This was a guy who’d had nothing to do with her for 16 years, and yet none of the other authority figures seem to raise an eyebrow.) (I, for one, was appalled when Adrian’s birth-father appeared on the scene and took her into his custody. It’s implied that Ricky’s promiscuity and inability to respect girls is a reaction to his abuse as a child.Īdrian Lee, Ricky’s ‘friend-with-benefits’, is the daughter of a single mother, and the series manages to imply that Adrian’s promiscuity would’ve been curtailed if she’d had a father-figure living in the house with her. (Some scenes with the Juergens family hit way too close to home, but that is a post for my Livejournal blog.)īob Underwood, the father of Ricky (the father of Amy’s baby), is a drug-addict who sexually abused his son. He has habitually cheated on his wife, his work is his life, and when he is at home, interacting with his family, he flounders cluelessly, seemingly incapable of understanding his two daughters. George Juergens, the father of pregnant 15-year-old Amy, is emotionally distant. Every single main character has a bad father. Secret Life picks up this theme and runs with it, arguing, in a rather clunky fashion, that bad fathers cause a range of problems. Despite the fact that the majority of families are two-income, everything in Anglo-Saxon Western societies is still set up according to 1950s standards: men go out to work, women stay in the domestic sphere, and this has had appalling consequences as far as how men relate to their children. Or, to put it another way, if women are able to do everything, what is there left for men to do? The past 40 years have shown that while women’s roles have changed tremendously, society – and men – have not, as a whole, made any corresponding changes. Secret Life taps into a rich vein of social commentary that has sprung up in the 40 years since women entered the workforce: if women’s role in the workplace has changed, how should men’s role in the home change. Suddenly soap-opera parents were getting their own screentime, as writers realised that the lives of people over 30 actually had some drama, and, more importantly, that parents actually have a tremendous impact on their children’s lives. If you were over 30, you had no impact on the lives of the main characters, as if juvenile delinquents and spoiled prom queens sprung, fully-formed, from the cabbage patch. In the olden days, the parents in teenage soap-operas were non-existent. And although the show’s cringe-worthy anti-abortion message (why is it that American television shows and movies cannot seem to admit that the majority of non-religious middle-class teenage mothers are more likely to choose to have an abortion?) is as heavy-handed as it is inevitable, the writers have managed to explore a couple of interesting themes in between all the angst and woe. In a show framed around the pregnancy of a 15-year-old girl, you can be sure that there will be plenty of moralising, and the Secret Life writers do not disappoint. Come for the drama, stay for the heavy-handed moralising. These kind of stock figures are much easier for writers to move around, acting out whatever lesson in morality they feel the audience needs each week. Instead of being three-dimensional human beings, they are, like modern-day morality-play characters, symbolic personifications of various stereotypes : Innocence Betrayed, Bad Boy From The Wrong Side Of The Tracks, Crazy Christian, Naive Nerd. One of the reasons it’s so easy to watch soap operas is that their characters are undemanding. Tags: fangirl, review, secret life of the american teenager Daddy never loved me: a review of ‘The Secret Life of the American Teenager’ Posted by dolorosa12 in fangirl, reviews.
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