Sunday night reality

The Amazing Race, 8pm on CBS
It was a very good move for the producers to have kept father/son team Michael & Kevin in the race last week, and within short order, they were leading the race in its Lapland leg.  Since Michael is unable to handle many of the show's physical challenges, it was fun to watch how good of a time he was having in the dogsled challenge, and his adorable cheers of "Go doggy!  I'm enjoying!" made up for how hard it was to watch his disappointment in himself for letting his son down last week.  It was also good to see them working together with the other father/child team of Gary & Mallory to get ahead.  I am seriously tired of annoying couple Chad & Stephanie, but definitely relieved that nerds Connor & Jonathan took their a capella butts home (on their Princeton graduation day, no less, reminding me of ANTM Cycle 7's Brooke).  Yes, yes, it's nice to see that they had a positive attitude, and I know I would have done as poorly in the sledding challenge, but still.  I was not a fan.  Doctors Nat & Kat made it from 2nd-to-last place to come in first this week, which I was pleased by.

Undercover Boss, 9pm on CBS
This week, the CEO of small, struggling regional airline Frontier went undercover to see how his employees and company are doing after a three-way merger and a company-wide 10% pay cut.  CEO Bryan Bedford tried out roles in airplane sanitation and airline hospitality, and learned a lot about how hard many of his dedicated employees have it.  As a devout Catholic, he was also inspired by how many of the people he worked with found comfort in God, and resolved to help serve others using the lessons he'd learned.  It was a very sweet episode; almost as good as the 7-11 one.

Sister Wives, 10pm on TLC
Kody is supremely terrible, and has the intellect and maturity of a preteen.  The wives express some jealousy over time Kody spends with Robyn before she is officially married to him, which she resents as she moved her whole life and family to be with him.  As the wedding planning goes on, Kody shows how little he respects his wives' feelings, and seriously upsets them when he usurps their plans about the cake and wedding dress.  In another moment where he is shown to be the worst, he looks so unamused when Robyn intimates that strangers observing them as a group may have no clue that they are a polygamist family, because "for all they know, Kody's just our gay friend."  If these women want to share a husband, that's great, but did they have to pick such an awful one?

Sunday night blitz

(I'm two weeks behind on Boardwalk Empire, but having seen the second episode, I definitely am more interested than I was after watching just the pilot.)

The Amazing Race, 8pm on CBS
I was legitimately bummed out that Michael & Kevin, and Nat & Kat came in as the last two teams.  It can happen to anyone, but the doctors kept getting waylaid by bad taxi drivers or car trouble, and I got empathetically frustrated on their behalf.  Michael & Kevin are just so likable, which explains why they ended up not being eliminated, but I hope that after this round they learned the lesson that they should persevere more when they have the option of a non-physical challenge, as they would not have come in last had they been more determined with the word search challenge.  I really liked the challenges that were set at the school, even if the a capella nerds came in first.  Annoying.

Undercover Boss, 9pm on CBS
It says something about how much I've come to expect from do-gooder reality TV that when DirectTV CEO Mike White offered his employees a few thousand dollars' worth of services at the end of last night's episode, I was disappointed by his stinginess.  I will keep watching this show, hoping for each episode to be as heartwarming as the one about 7-11, but this one did not come close.

Dexter, 9pm on Showtime
I hope that Astor and Cody haven't been so neatly written out of this show, as I think their added drama will enrich this show, and Harrison is a pretty easy obstacle to write around.  It was good to have Dexter back in his element, goading and dominating serial killer Boyd Fowler (great job by guest star Shawn Hatosy), and the final scene introduction of Julia Stiles got me very excited about where this season is going.  Quinn & Deb, Angel & LaGuerta, and Masuka, are all in top form.  Desmond Harrington got really hot all of a sudden, and I think it's his new haircut.  Yum.  Incidentally, I miss Doakes.

Sister Wives, 10pm on TLC
I am officially creeped out.  While at the hospital awaiting the birth of his thirteenth child, Kody (urgh) asks his third wife's doctor about his first wife's infertility.  Gross.  When celebrating his 20th anniversary with first wife Meri, he tells her that his gift to her will be a costly round of IVF.  She's clearly sad about the fact that she's struggled with fertility for so long, but when she says "no thanks," Kody is kind of upset.  When Meri tries to talk honestly with her husband about her jealousy issues, she asks him how he would feel if her attentions were split between him and another man.  I believe his exact response is that "the vulgarity of that idea is so against God and nature" that he refuses to even think about it.  Why weren't they having this conversation 17 years ago when Kody was getting married to a second wife?  With the addition of third wife Christine's baby Truely, and the upcoming addition of Robyn's three children, the wives were throwing around a lot of language making it seem like the best upside of being a woman in a polygamist family is the abundance of nannies around.  Finally, Kody and Meri's daughter Mariah tells her father that she wants to go to Annapolis, and he has to break it to her that a) polygamist private school is not accredited, and b) she will probably not get a gubernatorial recommendation based on her parents' lifestyle.  The first of many disappointments for this poor girl.

Sunday night reality

Unfortunately I missed Dexter and am 2 weeks behind on Boardwalk Empire, and can only catch premium stations on weekends, so my Sunday night shows were limited last night.

The Amazing Race, 9pm on CBS
Not much to say about last night's episode.  The challenges were not very exciting, and everyone being on the same flight from England to Ghana meant everyone was in the same boat.  The spectacle of the contestants endeavoring to sell sunglasses to Ghanaians at the market was a little uncomfortable to watch.  It's one thing for the contestants to have to take on a task that a local person does for a living, and showing them struggle with it, because that's just like a cross-cultural Dirty Jobs.  But haggling and trying to get money out of them was touchier.  In the end, "Gilmore Girls" Andie and Jenna were sent home, which means no more of their awkwardness to deal with.

Undercover Boss, 10pm on CBS
I'm a sucker for anything that tries to warm my heart, so shows like this and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition are perfect for when I manage to catch them.  When the CEO of a waterpark resort chain went undercover at some of her company's establishments, she had to scoop baby poo out of a swimming pool, wait tables, and check in guests at registration.  Fairly boring in terms of watching her try to adjust to the demands of these jobs, but in the end she was extremely generous to the employees she encountered, offering them college tuition, flight school, paid time-off, and promotions aplenty.  It was extremely affecting to see just how drastically people reacted to just getting a few extra hours off a week.

Sister Wives, 10pm on TLC
Kody and his klan clan are back, and it looks like fourth-wife-to-be Robyn is here to stay.  Kody's whole family helps move her and her three kids five hours to a home one block away from the Browns, where she'll live until she marries into the family.  We learned that Robyn is from a polygamist background, but that she is divorced from a husband who did not have any other wives.  While her young children seem to be very excited about all the activity, they don't clearly grasp what is going on.  Kody's teenage daughters do, however, and they all seem tepid about the notion that their dad is marrying a 30-year-old, even if they like Robyn herself just fine.  14-year-old Madison (who has dyed black hair and will hopefully flee Utah after high school) is quite frank about how little the polygamist lifestyle appeals to her.  Kody's wives all display some discomfort with what's going on, whether it's related to Kody's time away spent visiting Robyn, her youth and attractiveness, or just the appeal she has as a new face when they've all been with Kody for 16+ years.  Robyn herself seems like a very sad woman who may have had a traumatic past, and who clearly idealizes the possibilities that a future in the Brown family holds.

Zoinks!

So, obviously, last night I watched TLC's new "extreme reality" show Sister Wives, about a Fundamentalist Mormon family with one husband, three wives, 12 children, and another on the way.  All you need to know about patriarch Kody Brown you can learn from his "the Rachel" haircut, his terrible chin beard, and his sunglass tan:

I mean, you're Mormon, right?  So you're not even allowed to have caffeine or a glass of wine.  Don't even front like this hairstyle is not going to be frowned upon when you get to heaven.  Seriously, this guy probably drives the Mystery Machine to work:

Kody's first wife Meri grew up in a polygamist family, and married Kody when she was 19.  She admits to having some jealousy issues, but it's unclear if they stem from her husband having other wives, or the fact that she has only been able to conceive and bear one child, 14-year-old Mariah, while her sister wives have proven much more fertile.  Meri seems to be very happy to live a polygamist lifestyle, since when her sister died, she saw how her sister's sister wives (keeping up?) were able to raise her children as her own.

Janelle, Kody's second wife, is peculiar in the sense that she grew up in a mainstream LDS family, so it seems unusual that she would have become amenable to the situation.  She works full time, and has six children: Logan, 15, Madison, 14, Hunter, 13, Garrison, 11, Gabriel, 8, and Savanah, 5.

Third wife Christine is the Kool Aid drinkin' -est of them all.  She too grew up in polygamy, and claims that she always wanted to be a third wife.  She never responded to the attentions of single men, and she has complicated theories about everything from the psychology of wife order to the fact that more people die each year from toasters than from sharks.  Christine's children all have dumb names: Aspyn, 14, Mykelti, 13, Paedon, 11, Gwenelyn, 8, Ysabel, 6, and Truely, on the way.  Christine has crazy eyes.

One of the most interesting things about the Brown family is that Kody was married to all three of his wives before his first child was born, so all twelve of them grew up with the same three moms.  That's what makes the season's prime drama so exciting - Kody's courting a fourth wife, so it would be the first time that the children have experienced a new mom coming into the family.  The woman in question, Robin, also has three children of her own, which would be quite a shake-up at a time when third wife Christine is heavily pregnant.

The pilot of the show does address some questions about parenting and sex, and very clearly distances the lifestyle of the Browns and their ilk from the mainstream Mormon community (lest all the lawyers of Utah and the Angel Moroni himself bear down on TLC).  They avoid examining how the Browns manage to be so public about their lifestyle given the myriad of tax laws they must be breaking.  It's very clear every time he's onscreen that Kody has a serious personality disorder.  His wives and children all seem considerably uncomfortable on camera, while Kody mugs it up and comes up with lame one-liners that not even his kids laugh at.  "She's a sister from the same mister, and he's a brother from another mother!"

So yeah, sure, consenting adults should be free to live in whatever "harmless" lifestyle they please, but religious polygamy totally creeps me out and the Browns do nothing to make it seem like they're any less weird than the polygamists typically portrayed in fiction.  What they lack in prairie dresses and complicated french braids, they make up for in misogynistic control structures and the fact that they want this chin-bearded nutcase to be the god of the planet they all get to live on.  But hey, I love cults and I love hating stuff, so needless to say, I will keep watching.

Sister Wives, Sundays at 10pm on TLC