‘Too Close to Home’: Tyler Perry Tries His Hand at a White-Trash Soap Opera
Photo: TLC
I would call Monday night’s premiere of Too Close to Home — TLC’s first scripted drama, created, written, and directed by Tyler Perry — a riot of tone and style, but that might suggest an organized chaos that the two-hour premiere lacked. The tale of a young woman caught up in a presidential sex scandal … No, wait! … The tale of the poor inhabitants of a trailer park. Actually, Too Close to Home is really both of these — and so much less. The ostensible center of the show is Anna (Danielle Savre), a perennially woeful-looking gal who’s working in the social office of the White House and has convinced her fellow interns that her parents are fabulously wealthy.
In truth, Anna is the scion of a dirt-poor clan in Alabama, and Tyler Perry provides us with the dirt to prove it. The premiere kept cutting back and forth between the White House and a trailer park so dowdy, the actors seemed to open doors with their fingernails to avoid contact with verminous germs. In this latter location, we were introduced to mumbling Southerners named Bonnie and J.B. and Shelby and Brody, all of whom dropped their g’s and mumbled about drinkin’, whorin’, and not havin’ enough money.
Photo: TLC
So what is the connection between the White House and the Dirty House? Anna, of course: She lied about her roots, and now she is lyin’ down with the president of the United States (a rigid Ken doll played by Matt Battaglia), conducting an affair in the Oval Office, right under the nose of the First Lady (Heather Locklear, imported as a special guest star). By far the production’s biggest name, Locklear was given the show’s most dramatic scene. After sex with Anna resulted in a presidential heart attack, Locklear mustered her best Dynasty-fierce-frown and summoned up the spirit of Joan Collins while heaping withering scorn upon Anna. Telling the girl she will be “forever known as the dumb hick who sucked off the president,” Locklear sneered a thunderbolt threat: “You have no idea of the monster who stands before you!”
Cut to the small town in Alabama (that I think Tyler Perry actually named Happy) where Anna’s various relatives and former friends — among them, Bonnie (Kelly Sullivan), her sister, and Brody (Instagram legend Brock O’Hurn), her ex-boyfriend — continued to communicate their dissatisfaction in the rich tapestry of life by grunting monosyllabically. Brody, who wears his hair long and lustrous and rarely appears with a shirt — in an apparent homage to Fabio — is an especially resentful whiner, groaning about Anna, “She wanted the big city, so whut could ah do?”
Tyler Perry’s research for writing about white-trash trailer culture seems to have been limited to watching reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies and reading old Li’l Abner comic strips. His closest approach to wit occurred after a baroque scene in which the drug-addled Shelby rutted with J.B. in the cab of his big 18-wheeler rig, and then, after he declined to give her money for their two minutes of heaven, kicked him out of his own truck and drove the gigantic vehicle off-camera. “She took mah load!” J.B. whined to Bonnie. Bonnie: “She took both your loads!”
It’s clear why TLC was interested in Too Close to Home. Burned by those danged Duggars and their bad-for-business sex scandals, the former Learning Channel decided the best way to keep shoveling manure to its audience was to make it fictional manure. Perry, for his part, saw an opportunity, after giving the world shows such as House of Payne and Meet the Browns, to make white characters as venal and dumb as the black characters he’s created. Win-win, right? Yet Too Close lacked the snap and vigor of your average episode of Toddlers and Tiaras, and as a veteran TLC watcher, I can say decisively that it did not approach the fireworks of even the most lackluster entry in the Jon and Kate Plus 8 canon.
Incoherent as storytelling, lacking anything approaching dramatic structure, Too Close to Home is a gamble for TLC and Perry: Just how bad can a nighttime soap opera be and still attract an audience? The suspense is great, but not as great as the last-minute disclosure that the commander in chief whose heart attacked him is named “President Christian.” If Tyler Perry hasn’t named the veep replacing him “Vice President Muslim,” I’m washing my hands of this whole sordid enterprise.
Too Close to Home airs Monday nights at 9 p.m. on TLC.
