Kids Today: 16 and Pregnant

I’ve really been looking forward to MTV’s new reality series, 16 and Pregnant. As you well know, I heart MTV reality. I know it’s bad for me, but…I know that ice cream is bad for me too. Deal with it. I was very fond of Engaged and Underage when that first began, though I was always a little disappointed that the couples were not really “underage.” The youngest couple was 19, some were as old as 22 or 23. Really, it was just Engaged and Immature. But…they couldn’t really have a series on MTV about underage marriages, right? As Chris pointed, out, that would be way too depressing and not really all that entertaining. So how about a show that actually shows teenage girls going through pregnancy, birth, and raising a child?

I’ve only seen the first episode so far, and it was a little bit depressing. But it was also pretty tasteful for MTV. And I wanted to watch the entire hour-long episode to find out what would happen to this young mother and her baby. It was a lot less drama-centered than Engaged and Underage. The main drama is not really centered around the pregnancy, but rather on the relationship between Maci (the mommy-to-be) and Ryan (the baby daddy). The two moved in together after she found out she was preggers, and he even proposed (no wedding date had been set, though). Ryan is, of course, a jerk. Maci manages to graduate high school at 16, works part time for her father, and attends college, and Ryan doesn’t seem to do much of anything. Of course I ended up getting pretty angry with Qualler over Ryan’s attitude, even though Qualler insisted that he was not neglecting his responsibilities, and that it was just on TV, but MTV reality has so blurred my own line between reality and television that I didn’t understand and continued to be mad at him.One thing I really didn’t care for were the aesthetic similarities I noticed between this first episode and Juno (see the above Juno promo and the 16 and Pregnant Promo). The transitions between scenes would turn into little sketch book type drawings, of Maci and the baby or whatever had been happening in the previous scene. Each section was narrated by Maci, and ended with a sketch in a notebook...which sort of took away from the realism of the episode. However, despite these annoying segues, it was more "realistic" than most MTV shows.

In the end, Ryan just kept acting jerkier and jerkier, and Maci was becoming more frustrated and overwhelmed. At one point Ryan actually said that he was totally fine with the responsibility of taking care of Bentley (yes, they named their son Bentley), but he couldn't handle her nagging him all the time. Really? Being with your girlfriend is more difficult than taking care of your newborn son? Though Maci should have moved home with her parents, the show ended with the two of them deciding they would try to work it out for the baby's sake. I'd really like an update in six months to see if that wedding ever happened.

In the previews for the next episode (airing this Thursday) we see the mother telling her daughter that the most loving option would be to give the baby up for adoption. I wonder how many of these episodes (there are only 6 scheduled) will showcase a young girl who chooses to keep her baby and raise it herself. It certainly wasn’t romanticizing teen pregnancy, though the episode did show a girl who had the support of her parents, her boyfriends’ parents, and who was able to finish high school early and begin college while her mother helped her out with free babysitting. Yes, is still showed how difficult it was to be a 16 year old mother, but…will all the girls on this show be this lucky? She was a popular, overachiever at her high school, and it looks like this Thursday’s episode is also about a popular cheerleader from an upper-middle class family. So I guess MTV still doesn’t want things to get too depressing.

Author's note: While looking for some photos from the series premiere, I ran across Maci's MTV blog, which you can check out here. I wonder how "real" this is...

This entry was posted by Brigitte, on Thursday, June 18, 2009. You can leave your response.