The Week The Women Went is a five episode series on Lifetime about a small town in South Carolina that sends the women out of town for a week. Lifetime is a network on cable whose target audience is women. Having said that I’ve been to the network once or twice, but it was to watch something starring Jennifer Love Hewitt.
The Week The Women Went is a fascinating concept. It bills itself as ‘the world’s largest social experiment’ and that is certainly true. A town without women for seven days has lots of room to be entertaining. Some of the characters are interesting, the Yemassee, South Carolina back drop is very pretty and the show is narrated by Jeff Foxworthy.
Reality television has lots in common with the bad guy, or heel in a movie or wresting match. The heel has to be annoying enough to incite interest and dislike, but not so much that you don’t care about them. At first glance, The Week The Women Went would seem to set up the women as the good guys and the men in the town as the heels.
However, more than halfway through one episode viewers will realize that both the men and women are heels for various reasons. The bad news for the series is that they’re both heels that the viewers will not care about, again for various reasons.
On the men’s side the single Marine whose girlfriend has three children and Justin, the young fire chief who’s engaged to Amy and has a mother who is overbearing-are the most watchable. The women all seem to have their moments, most notable the women who owns a restaurant. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a cast bio on the Lifetime website-and I’m not watching the episode again.
It’s not that the show was that awful, it’s just that I didn’t really like anyone in the show that much to sit through the majority of the people that I didn’t like. The dads were hapless, some of the kids were spoiled brats and the women came across as knowing that their men would fail miserably. I could listen to Jeff Foxworthy recite the phone book and he’s the one strand that kept me entertained through this show.
The interesting thing about The Week The Women Went is that it does open up many conversation points that need to take place outside the scope of a review of the show. I did interview Justin and Tammy Lane, the fire chief and his mother and will run down those points in another post.
As for The Week The Women Went it’s a show that can be mildly entertaining if you know the people in it. It not it’s a joyless showcase of southerners and the family unit.
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I don’t know. I’m happy with my antenna and Netflix, and reality shows are not going to make me a cable subscriber again. See, I’ve never seen a reality show participant that didn’t come out looking bad at the end, so I can’t imagine these people aren’t being manipulated. But like I said, I don’t know, because I haven’t watched it. So I really shouldn’t say anything.
Too late for that…
Yes, we’re on the verge of cutting out cable. A la carte programming would be great, but then the bad channels wouldn’t have any subscribers and would only get the low paying advertisements.
The problem is, of course, that the deck was stacked from the start. They found a neighborhood where somehow men lived out every advertiser’s dream: these guys don’t know how to change a diaper, don’t know how to cook, don’t want to drive kids to practice/ballet/pageants. So it HAD to be “funny.”
If you did this experiment in my neighborhood or among MY friends, here’s how the story would go: the wives leave, the men play Xbox, the men have a block party where they all grill, cook and provide round meals for the kids, the kids are all happy, fed and tucked-in at night, and…well…success.
It’s a shame we’re still doing this song and dance – and that a show like this is billed as what would happen if the women/wives really did leave. The truth is that if they left, it’d be a lot more normal than advertisers would hope. Oh, and they’d also have to admit that men are buying things too.
I agree. If Spike did a show on women shopping or being bad with tools there’d be an outrage in certain circles-and the show would be just as crap.
In a way, I almost see other shows as this sort of thing. Bravo runs “The Real Housewives” series, which almost plays out like a no-dad show. It’s all women and they’re all morons. But the marketing angle isn’t “what happens when a bunch of rich moms have to fend for themselves!”