Controversy is what TV does best. Sometimes that controversy is real, other times it's manufactured. Often, dramatic TV series go over the top to make a point about something in the culture. TV news programs do the same thing. The two most compelling stories on the tube this week were highly controversial in their own right: real, honest not-made-for-TV controversy. What the fallout will be from either of them remains to be seen. But that these two stories will resonate with viewers for a long time is undeniable.
In some respects, the stories couldn't be more different: a glossy soap opera wedding and an in-depth hour-long news report on a segment of America's most forgotten poor. Both dealt with what most viewers don't want to see and often watch TV to avoid: real faces being put to "issues." Those two "issues" are same-sex marriage and gut-grinding, inescapable, how-can-it-happen-in-America poverty.
Sure, there was other stuff on the tube this week that attracted attention, notably Ann Curry's NBC interview with Nadya Suleman, the California woman who recently gave birth to octuplets, and who likes to have babies but doesn't much like to take care of them after they are born. There was the ongoing effort by the Republicans to derail the Obama presidency. There were more revelations about Rev. Ted Haggard's sexual exploits while an evangelical minister of a megachurch.
Some new TV shows debuted, like Joss Whedon's long-awaited Dollhouse on FOX, and the new season of Amazing Race on CBS, with gay activist Mel White and his son, Mike, who is also gay, as participants.
But the stories that touched deep were the marriage of Bianca Montgomery to Reese Williams on ABC's All My Children, TV's first legal lesbian wedding, and Diane Sawyer's disturbing investigation into poverty in Appalachia, A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains.
No doubt many would think the soap opera wedding was frivolous and worthy of only a paragraph or two from a TV critic. Not so. Soap operas have been around since TV began. All My Children has been on the air since January 1970. Although AMC is not the longest-running soap (those would be Guiding Light and As the World Turns, both of which began on radio, before TV), 39 years on the air is a long time. (By comparison, TV's longest-running prime-time series is Law & Order, now in its 18th season).
Soap operas reach a wide demographic that isn't bounded by age, race, class or even gender (although more women watch than men). And soaps have long broken ground on social issues while prime-time series have lagged behind.
It was Erica Kane on AMC who had TV's first abortion. This week it was Erica Kane whose daughter, Bianca, became TV's first legally wed lesbian.
The Valentine's Day wedding (Feb. 13 & 16) was simple but lovely. The couple and their friends and family had to travel from Pine Valley, PA to Essex, Connecticut, because same-sex marriage isn't legal in Pennsylvania. The verisimilitude leant another layer of poignancy to the nuptials.
Weddings are a staple of soap operas. Soaps focus on romance and family, as well as conflict. Weddings provide the perfect opportunity for fairy-tale settings and familial conflicts. The wedding of Bianca and Reese was a typical soap wedding in that regard. What was decidedly untypical, of course, was the fact that it was the first same-sex wedding on a soap.
Bianca Montgomery, Erica Kane's youngest daughter, is one of AMC creator Agnes Nixon's most fondly regarded characters. For years, Nixon said she had wanted to present a gay storyline on the soap and have it be intricately connected with family, thus tell a true story about being gay in America.
For the most part, Nixon achieved her goal. Bianca came out in high school and has always been a lesbian. Although she had conflicts over coming out to her powerful mother, she's never wavered in her lesbianism, never thought perhaps she wasn't really gay or that she was (as her mother fervently hoped) going through a phase. But Bianca, like many soap characters, was unlucky in love. Until Reese.
The coupling of the expatriate architect living in Paris and the girl from Pine Valley with a young daughter wasn't that unusual, except for the same-sex aspect. Reese had a past, which provided conflict. But AMC presented an easy sexuality in their relationship that was wholly new: the couple kisses and touches each other a lot, and the slender Reese frequently sits in the lap of her more voluptuous partner.
In Bianca and Reese, viewers got to see a lesbian relationship day-to-day. Two women with children – Bianca had given birth to the couple's daughter, Gabrielle and already had another daughter, Miranda – and a home life that looked a lot like the lives of other soap couples.
When Reese proposed to Bianca, it was romantic. When they kissed, it was romantic. When they touched each other's hair and woke up in bed together, and when Reese made comments about how beautifully full Bianca's breasts were post-pregnancy, there was no prurience, just pure romance, pure love.
For queer viewers it was the long-awaited integration of a lesbian couple into what has always been an exclusively heterosexual soap opera world. For straight viewers who had watched Bianca for years and wanted her to be happy, it was acceptance. There were no boycotts of AMC, few irate letters to the network demanding the couple stop kissing or no longer be seen in bed together. If anything, the struggles the couple began to have with family and friends took on the typical soap dynamic: Viewers wanted the couple to make it despite the odds. They wanted the wedding to happen, they wanted Bianca and Reese to say their vows.
And say them they did. Beautiful, romantic, loving vows that are the stuff of every girl's storybook dream of a wedding. The women were dressed in white Grecian-style gowns with upswept hair. It was a subtle homage to Sappho that queer viewers didn't miss.
It's been a rocky road for Bianca and Reese, and the strife around their relationship is bound to continue. But those in attendance at their wedding, including a smiling, tearful Erica who once told her daughter not ever to say again that she was gay, saw two women deeply in love with each other pledging their life-long devotion and love to each other.
It may not have seemed like much in the panoply of soap weddings – Erica herself has been married 10 times – but in terms of broadening the dialogue on same-sex marriage to reach those who may believe it's wrong or against some biblical dictate, it was perfection itself. No one could deny the love between these two women. And as Bianca and Reese embarked upon their new life as wife and wife, the soap world was radically and inalterably changed. So were the viewers who watched, even if they didn't realize it as they shed a tear for this couple.
Appalachian ode
There were tears aplenty to be shed while watching Diane Sawyer's deeply moving and thoroughly disturbing report on poverty in Appalachia, A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains.
We all know there's poverty in America. But TV usually presents it as urban and non-white. Sawyer's report was about the 1.5 million people living in poverty in her own home state of Kentucky, in the Appalachian mountains. Unemployment is rampant there, as is drug abuse. Prescription pills are the drug of choice, the drug most easy to obtain. Sex is a palliative, and children are an often unwelcome by-product. It's a nowhere existence where the best job to be had is coal-miner, one of the riskiest professions in the nation.
Sawyer, far from her glamorous Good Morning America host self, slogged through hills and coal mines and trailers with no running water to get the story about how America's forgotten poor live.
The scenes were overwhelmingly shocking. Mothers who looked 60 but were only 30, missing half or all their teeth, trying desperately to figure a way to feed and care for their children. Men and boys going deep into mines where the only light was artificial and the dust covered everything, with mining execs unable or unwilling to reveal statistics on black and brown lung disease or the number of accidents that befall the workers. Other men standing around burning tires waiting for the rubber to burn away so that the interior metal rim could be sold for scrap, $5 a pound. Children explaining how they hoped their mothers could get off drugs and get it together so they didn't die.
One young mother, Angel, not yet 30, walked eight miles each way every day along a sodden, grim road to take a GED class in the hope of getting a job to support her young daughters. Missing all her upper teeth, her mouth caved in, it was still clear she had once been pretty. At the end of the show, when she gets her GED after all that effort, she dances around pressing the document to her face, her excitement palpable: this will mean so much, she hopes.
Her daughter, Courtney, who seemed far older than her 11 years, explained how there was never enough money for food. How sometimes there's nothing left but salad dressing. "We can't just be buying food all the time like other people," she says, as if food were a luxury item. Her one desire, beyond seeing her mother succeed: to have a pair of fur-trimmed boots like Hannah Montana.
Another girl, Erica, watches her mother head off to court-ordered rehab. Also old beyond her years, this 11-year-old sees it as another chance from God to start over. But when her mother relapses yet again, Erica begins to go for long walks through the vacant and boarded-up buildings in the poverty-stricken town, looking for an escape that will, no doubt, come at the hands of some boy or a pill finally swallowed to stave off the insuperable pain.
A football star, the best in the state, lives out of his car, showering at a friend's or at school because he wants to escape the world his family lives in of drugs, no food and endless arguments over how little they have. He graduates and gets a football scholarship to a college. But after eight weeks he's overwhelmed by his classes and having no money for food and clothes. He drops out and goes back home.
Many things resonate in Sawyer's story: the dental disease brought on by poor diet and reliance on soda, notably Mountain Dew, to get through each day when food is scarce. A dentist outfits a truck with equipment and travels the hill country trying to help.
It's an overwhelmingly bleak story Sawyer presents, yet the resilience of some of these people – Angel getting her GED, Courtney singing at church even though she hasn't eaten in several days, Shawn trying to find a way to get back to college, Jeremy entering the mines at 18 to support his wife and baby, Erica trying to save her mother's life – is remarkable.
TV can show us things we thought we knew yet didn't. Whether it's the dreamy soap opera romance that addresses real-life controversy because the love affair is between two women, or the poignant horror of hidden poverty in some of the nation's most beautiful country, it makes us think. And re-think. And not forget.
Stay tuned.
Sawyer's piece can be viewed in its entirety at www.ABCnews.com.
Bianca and Reese's wedding can be viewed on SoapNet, Hulu and YouTube.