Here Comes Honey Boo Boo

I don't have as much time as I'd like to have to devote to a discussion of the content to which viewers of this motley excursion into redneck suburbia are treated, but a few salient points stand out in my mind. I found it funny when Honey Boo Boo child's mother, June, commented, "Pageants are an expensive sport." I'd never before heard pageant participation described as a sport. If pageants are a sport, what isn't a sport? Likewise, I was intrigued by June Thompson's comment about her daughters' etiquette instruction: "No one can be proper and etiquettely all the time." Those, ladies and gentlemen, are words by which one can live, and have become my new motto..

I suspect we all know that just because it's called reality TV doesn't make it real. TLC is taking the basic redneck tendencies they've observed in the Thompson family, one would assume, and coaching them on how to crank those basic tendencies up to Deliverance levels of hillbilly white-trashness in order to maximize shock value and  ratings. Still, these people are not Hollywood actors, and they couldn't do some of this stuff convincingly for the cameras if they weren't already doing something along the lines of what we've been shown.

As bizarre as this sounds, I find the family oddly endearing.  While they epitomize redneck dysfunctionality, they do so in an oddly almost-charming fashion. As glad as I am not to live next door to them, and even more glad that I was fortunate enough not to have been conceived from and born into their debacle of a gene pool, I think the family has at least as much as and probably more working in its favor than the Gosselins ever had. I hope the Thompsons make their inevitable eventual departure from the world of reality television with their relationships as intact as they presently are and with their finances more secure than they would have been without the intrusion of reality television. I wish them the very best life has to offer.