In 1992, MTV defined reality TV as we know it with The Real World and its famous spoken intro: “This is what happens when people stop being polite, and start getting real.” In the 25 years since, reality TV has gone from an oddity to the dominant genre, and along the way it really doubled down on the “stop being polite” thing…while playing pretty fast and loose with the “real” part.
You don’t have to be a media-studies professor to know that reality TV makers manipulate everything from the casting to production in order to deliver dramatic story lines. Just ask anyone who ever got voted off the island, was kicked out of the house, or didn’t get the rose, and they’ll tell you all about how they “got the bad edit,” and the show doesn’t reflect who they really are. (Or ask me, and I’ll tell you some CUH-RAZY things I’ve seen on UnReal.) But MTV’s current reality juggernaut, Teen Mom, is proof that sometimes producers work to keep the juiciest story lines off the air.
The franchise, which debuted in 2009 as the warts-and-all docuseries 16 & Pregnant, has suffered in recent years from a dip in ratings and relevance. A common complaint is that it got too “boring” as the cast approaches 30, they are now comfortably rich, and moms like the frequently arrested Jenelle Evans and Amber Portwood got sober and settled into (relatively) peaceful adult lives. But if viewers want storylines more compelling than, say, Chelsea DeBoer’s baby shower, they’ve often had to look to sources outside MTV. Because the truth is, the cast’s lives never really stopped being dramatic—it’s just that the most controversial stories were playing out on social media, Reddit or Facebook fan forums, or gossip sites like Radar and Ashley’s Reality Roundup. In other words, anywhere but the show. Until this year, that is, when the show finally let us see what fans have been speculating about for years.
The most dramatic example is Teen Mom‘s recent scandal involving Ryan Edwards (former boyfriend of Maci Bookout and father to Bentley) who was driving while severely under the influence. Despite the show’s prefacing the footage with a warning that “the following scenes may be disturbing to watch,” there was no way to prepare viewers for the genuinely shocking sight of Ryan falling asleep at the wheel while speeding down a multilane highway with his now-wife Mackenzie.
As Ryan struggled to keep his eyes open, a visibly tense Mackenzie repeatedly slapped his arm to wake him up, and at one point had to grab the wheel and jerk the car back into its lane. Meanwhile, Ryan sang childlike songs, trailed off mid-sentence, and mumbled excuses about the sun being in his eyes. After shutting off the cameras, Mackenzie asked Ryan if he’d taken “Xanax again,” which he denied. The day after that incident, tabloids reported that Ryan left for a 30-day stint in rehab for an unspecified substance abuse problem.
There was immediate outrage on social media—tweets like the above were just two of thousands calling the incident “disturbing” and “horrifying.” Many viewers were angry with Mackenzie for allowing Ryan to drive, and she became the target of social media harassment and even death threats. But scapegoating Mackenzie ignores Ryan’s much greater culpability—not to mention the criticism that producers failed to intervene. (“MTV does not condone driving under the influence,” a spokesperson said in a statement to People. “Ryan’s erratic behavior was due to actions that he took without anyone’s prior knowledge.”)
The incident also called into question whether MTV had known about Ryan’s addiction and purposely hid it from viewers. Through the years, anyone with eyes could see Ryan wasn’t sober. In multiple scenes, he had bugged-out eyes; in others he appeared disoriented, slurred his speech, and repeated himself (in the saddest example, he repeatedly asked his visibly uncomfortable son Bentley about his baseball game: “Did you get any good hits?”). Off-camera there were reports of erratic behavior—earlier this year he was investigated by the Humane Society for animal cruelty after he bragged about killing cats on social media. And he’s long been known for his unreliability, frequently missing visits with his son and disappearing for hours every day. This season on the show (and prior to the impaired-driving incident in the finale), Ryan’s family explained his behavior by saying, “Ryan’s like an old man, he disappears to the bank every morning for three hours, then comes home and naps all afternoon.” Yeah, sure. Like an old man with a spiraling addiction.
Explanations like that were indicative of how Teen Mom has previously handled cast member’s issues—Ryan got the “good guy” edit, and his drug problems were either not shown, not mentioned, or explained away in ways that increasingly insulted the intelligence of any viewer not watching blindfolded. The show only gave Ryan the “honest edit” when speculation by fans and tabloids had reached a fever pitch and Maci Bookout finally started speaking about his drug problem on camera.
But Ryan isn’t the only Teen Mom cast member to have a long-brewing scandal finally break on air this season. The other most-talked-about storyline involved Amber Portwood’s (now former) fiancé, Matt Baier, being outed on-camera for a host of nefarious deeds, the most disturbing of which had him pressuring Portwood into a quickie Vegas elopement, being verbally abusive toward her and a producer, and using a homophobic slur against her brother when she refused. He also failed a lie-detector test about his fidelity to Amber, allegedly stole thousands of dollars of Amber’s money, and was caught offering Xanax to fellow cast member Catelynn Lowell—something that’s not only, you know, a felony, but also highly suspect since, like Amber, Matt has a history of addiction and claims to be sober.
Again, though, the fact that Matt is a grifter is not news to fans of the show, who were suspicious of him ever since he showed up in Amber’s life three years ago—over 20 years her senior with no job and a host of court cases for unpaid child support—and surprised her by moving into her home just weeks after they started dating. (He is the actual worst, and you’ll be happy to hear that Amber has now dumped him, thank goodness.) As with Ryan, Teen Mom only started giving Matt the “honest edit” after fan forums and tabloids had made his shadiness an open secret, and a cast member (in this case, Amber) started to speak about his issues on camera.
So the big question: Why is this reality show taking so long to show…well, reality? Maybe it’s because Teen Mom started out aimed squarely at the high school demographic and still airs on a network whose primary audience is 12 to 34 years old, making the pressure to keep things PG-13 very real. The show is also under pressure to keep its cast happy. Unlike The Bachelor or Big Brother, which get a shiny new cast every season, viewers tune into Teen Mom OG and Teen Mom 2 to watch these particular families’ lives unfold. That means the cast isn’t readily replaceable—and gives them negotiating power when it comes to what does and doesn’t make it to air. Of course, we can’t know for sure whether, say, the Edwards family directly asked MTV not to air evidence of Ryan’s addiction, but it doesn’t feel like much of a stretch to imagine such an arrangement.
But whether the network does it to attract a broader audience or to protect the cast members, there’s a problem with keeping the heavy stuff off the air: Namely, it normalizes some seriously dysfunctional behavior.
The Teen Mom franchise has always denied that it’s your typical reality exploitation-fest by playing up its educational qualities. The cast and MTV frequently cite a 2014 study that claims the show led to a 5.7 percent reduction in teen births (a specious claim that ignores the fact that teen pregnancy has been declining since the 1990s. The argument goes that the show helps its audience of young women.
But you know what else would help them? If an expert talked about the signs a loved one has an addiction after Ryan was seen driving under the influence. Or if they aired a PSA for Al-Anon every time Ryan’s parents covered for his disappearance with an excuse about “going to the bank.” There’s an opiate crisis in this country; talking frankly about what addiction and enabling looks like—and how it can happen to anyone, even a reality star—could only be a good thing.
As for Amber and Matt’s unhealthy relationship, the show has never given viewers so much as a content warning about that. Teen Mom frequently links viewers to resources for preventing teen pregnancy, which is important, but it could maybe be just as impactful to teach viewers, especially young women, what intimate partner violence and abuse really looks like. (To be fair, the show did have a discussion about domestic violence after Amber was seen hitting Gary Shirley, her daughter’s father, during an argument.) Though older and savvier viewers may have seen right through Baier, younger viewers saw a manipulative, predatory man target a vulnerable woman and be given an “awesome boyfriend” edit for years before the “honest edit” started.
I’m not naive enough to think Teen Mom can fix its cast members’ issues with addiction or unhealthy relationships, but I think it has a responsibility to help its young audience frame the issues presented on the show. Dysfunction thrives in denial—and until very recently, the show played a huge role in keeping its cast members’ secrets. Maybe this will be the start of a new approach, one where the network realizes that its audience stands so much more to gain from an honest portrayal of its cast’s struggles, than it does from letting them smile and pretend the stakes aren’t life and death.
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