Two shows, "Brothers & Sisters" and "Mad Men," didn't wait until sweeps week to reveal one of the more reliable TV cliches - an unplanned pregnancy story lines. While both rely on television tropes – and in fact, "Mad Men"’s conclusion seems even more unbelievable and melodramatic on first watch -- the execution of the latter makes dramatic and biological sense; the former seems contrived and trite, and represents a larger problem surrounding Hollywood and reproduction.
On the second season of "Brothers & Sisters," "driven" "career woman" Kitty Walker (Calista Flockhart) has seen both her drive and her career savvy disappear as her romance with boss/dreamboat, Sen. Robert McCallister (Rob Lowe) develops. Last Sunday, her character discovers she’s pregnant – and right as the campaign begins to gain steam!
Like most television characters who find themselves pregnant, Kitty had been using protection that failed. She and her fiancé had been careful - "very careful" -- the show explained, but the pregnancy "happened anyway." She’s not alone: remember Ross’s frantic calls to the condom company on "Friends"? And while it was never specifically discussed, is one really supposed to believe that Sandra Oh's character on "Grey's Anatomy" - the driven, competitive, cold, medical doctor Christina Yang - wasn't taking every precaution to prevent what she clearly viewed as a career-derailing pregnancy? Even "Ugly Betty"’s Hilda had the foresight to use a condom, in the back of a car, on prom night – too bad it broke.
In reality, most unplanned pregnancies are not the result of the few statistical percentage points beyond which birth control is unreliable. Instead, birth control fails - and women find themselves pregnant - thanks to human error and inconsistent application. The most recent realistic portrayal of How A Baby is Made comes in the film Knocked Up: the main characters aspire to safe sex, and usually practice it, but fail to follow through after too many drinks and too little patience for prophylactic detail. But while the “pregnant despite our best intentions” is not entirely realistic, it allows Hollywood to exploit the tension that comes from irresponsible behavior while creating characters who are smart about sex.
The safe-sex boom in the 90s created both overt and covert pressures on Hollywood: When Buffy Summers lost her virginity to the undead vampire Angel on "Buffy The Vampire Slayer," the show faced harsh criticism for not implying condom use between the two lovers. (“When you're losing your virginity to someone who's been dead for hundreds of years, is there a risk of contracting sexually transmitted disease?” asked head of programming Garth Ancier in reaction to the uproar). The media had an obligation, it was understood, to promote healthy behavior through positive examples.
At the same time, safer sex advocates wisely marketed sex ed as a must for those in the know; anyone who wasn’t proactive about sexual health was seen as uninformed, unintelligent, and a little bit trashy. The branding stuck, and writers were loath to make their heroes and heroines look irresponsible or unhip by forgoing birth control. (One pregnancy on "Friends" was a result of unprotected sex; the foolish practitioner was Gina, Joey’s gum chomping, faux-fur wearing teenage sister, heavy on the Brooklyn accent, short on brains.)
Despite making their characters savvy about sex to satisfy both political and societal pressure, Hollywood still relied on the dramatic options created by unsafe sex – namely, the unplanned pregnancy. So while characters on TV were smarter about sex, they still suffered the same consequences. As a result birth control appears as volatile and unreliable as none at all, as Ross so succinctly states on "Friends":
Rachel: But you know, condoms only work like 97% of the time.
Ross: What? What? They should put that on the box!
Rachel: They do!
Ross: No they, don't! (Checks box) Well, they should put it in huge, block letters!
Rachel: C'mon Ross, let's just forget about the condoms.
Ross: Well, I might as well have!
The misrepresentation of birth control as ineffective is troubling (though a Kaiser Health study did find that teenagers who watched that episode with a parent better remembered the efficacy rate of condoms). It’s also transparent. This reproductive bait and switch has been going on for years, and most savvy viewers are tired of it. Many also see it as a throwback to the morality plays of yore – that no pleasurable deed goes unpunished, and that a woman who has sex will suffer for it later. As a result, when a show does introduce a smart, complex pregnancy plot line, it’s often perceived as cheap theatrics and lazy writing.
That’s how many viewers responded to"Mad Men." Peggy Olson’s season-long weight gain had viewers wondering if she was pregnant. After several episodes (and episodic months) passed without mention of a pregnancy, viewers assumed she was just gaining weight in an attempt to desexualize herself and gain professional respect. Both they and she were surprised to find Peggy in labor around the 47-minute mark of the season finale. TV Guide called the story “boneheaded” and said the surprise pregnancy “smacks of the kind of soap-operatic plotting this achingly subtle series has so skillfully avoided.”
But Olson is a 1960s secretary coming of age long before Our Bodies, Ourselves. That she was totally oblivious to her impending labor is more believable than the dozens of current-day characters who find themselves knocked up after doing Everything Right.
Peggy is decent and earnest and way out of her league, a Bay Ridge girl in Midtown Manhattan. She tries to play by the rules and do the right thing, and is surprised when those who don't get ahead - or at least get away with it. She doesn't quite understand the game, doesn't at all like it, but still tries to play -- so badly does she want to be included in the glamorous world of advertising. Therefore it’s no surprise that while lots of characters are shown having sex without physical consequence on "Mad Men "(the moral consequence is another article entirely), poor Peggy is the one who ends up knocked up: A mere 8 hours after her doctor's appointment to obtain the Pill, she has sex with oily, married, co-worker Pete. Joan, the office siren and consummate city girl, could have told her that oral contraceptives can take up to a month to kick in.
While pregnancy denial does seem soapy and contrived, it still happens in this day and age – remember the spate of prom-night pregnancies and dumpster babies? When women, especially young women who don’t know about sex and are in no position to have a baby, find themselves pregnant, it’s remarkably easy to convince themselves that they aren’t. Peggy fits that profile exactly: she’s naïve and inexperienced sexually, but professionally finds herself thriving; a baby would ruin her newfound success. The day she gives birth, she’s also promoted to Junior Copywriter.
Drake LeLane’s excellent “music” column about "Mad Men" ("music" in quotes because the scope and spot-on analysis go far beyond the songs played in the show) explains her psychology perfectly:
[…]Pete's cruelty, coupled with her career's sudden upward trajectory, made having this baby an impossibility. She had the pill on her side for deniability... it was a new product with plenty of side affects to help her explain away many of her body's signs. In parallel this season, both Betty [the main character’s wife] and Peggy have lived with this growing feeling, kicking inside them, yet refused to recognize the beast for what it was until that final painful kick (the call to the therapist, the hospital).
Those who still see the plot point as too easy and cheap would do well to read the rest of his analysis; suffice to say the pregnancy of Peggy is not a sensational “gotcha” moment but part of a much more nuanced and intricate theme - and one that's biologically and socially plausible. The challenge now is to deal with the pregnancy’s aftermath in a similarly realistic, thematic way.
CRITICAL MASS: A PLACE FOR EXTRA ANALYSIS
The way "Mad Men" skewered the conventional pregnancy plotline had a smaller, more subtle detail: Peggy and Kitty both attribute their pregnancy-related illnesses to food poisoning. When Kitty Walker starts vomiting at the smell of shrimp pizza, she blames her morning sickness on rancid seafood, letting the viewers know where the story would lead before she did – a nauseous woman has become TV shorthand for a positive EPT. When Olson shows up at the clinic thinking she ate a bad sandwich, she's actually in labor.
1 comment:
Right on, Kate! I appreciate this observation for a few reasons:
1. To me any pregnancy (planned or unplanned) seems to be the modern day jumping of the shark - it's almost always a sure sign that the writers have run out of ideas. The general trajectory after someone gets pregnant is the show turns lame and goes off the air in a season or two.
2. It infuriates me when these story lines give the impression that birth control is generally unreliable and that getting knocked up just happens, even to the most hip, clever and beloved characters on television. As Kate so accurately pointed out, the majority of birth control failures are a result of imperfect use do to the users failure to fully read and understand the instructions, laziness or lack of patience. To lead the sexually active population to believe that if they get pregnant it's because the condom "broke," not because they failed to pinch the tip. Even worse is the possibility that any impressionable viewer believe that having sex without birth control is worth the risk because it's not all the reliable in the first place.
3. Finally, if I had the energy I'd go into some discussion about how networks won't show condom advertisements when the Ad touts condoms only for the purpose of preventing pregnancy and not for anyother health purpose (I'm thinking of the Trojan commercial with the pigs that can now only be shown after certain hours - yet somehow a group of old dudes singing Viva Viagra in the middle of the day is A-OK), but a storyline about an unplanned pregnancy due to birth control failure or failure to use birth control at all, is totally acceptable - and worse romanticized in some way (Ross & Rachel get back together, etc). Unequivocally we need to be promoting and encouraging safe sex.
The point is, Kate you hit on a good point - Babies = jumping the shark.
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