The premiere of Plain Jane on the CW tonight was as inoffensive as I could have expected from a hetero-normative makeover show. It managed to avoid all the worst pitfalls of that heinous crime, The Swan, and geared itself instead toward the best intentions of Beauty and the Geek.
On a normal "change the girl" show, the first thing that happens is that the the girl is separated from everything she loves and then her look is changed immediately. The rest of the show is about teaching her to flaunt the new her. In The Swan, the victim was removed from all of her friends and family and surrounded by professional brainwashers who, as a very very first step, performed irreversible surgery on her body. Only when the victim had been gone from her life for weeks and thoroughly indoctrinated into the beauty cult, was she allowed to see her loved ones again, and only on the beauty cult's terms: the mirror was way more important than the gathered family when it came to the final reveal. Plain Jane did not do this. For one thing, the entire episode took place over only about forty-eight hours in the girl's own neighborhood. For another, the first move was to build up the girl's confidence, to show her that she was capable of doing things that she really wanted to do, but thought she couldn't. That's exactly what Beauty and the Geek got right--the confidence comes first. And after the girl was more sure of herself, she wanted to try new clothes, get her hair cut, and stop hiding her face behind her hands. All of this is a good thing. The worst we have here is a B-rated make-over show.
Until the end. The final challenge is that the girl has to have the chutzpah to tell the boy she's been crushing on for, like, forever that she likes him. The final prize is that he'll like her too. The message is that if you're willing to be the girl that Bloomingdale's wants you to be, the boy you desire will desire you too.
To be perfectly fair, in this premiere episode, the boy confesses that he's liked her all along, and that's nice. It means that the most important thing was her new found courage to confess her affections. That's a good message: have confidence! But unfortunately, in the structure of the show, the good things that have happened for this girl are overshadowed by the prospect of a boy's affection. Her crush is mentioned in every scene. The promise of his approval validates her every advance. The final scene is a photo montage of the happy couple. This is not helpful.
I hope that some episode will have the boy reject the girl, despite her new clothes, new hair, and even her new courage. The show should still be able to show that its process was worth it.
In the end, the show is not as ridiculous or addictive as The Bachelorette, not as charming as Beauty and the Geek, but certainly not as horrid as any number of shows where women are only as valuable as men make them.
