When Reba Jumped the Shark
Last year I spent a couple of weeks laid up in the hospital with pneumonia, during which I watched a lot of Netflix as I drifted in and out of consciousness in between being woken up by nurses checking my vitals. I rewatched pretty much all of Sex and the City, and it still holds up really well 25 years later. It’s actually an unusual show in that it worked better week by week and season by season, maybe because the stories really do advance in more or less real time as the series continues. Big to Aidan to Big to Aleksandr to Big again just races by way too fast when you’re binging.
I rewatched The Good Place, and that series does flow better when binging. When it first aired, I had a very hard time keeping track of the story from about the middle of Season 2 to the end. There’s just too much going on and it’s too unusual to remember from one fall to the next. Not to mention the network kept moving it around and I missed episoides. But binging has none of those problems, and let’s you see just how truly great this series is.
And then there’s Reba.
Reba is a mostly forgotten family sitcom from the 2000’s, but it is available on Netflix, and it is the sort of easy pap I needed at the time. Reba’s a divorced mom with three children, one of whom is a soon-to-be teen mom. She has a jerk of an ex-husband who’s getting remarried, and both he and his new wife repeatedly take advantage of her good nature. This isn’t as realistic a show as Roseanne or Grace Under Fire. Like Friends and a lot of other TV sitcoms, Reba is portrayed much more well-to-do than anyone of her circumstances realistically would be. She has a house most people would dream of, the suburban equivalent of Monica and Rachel’s Manhattan apartment. The first season mostly focuses on the arrival of her first grandchild, and her husband’s remarriage, and that’s watchable.
But then came Season 2, in particular the third episode, “Proud Reba“, directed by Gail Mancuso who really should have known better. This episodes starts off really interesting. Reba’s daughter Cheyenne and her baby-daddy Van apply for food stamps, and Reba flips out, just like you’d expect a white suburban woman in Houston to do. It completely fucks with her sense of self and her place in society. Also, although it’s not quite stated, she (the character, not the actor, even though they have the same name) has a naive racist view that food stamps are for black people. Good white people like her and her children are better than that. The story also exposes that she is extremely classist, but race is definitely in play. And in a really important scene Reba gets called on it by a black woman social worker masterfully played by Sonya Eddy. The episode doesn’t shy away from presenting its title character and star in a very negative light. This is serious stuff. There’s real conflict here that touches on multiple third rails of 21st century America. And then the show does a complete 180 and throws it all away.
Cheyenne cuts up the food stamps she and her husband clearly qualify for and deserve because, “I don’t want to teach my daughter the wrong values.” And Reba is proud of her for making the right decision! What the ever-loving fuck? After a whole episode focusing on classism and race and why people shouldn’t be ashamed to be poor, this is what they conclude? And it really comes out of nowhere. Van and Cheyenne were the ones who applied for food stamps in the first place. This was an opportunity for them to teach their mother a lesson. I don’t know what happened here. Maybe the censors or network execs got antsy at the clear message of the episode? Or maybe Reba (the actor, not the character) did? But whoever reversed the moral of the story, they did the show a huge disservice. Reba, middle-of-the-road as it was, was on the brink of becoming a really significant part of American culture. Instead, it became just another piece of everything that’s wrong with it, and ended up reinforcing the problematic attitudes it was trying to address.
