Lacking

Flipped, a new half-hour “documentary” from MTV, has all the novelty of COPS and the finesse of Undressed. Meaning, there’s nothing new here and it’s poorly produced to boot. Brought to us by Arnold Shapiro, the brain behind the formerly shocking Scared Straight and the much less frightening Scared Straight: 20 Years Later (which is frightening in a whole different way, as in: “Hope I Die Before I Get Old”), Flipped has none of the depth but all the cliches of Shapiro’s relatively in-depth shows.

Flipped is structured as a day-in-the-life look at teenagers in a Southern California high school. Each episode follows one teen, or a small group, navigating the shark-infested waters we know as adolescence. MTV’s tagline for the show is: “Real People. Real Issues. We control everything—except the reaction.” If MTV is really in control, we’ll all die of boredom. Flipped uses tired methods such the “FlipCam,” a shaky, hand-held technique to signify the shot is from the viewpoint of the protagonist. The “FlipCam,” however, differs little from the regular filming, and the only way I know it is there is the icon in the bottom right corner of my TV screen. This technique was pretty amusing when David Letterman called it “Monkey Cam,” and was used effectively in dramas such as ER—about a zillion years ago. After several seasons of reality television, this format is truly a dead horse, and MTV is beating it.

In the “Mother/Daughter” episode, a Freaky Friday clone, 16-year-old Connie changes places for a full day with her 40-year-old mother. Their findings are disturbing in at least two ways. First, in her adult day, the daughter falls short on cooking, cleaning, laundry. As “the mom,” Connie is chastised by her boss for spending too much time on her home life and not enough time at her job. What decade is this? While I know that the realities of parenthood, and especially single parenthood, involve amazing feats of time management, these scenes in Flipped add fuel to the youth-based argument that being an adult can only be unpleasant, and that the sluttily garbed young women of today are the unhappy, overburdened office workers of tomorrow. If this is what kids think they can look forward to, it’s no wonder the next episode of Flipped shows teens using drugs.

Second, each of these lovely ladies realizes the other’s life pretty much sucks: they end up in tears and a big hug. There is no complexity to the characters, who, by the way, are held up as “real” people. Part of this is a format problem: it is difficult to develop characters when every half-hour episode features a new set, when there are probably 12-15 minutes of advertising during this half hour, and when scenes only show seminal events. There is no room for subtlety or ambiguity.

While enduring the first episode, I was thinking, “God, I hope the next one is better.” It was not. The “Drugs” episode ends up saying that, well, drugs are bad and if teenagers use drugs, they will get in all kinds of trouble. This message has been far better advanced elsewhere on television over the past 50 years, including anti-drug public service advertisements on MTV itself. Maybe because I was around to see the beginnings of MTV, I hang onto Pollyanna-ish high hopes for what a youth-oriented network can do. And so I say to Flipped, in the language of parents everywhere: “I’m very disappointed in you. You ought to know better. I trusted you . . .” and so on.

Most people today are cognizant of the techniques used to infer media reality—hand-held camera, strangely angled and out-of-focus shots, poor lighting. Likewise, people, especially media savvy youth, are aware these techniques are used in some very non-real setting to create an illusion of veracity. But, after all the hype about The Real World being contrived by grown-up producers, it still has a large following. And in the end, TRW has some things Flipped lacks—intriguing (and often annoying) recurring characters to love and hate, some actual story lines lasting longer than 10 minutes, and some editing. It would make a far better 2-hour MTV special than it’s current state as a poorly conceived series dragging out over a whole, long season. For me, I would rather watch MTV’s truly smart show about teenagers, Daria.