Word: tlc
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Want a new you?" asks a promo for TLC's midday block of makeover shows. "You're not alone!" For once, an understatement in advertising. America is the home of the new you, the uncharted land where pilgrims, convicts and Gatsbys set out to remold themselves from scratch. We ran out of uncharted land, but we didn't run out of the urge for self-reinvention. So we turned that desire inward in ever tighter circles, expressing our idealized selves through our homes, our clothes and our bodies...
Television has followed a similar pattern. A few years ago, led by the TLC hit Trading Spaces, came a new breed of home-makeover shows that were really homeowner-makeover shows. A designer would look into your soul and give you a living room that expressed your true nature--all on a $1,000 budget! Now TV is giving out new wardrobes, new lifestyles, new careers and even new noses in an onslaught of makeover series that use reality TV's titillation and tear jerking to offer a new you, vicariously, dozens of times a week...
...TLC recently launched an American What Not, with greater emphasis on the subjects' life stories. "I consider them the stars of the show," says executive producer Michael Klein. "We're watching them turn into butterflies." Unfortunately, just as Americans took scones and supersized them into catcher's mitts, TLC doubled What Not into a bloated, tedious hour, and hosts Wayne Scot Lukas and Stacy London deliver showy put-downs ("She looks hip-py, not hippie!") and lack their British forebears' acuity. If there's a real candidate for the American What Not, it's Bravo's Queer...
...season blitz of reality shows to make fall's prime-time schedule, has petitioners beg, Queen for a Day style, to win packages of plastic surgery, cosmetic dentistry and sundry other injections and deletions. It's not surprising that Extreme is crass, but it is also maudlin. (As is TLC's plastic-surgery show, A Personal Story. In its credits, words float across the screen: LIPOSUCTION ... SELF-ESTEEM ... BREAST AUGMENTATION ... DIGNITY ... RHINOPLASTY.) A stay-at-home mom on Extreme describes her surgery as a reward for years of self-sacrifice ("This is something Mommy's just gotta...
...Dumberer, and enter into a long and oddly impressive quote session from the original. These two have clearly been around each other a lot. Usually in front of the media. But they have a likable self-star-struck quality about their new celebrity. "At the MTV video music awards, [TLC's] T-Boz actually called us by name," says Clarkson. "I don't know what she said because I couldn't hear anything after that...