They’re coming. On heels. In boots. Driving pickups and Bentleys. Descending from their manicured lawns and their havens of new money opulence, they’re coming. The Texans are coming. Fortunately, they’re only coming as far as the small screen.
In case you’re unaware, or have been occupied with partaking of more valuable forms of entertainment, Texans are taking a prominent place in a number of new television shows. Not since the post-Burt Reynolds heyday of Southern-themed schlock in the early 80’s has the Lone Star State received such a scenery-chewing starring role. In fact, it’s only fitting that Dallas, the show that stands as the gold standard of this kind of “Texploitation,” is receiving a revival.
The other figurehead of this dubious renaissance is GCB, a coy abbreviation for the book that inspired the ABC series: Good Christian Bitches. Well. Any thoughts that this would be a successor to the much loved Friday Night Lights are pretty much out the window already. All that’s left is a surgically-enhanced soap opera with accents of uneven quality.
Now, it’s not my intent to criticize GCB for its lack of realism with regard to Texas, nor is it necessary to take it to task for its portrayal of Christianity. Certainly others more shrill than I can take up these tasks. Entertainment must be encountered on the terms under which it presents itself. GCB ain’t art, and it barely qualifies as satire. Satire creates an outsized reality to expose a deeper truth; GCB creates an outsized reality in order to use up every cent of the set design and costuming budgets.
As with any tale of a bizarre foreign land, the protagonist of GCB is an outsider through whom we meet the denizens of a posh Dallas-area community. The reasons for which we are supposed to consider Amanda Vaughn (played by Leslie Bibb) the protagonist are vague; I guess because she’s the first woman we see in the Texas scenes is intended to suffice. Regardless, once her heels hit the pavement, the schlock amps up.
The rules of schlock are simple: everything that can be bigger should be. Houses. Accents. Personalities. Boobs. It is here that we encounter the embodiment of the title in the form of Kristen Chenoweth’s Carlene Cockburn. Sporting skin a shade of burnt orange that only a University of Texas alum could appreciate, Carlene seethes at the return of Amanda and sets up the central drama of the series.
From here on out, everything follows beats familiar to any fan of Desperate Housewives. Which ultimately raises the question, how many portrayals of overblown domestic cattiness do we really need? But it’s not here that GCB fails; it fails because it’s not schlocky enough.
Sure, the hair is big, the sexuality is both repressed and flaunted, and the vowels are long, but the heart’s not in it. Chenoweth, beloved for her work on Broadway, obviously is trying hard as the queen bitch in a church choir robe, but it falls flat. Maybe it’s because she’s from Oklahoma. That’s just bringing a knife to a gunfight.
All the iconography of Texas is well-represented and deployed to garish effect. Western shirts have rhinestones on rhinestones, and Nieman Marcus is shown to be as central to life as Sunday School. Everyone has a ranch, with a hat and belt buckle to match. Hill Country wines and kolaches both get shout-outs.
But other attempts to paint the canvas in Lone Star shades fall flat. For starters, I can neither confirm nor deny that I shouted an expletive at the screen when a character offered Amanda a glass of sweet tea. Dallas may be the tacky aunt of Texas cities, but she’s not Atlanta. We drink our tea bitter to offset the heat of our enchiladas, you ABC cretins.
The hyper-Christianity shown doesn’t quite land right either. It’s not that there isn’t plenty of ripe material in Texas. From the unnatural hair colors at the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s studios in Irving, to the shouting legalists of any number of pulpits, the characters are there for the picking. But the Christians in the show demonstrate neither “name it and claim it” optimism or judgmental piety. They have obscure Bible verses at the ready for the most exact circumstances, showing more of a willingness to Google through the Psalms than a recognizable type of Christian, even the kinds that would make good villains.
I’m now dangerously close to the nitpicking that I promised I wouldn’t do. Ultimately, the failure of GCB isn’t that it caricatures Texas out of recognizability, it’s that it distorts a reality that doesn’t exist. It’s a parody of London with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Change the accents and a handful of geographical references, and the show could function perfectly in Miami or Beverly Hills. Go strong with the parody, or go home and change your Tony Lama’s.
GCB will never be mistaken for good television. The writing is lazy and the characters aren’t that interesting. This alone doesn’t damn it, though. Plenty of shows have the ability to rise to the level of guilty pleasure through exactly these weaknesses. But the real failure is that it doesn’t seem to be having fun in the process. By putting the viewer on the rooting side of Amanda, all the Texans are either attackers or uneasy allies. The narrative goal then becomes a decisive victory over the sanctimonious forces of evil, not the exploration of a well-conceived fictional world. Maybe the new Dallas will at least be fun.
Texploitation can be done well. The best example is the recently departed King of the Hill. Mike Judge’s animated comedy mined every corner of the Texas experience for laughs and created memorable characters along the way. But its true triumph was that, beyond the loads of humor it delivered, it was recognizably Texan. I daresay that everyone who has spent any time down here knows a Hank Hill or a Dale Gribble. The humor is more like the easy laughter that comes from looking through embarrassing old photos of yourself, and less like poking fun at the monkeys at the zoo.
So I’ll deign to forgive GCB their sweet tea transgression, if only they’ll find some fun in their Texan trappings. A cowboy hat isn’t funny because it’s a cowboy hat; it’s funny because of what’s going on in the fat head underneath it. Using regional signifiers for humor can be a strangely effective way of seeing ourselves in other people. If GCB can find that humor, they’ll at least live up to the “G” in their acronym.