'Tallafornia': soap opera for a channel that can't afford to make one

SO WE FINALLY write about Tallafornia. Just as it’s disappeared for a while. Just as it’s been talked over enough times already. Just as TV3 has released daily retorts to David Norris’s gift that was his outrage about the show. But we’ll persist in writing about the blasted thing anyway, because Tallafornia has its place, regardless of the senator’s opinion. And because TV3’s director of programmes, Ben Frow, this week justified a scene in which a 19-year-old girl lapdanced for a guy she picked up in a nightclub by saying: “She’s not a stupid girl. She is smart enough to know what she is doing.”

And, suddenly, Nikita from Tallafornia is being presented as a Warholian manipulator of popular culture whose understanding of the demands of the media and its audience had made her the exploiter rather than the exploited. It just happened to resemble a drunken lapdance.

Each week TV3’s reality-or-whatever-you-call-it show opens with a warning that is practically South Park-esque in its glee. Over the logo of a skull and crossbones sporting disco shades, it promises that Tallafornia contains bad language, “adult themes and nudity”.

You can search, very diligently and, if you’re a middle-aged newspaper columnist claiming to be searching for something coherent to say, for professional purposes. You can go to the TV3 website, which teases viewers with the assertion that “the upcoming programme contains graphic scenes of sex and violence”. You may then progress only if you are over 18. Veracity is assured to everyone’s satisfaction by the ticking of a box. It’s a watertight system.

Nudity seems absent. The language is bad but no worse than the saltiness the Irish pride themselves in being masters at. The sex is there but the violence is verbal and – here is where it truly fails in its promise – there are few “adult themes”. The point of Tallafornia is that it is not about adult themes. It is postadolescent, pre-maturity. Its setting is a zone between childhood and adulthood, where no one works and everyone parties. If it had adult themes it wouldn’t be so unwatchable to most adults.

Instead, watching Tallafornia is like being stuck on a packed last Nitelink that’s sitting in traffic near Temple Bar. The journey is awful, but you know it’ll be over eventually.

If you were to place reality TV on an age scale, Tallafornia, like similar shows, sits between MTV teen birthday shows and the structured gameshow types that find increasingly focused twists on interpersonal conflict. That evolution would go something like Super Sweet 16 – Tallafornia – The Apprentice – Come Dine With Me – Wife Swap – Grand Designs and probably culminate in a Dutch reality gameshow set in a euthanasia clinic that we just haven’t had a chance to be outraged about yet.

Tallafornia is the modern soap opera, as are its progenitors Jersey Shore, Geordie Shore, The Only Way is Essex, The Villa and countless other programmes that make your soul sink but the ratings rise.

In fact, by heading off to the sun for its second series, Tallafornia will be paying homage of sorts to The Villa, the long-gone Sky1 show that has proven to be surprisingly influential for such a downmarket programme.

Pre-Bebo, pre-Facebook, pre-YouTube, it anticipated the drunken Facebook wall photos and houseparty clips. This genre of television is plugged deeply into the wider society that Senator Norris believes we need to be having a debate about.

All it does is put a shape on it, give it a storyline, a setting and a range of characters. It is exploitative, yes, but is it any more so than any TV drama or movie for which actors are told that nudity will be required for the role?

As US cable television has developed its supposedly “novelistic” streak, it has also drifted alarmingly towards soft porn, and not just because sex sells but because it has become a trope of modern television drama.

Ultimately, Tallafornia is soap opera for a channel that could never afford to make a real one (or an artificial one, as might be more accurate). It takes a particular aspect of the lives and concerns of its viewers, exaggerates the conflict, sex and characters, and does so relatively cheaply. It is manipulative and, at times, unsavoury. Although if you think it’s bad for you to watch it, imagine how traumatic it must be for the camera operators. They are the hidden victims in all of this.

shegarty@irishtimes.com

Twitter: @shanehegarty