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Tuesday, July 01, 2008

"A Teenage Pregnancy, Packaged as a Prime-Time Cautionary Tale"

ABC Family -- Shock troops for Obama's coming slide away from abortion rights?

Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/arts/television/01stan.html

No one seems to know for sure whether all those high school girls in Gloucester, Mass., had a secret pregnancy pact. But “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” must surely be the collective effort of an anti-pregnancy cabal.

This cautionary series, which begins Tuesday on ABC Family, woodenly follows the trials of a 15-year-old named Amy (Shailene Woodley), a good student and dutiful daughter who becomes pregnant the first time she has sex. “I didn’t exactly realize what was happening until like after two seconds, and then it was over,” Amy tells her two best friends.

Her friends tell her she has options, but abortion is apparently not one of them; that choice is dismissed right away in horrified tones. The despairing Amy does not even know the baby’s father well enough to tell him, and he probably wouldn’t care; he’s a cad in the high school band who sleeps with as many girls as he can because, viewers quickly learn, he has low self-esteem.

At a time when hit movies like “Juno” and “Knocked Up” celebrate the lighter side of unprotected sex and the celebrity press has recently been filled with belly shots of Jamie Lynn Spears, it’s not surprising that purveyors of pop culture feel compelled to send a corrective message to young viewers. NBC is doing its part with a reality show, “Baby Borrowers,” that assigns teenage couples babies to raise by themselves full time to discover what parenthood is really like. ABC Family chose a more traditional drama format and then promptly forgot who its audience is.

For a generation of young viewers raised on “The Simpsons,” “South Park” and “Degrassi Junior High” (not to mention reruns of “Sex and the City”) this kind of earnest, sound-out-all-the-syllables agitprop is almost comical, a parody of an after-school special. The occasional lapses into portentous symbolism are inadvertently hilarious. While Amy sneaks into the bathroom to take a home pregnancy test, her mother, played by Molly Ringwald, reheats Amy’s supper in the microwave. At the exact moment that the oven timer rings and reads “End,” Amy stares at the test results that will end life as she knows it.

That part is kind of fun. “Secret Life,” however, actually tries at times to be funny, and that makes it painful to watch. The peripheral presence of Ms. Ringwald, once the teenage heroine of John Hughes classics like “The Breakfast Club” and “Sixteen Candles,” is almost taunting, a reminder that these teenage morality plays have been made many times before, much better.

Americans didn’t invent coming-of-age comedies, but they certainly perfected the idea of high school as a rite of passage. European television and movies focus more on sex and angst within the family, unless it’s Britain, where it’s more likely to be a boy and his boarding school proctor. Some of the classics, like “Clueless” and “10 Things I Hate About You,” truly are classic, modern adaptations of Jane Austen and Shakespeare. Television has its own share of high points, from “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” to “Gossip Girl.”

And that legacy makes it all the more sinful that ABC Family underestimates its viewers’ sophistication. Even for a didactic work made in collaboration with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, “Secret Life” is surprisingly unimaginative. The star of the football team, Jack (Greg Finley), is an earnest Christian, and so is his girlfriend, Grace (Megan Park), a blond, bubbly cheerleader who wears a promise ring to symbolize her vow to her parents to delay sex until marriage.

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