It’s interesting to note the television comedy’s long-standing goal of mimicking reality, and the ever-shifting conventions for doing so. In the early days of the television comedy, we needed live audiences and piped in laughter to put viewers — probably weaned on stage shows and vaudeville — at ease. A silent show? That’d just be weird.
Later generations came along and fairly rightly wondered what was up with all that disembodied laughter. Who is doing that? How weird! Thus the single-cam comedy came into vogue, alongside reality television that ditched the actors and scripts entirely (allegedly), which now occupy an uneasy space alongside YouTubers and influencers whose second-person address style (“What’s up, guys…”) makes even the God’s eye format of “reality television” seem quaint.
What, then, to make of DeMarcus Family Rules on Netflix?
The surprise release follows Jay DeMarcus, one of the three members of Rascal Flatts — who appear to be a kind of middle-aged boy band for pageant moms complete with frosted tips — and his ex-beauty queen wife, Allison, as they… well, mostly as they unconvincingly play the role of “people with a reality show.” Later we meet the kids, an archetypal Bart and Lisa (mischievous boy, brainy girl) for people whose parents didn’t let them watch The Simpsons. The way show attempts to squeeze every dumb TV trope into just a few minutes of over-edited docucomedy following a supposedly-famous family is like staring into fame’s uncanny valley. I think if you make it more than ten minutes into this show, you wake up in the hellish place between universes from Event Horizon.
I spent the first few minutes of this new show wondering if I was watching a “reality” show, something scripted, or something else. The theatrically pudgy, tall-haired DeMarcus spends the show’s cold open doing a vacuous impression of his wife. Which, unless you were extremely into Rascal Flatts, you probably wouldn’t know, because without knowing Jay DeMarcus we’re left to assume that this is just his regular personality. That he’s doing a “bit” is also unclear, since everything about the situation already feels bitty, complete with sitcom wife, fake therapist, and everyone sort of half sneaking looks at the crew to see if anyone is actually buying this. The tone lands somewhere between Disney Channel sitcom and TLC reality show, intent on selling us this sitcom life where dad is a lovable screw-up breadwinner and mom dutifully keeps the house from falling apart while opining about make-up and hair. Oh, and they’re rich!
The question here isn’t just “is this reality,” but rather, is this supposed to look like reality? Is this a reality show mimicking a sitcom, a sitcom mimicking a reality show, or are these peoples’ brains so atrophied from YouTube pranks and Disney sitcoms that this is how they really act? Jay and Allison DeMarcus are so transparently play-acting their expected roles (a kind of barely-updated fifties sitcom milieu spiced with early aughts wealth porn) that it’s hard to tell whether this is all for the camera or for their whole lives. Jay DeMarcus speaks with an exaggerated Nashville drawl (is there a better word for this accent? Tennessee accents sound much less languid, more buttoned-up than deep south drawls, like Alabaman with its t-shirt tucked into its shorts) despite subsequent research revealing that he was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio.
It occurs to me that this kind of unceasing performativeness may actually be what characterizes life in certain affluent suburbs; that DeMarcus Family Rules is just Real Housewives for people with Disneyland annual passholder car magnets. Yet the obvious draw of Real Housewives is to watch rich people behaving terribly. The draw of DeMarcus Family Rules, and by extension the draw of both pop country and Disney shows (a parallel made explicit in the case of Rascal Flatts, who spent much of their career on a Disney record label) is presumably to watch rich people behaving… wholesomely. It feels less like a show than a sales pitch for a lifestyle. At any moment you expect someone to break in and ask you to buy a timeshare or join a multi-level marketing scheme. It’s not only nauseating but vaguely reactionary. See, y’all? Everything’s fine!
The result is an inescapable and overwhelming smarm. Just watching the DeMarcus family be (I mean, not really, it’s all fake as shit) feels like being smugly chided. In the course of researching this I kept looking up pictures of Rascal Flatts and getting angrier and angrier.
Would you believe this picture was taken in 2019? It looks like someone replaced the kids in a Mervyn’s ad with their dads as a joke. It looks like a convention of cool pastors. These men are walking pooka shell necklaces. DeMarcus Family Rules is like an animatic of this picture.
Applying the same styling the Disney Channel does to its tween stars to grown men makes explicit what’s always been so disturbing about it: The sheer amount of artifice it takes to make people look this sexless. It’s an army of stage children selling abstinence through bleached teeth and 10 pounds of makeup. The irony is that Disney’s studiously sex-free stars always end up looking a lot like porn actors. How far can you take fantasy before it becomes fetish?
But hey, maybe I’m reading too much into it.
Perhaps being incredibly skeeved out by well-coiffed youth pastors is more of a “me” thing. In any case, they say good art disturbs, and watching just half an episode of DeMarcus Family Rules sent me to a dark, dark emotional place from whence I still haven’t fully returned. In conclusion, solid B+.
‘DeMarcus Family Rules’ is available to stream on Netflix starting Wednesday, August 19th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.
