough of a cliffhanger that we wanted to know what happened, so we tuned in again. Only that preview was actually for the season, not the next episode, so we had to watch a couple more to get to that part and by then we were kind of hooked.

That's how they get you. So good on you Pie Town Productions, you did your marketing well.

But really, if the show focused more on just Michelle (the owner of The Winning Crown Boutique) and her pageant consulting, it could have been pretty good. A good insight into the pageant world? Sign me up. I got to attend Miss USA a few years ago, and talk with some of the contestants and I really learned a lot of stuff that would make a great series. And when the show was focused just on the girls coming in for their appointments and trying on dresses, it mostly was great. It had all the pieces of Say Yes to the Dress, but with an added bonus of pageant coaching and insider knowledge.

This is reality tv though, so the bulk of the show was actually focused on the drama between the staff, of course. Listen, Say Yes to the Dress did a little bit of that, but not much, because the drama came from the bride's personal stories, their annoying or loving families, and just the general stress of weddings. There wasn't a need for this superficial idiocy.

So in the end, Obsessed With the Dress really fails, because like I said, either it was all made up for the tv cameras, in which case it wasn't even a good story so why invent something so lame? Or it was that Michelle has no clue how to actually deal with employees, and Beau actually does a few things that might possibly be illegal, but are definitely immoral in how he handles his role as manager of the store. Not to mention that the employees behave terribly, and are constantly saying things in front of customers that if I was running the store would have resulted in being reprimanded, sent home, and only brought back after some serious training. I don't care if these girl's win pageants and "they're young" as Michelle keeps lamenting. It's YOUR job to teach them how to be salespeople and good at customer service. Gretchen was the only person in that place with some sense, really.

At the moment I'm trying to take comfort in the fact that it was probably almost entirely faked or at least exaggerated by the producers who egged on the people for extra drama. I'm certain they encouraged Tiffany to act out in the shop while customers were there, and encouraging Beau and Sarah's little commentaries in their interviews together.

Basically, while I have to admit I watched all six episodes of the show, I also have to say that even if I was suddenly ridiculously rich and wanted a fancy dress, the Winning Crown would be the absolute last place I would visit to get one. Michelle could undoubtedly pick a great one, but who needs the drama?