Hockey Wives: Season 1, Episode 1
For the record, I loved the premiere of Hockey Wives. I watched it with focused attention (I closed both Firefox and my Twitter client), and with my knees clasped to my chest in delight. I know it's a manipulated reality show, and I still found it to be a fascinating look into the lives of a handful of women (there are ten on the show, but only five featured in the first episode) partnered to hockey players. That said, I think there's a lot of material there for critical commentary.
I read a handful of articles about Hockey Wives yesterday. For the most part, once you've read one of them, you've read them all. This was one of the more interesting ones, partly because it's structured as a conversation, and partly because it's a conversation between two women (as opposed to some dude passing judgment on women's lives). One of the things I found interesting about it was that it picked out Nicole Brown and Noureen DeWulf as the "most hateable" characters. I couldn't quite dislike Nicole and Noureen because I found them to be the characters most obviously manipulated to be unlikeable.
In Nicole's case, I expect it's half editing and half personality. She is obviously In Charge of her household, and I think one of the other women was right when she said, "Nicole lives in a bubble," meaning that Nicole has a level of security and certainty that's not true of all of the women. But it's also clear that the show wants us to think she's the Queen Bee, and while I read a commentary from a hockey wife who said that's true of how the social hierarchies play out - the wives of stars are the queen bees of the wives and girlfriends - it felt exaggerated on the show. It especially felt exaggerated in view of other things I've read about Nicole, both this delightful blog post about how great she is, and especially contrasted with this article where she talks about the wives and girlfriends being a support system for each other.
In Noureen's case, I expect it's half personality and half deliberate performance. One of the other actually interesting articles I read about the show was this interview with Noureen where she talks about her decision to do the show:
"I was hesitant at first, but I feel like we're in this era of over-sharing, and as actors we're encouraged now, by our studio, by the network, they say, 'Don't forget to tweet about the episode, don't forget to Instagram your quotes from set,'" DeWulf said. "That trend of trying to be a private actor has kind of fallen away.
"So I thought, this is a great opportunity for Canada to get to know me, and hopefully people will get to see another side of me and maybe even draw more viewers to me as an actress."
I think Noureen probably is somewhere close to how outrageous she comes off on the show (I think I would find being friends with her to be very tiring), and that she knows that playing it up is going to get her screentime, which will be good for her career.
Noureen also makes a point to point out that she's "ethnic" (her word) - she was born in the US to parents who immigrated from India - and I expect that she and the show are playing on some of those stereotypes, particularly concerning the sexualization of women of color. We get extensive footage of her photo shoot for Playboy, compared to unexplained glimpses of Brandon and Maripier's Rad Hourani shoot.
The woman I thought was the least likeable was Tiffany Parros, and I also got the sense that she was less manipulated into a specific role than Nicole, Noureen, or Emilie Blum (who may be a sweet woman in real life, but is clearly set up to be the new, young, sweet one everyone likes on the show). We saw a lot of Tiffany in the first episode, and for all that screen time, I can only think of one nice thing she said about another person: "I don’t think you can call me superficial, but I definitely married George for his looks." (I honestly thought that was a joke at first because: him?, but apparently she was serious.) I mean, I suppose it's good that she thinks her husband's attractive, but I would have liked to see her being positive about someone else as well.
That said, the person I thought came off the worst in the show was Brandon Prust. Maripier does say nice things about him, but I thought the negative things about their relationship, at least as portrayed on the show, outweighed those.
Brandon and Maripier often chirp each other on Twitter; sometimes I find that amusing, and sometimes I start to wonder if their relationship is always full of insults. It turns out the chirping is a lot funnier when you can't see their interaction. On the show, Brandon and Maripier go out to dinner with friends after the Habs opener. Two relevant details: they go to the restaurant they co-own (good cross-marketing work there), and they go with a group of all or mostly men (there's one glimpse of Maripier hugging a woman who may be part of their group) who are all, presumably, Brandon's friends. At the very least, the only one who gets identified by the show gets the label, "Dave, Brandon's Friend." Someone says something about the time, and Brandon says, "We got lots of time. MP's gotta go home to bed here soon." Maripier looks at him and says, "So are you...,"and then we get footage of what looks like them arguing at the table while her voiceover talks about how she broke up with him over the summer. Brandon doesn't seem very kind to her about the teasing, and Maripier doesn't look happy about it at all, which puts a whole other spin on Brandon's ongoing joke on Twitter about how she can fall asleep anywhere. The more I thought about it after watching the show, the more that makes sense: if she's out late with him, and then has to be made-up, dressed, and prepped to go on camera at 10 am for her morning show host job, then it's no wonder she sleeps every spare moment she can get. Thinking about that has me reconsidering how funny his Twitter chirping actually is.
The other thing that makes Brandon come off as a jerk is that Maripier says, "When I ask Brandon a question about hockey, I get a 'mind your own business.' It is frustrating when you're just trying to have a normal conversation, like I talk about my work. I've been trying to make him talk for so long. It never really works." This is around footage of them having dinner the night before the season opener, where when she asks if he's nervous, he says "We're not talking about my game plan tomorrow," and she looks down at her dinner with an unhappy look. I wanted to tell her, "Somewhere out there is someone you could fall in love with who will love you, support you, and also talk to you." Later she says, about his role as a fighter, "When I say, 'don't fight,' he's gonna tell me me, 'shut the fuck up,' cause that's what he has to do." To me, that sounds like a rough way to have your partner speak to you.
A story: when I was living at home after college, my mom and I would sometimes watch the same show and talk about it even though she was in the living room and I was in my bedroom. One night, we were watching one of those newsmagazine shows - 20/20 or something similar - and there was a story on a family that was advocating for the fundamentalist Christian wives submit to their husbands in all things (finances, decision making, etc.) lifestyle. The wife in the family said something about feminists disapproving, which had my mom and I yelling down the hall at each other about how these feminists certainly do. The wife in the story went on about how this works and how happy she is, with one exception: she wanted her husband to talk to her more. This really sticks out to me a decade later: her husband was, she said, giving her everything, except the one thing she really wanted, which was just for them to talk to each other.
I bring this story up because I felt like I was watching almost the same dynamic play out on Hockey Wives. Brandon and Maripier were the most obvious example of it, and Maripier was the only one who brought it up specifically as a complaint, but they weren't the only ones. Brijet Whitney, in talking about what's going to happen now with her husband's career, says, "I feel like I'm treading softly. I have my own feelings; I don't necessarily know what his are, but I want to be there for him." Noureen says, "[Ryan]'s a very reserved person. I have a habit of trying to fill space." I hope this is just something that's coming out of a mix of the show's editing process and what they manage to capture on camera, and not a full picture of these couple's relationship patterns. A relationship where your partner can't or won't talk to you doesn't seem like a very good partnership to me. And if this is more generally how most opposite-sex relationships work, then there's an even bigger problem on display. Oh, how I would love a Captain Awkward column about the relationships in this show.
I read a handful of articles about Hockey Wives yesterday. For the most part, once you've read one of them, you've read them all. This was one of the more interesting ones, partly because it's structured as a conversation, and partly because it's a conversation between two women (as opposed to some dude passing judgment on women's lives). One of the things I found interesting about it was that it picked out Nicole Brown and Noureen DeWulf as the "most hateable" characters. I couldn't quite dislike Nicole and Noureen because I found them to be the characters most obviously manipulated to be unlikeable.
In Nicole's case, I expect it's half editing and half personality. She is obviously In Charge of her household, and I think one of the other women was right when she said, "Nicole lives in a bubble," meaning that Nicole has a level of security and certainty that's not true of all of the women. But it's also clear that the show wants us to think she's the Queen Bee, and while I read a commentary from a hockey wife who said that's true of how the social hierarchies play out - the wives of stars are the queen bees of the wives and girlfriends - it felt exaggerated on the show. It especially felt exaggerated in view of other things I've read about Nicole, both this delightful blog post about how great she is, and especially contrasted with this article where she talks about the wives and girlfriends being a support system for each other.
In Noureen's case, I expect it's half personality and half deliberate performance. One of the other actually interesting articles I read about the show was this interview with Noureen where she talks about her decision to do the show:
"I was hesitant at first, but I feel like we're in this era of over-sharing, and as actors we're encouraged now, by our studio, by the network, they say, 'Don't forget to tweet about the episode, don't forget to Instagram your quotes from set,'" DeWulf said. "That trend of trying to be a private actor has kind of fallen away.
"So I thought, this is a great opportunity for Canada to get to know me, and hopefully people will get to see another side of me and maybe even draw more viewers to me as an actress."
I think Noureen probably is somewhere close to how outrageous she comes off on the show (I think I would find being friends with her to be very tiring), and that she knows that playing it up is going to get her screentime, which will be good for her career.
Noureen also makes a point to point out that she's "ethnic" (her word) - she was born in the US to parents who immigrated from India - and I expect that she and the show are playing on some of those stereotypes, particularly concerning the sexualization of women of color. We get extensive footage of her photo shoot for Playboy, compared to unexplained glimpses of Brandon and Maripier's Rad Hourani shoot.
The woman I thought was the least likeable was Tiffany Parros, and I also got the sense that she was less manipulated into a specific role than Nicole, Noureen, or Emilie Blum (who may be a sweet woman in real life, but is clearly set up to be the new, young, sweet one everyone likes on the show). We saw a lot of Tiffany in the first episode, and for all that screen time, I can only think of one nice thing she said about another person: "I don’t think you can call me superficial, but I definitely married George for his looks." (I honestly thought that was a joke at first because: him?, but apparently she was serious.) I mean, I suppose it's good that she thinks her husband's attractive, but I would have liked to see her being positive about someone else as well.
That said, the person I thought came off the worst in the show was Brandon Prust. Maripier does say nice things about him, but I thought the negative things about their relationship, at least as portrayed on the show, outweighed those.
Brandon and Maripier often chirp each other on Twitter; sometimes I find that amusing, and sometimes I start to wonder if their relationship is always full of insults. It turns out the chirping is a lot funnier when you can't see their interaction. On the show, Brandon and Maripier go out to dinner with friends after the Habs opener. Two relevant details: they go to the restaurant they co-own (good cross-marketing work there), and they go with a group of all or mostly men (there's one glimpse of Maripier hugging a woman who may be part of their group) who are all, presumably, Brandon's friends. At the very least, the only one who gets identified by the show gets the label, "Dave, Brandon's Friend." Someone says something about the time, and Brandon says, "We got lots of time. MP's gotta go home to bed here soon." Maripier looks at him and says, "So are you...,"and then we get footage of what looks like them arguing at the table while her voiceover talks about how she broke up with him over the summer. Brandon doesn't seem very kind to her about the teasing, and Maripier doesn't look happy about it at all, which puts a whole other spin on Brandon's ongoing joke on Twitter about how she can fall asleep anywhere. The more I thought about it after watching the show, the more that makes sense: if she's out late with him, and then has to be made-up, dressed, and prepped to go on camera at 10 am for her morning show host job, then it's no wonder she sleeps every spare moment she can get. Thinking about that has me reconsidering how funny his Twitter chirping actually is.
The other thing that makes Brandon come off as a jerk is that Maripier says, "When I ask Brandon a question about hockey, I get a 'mind your own business.' It is frustrating when you're just trying to have a normal conversation, like I talk about my work. I've been trying to make him talk for so long. It never really works." This is around footage of them having dinner the night before the season opener, where when she asks if he's nervous, he says "We're not talking about my game plan tomorrow," and she looks down at her dinner with an unhappy look. I wanted to tell her, "Somewhere out there is someone you could fall in love with who will love you, support you, and also talk to you." Later she says, about his role as a fighter, "When I say, 'don't fight,' he's gonna tell me me, 'shut the fuck up,' cause that's what he has to do." To me, that sounds like a rough way to have your partner speak to you.
A story: when I was living at home after college, my mom and I would sometimes watch the same show and talk about it even though she was in the living room and I was in my bedroom. One night, we were watching one of those newsmagazine shows - 20/20 or something similar - and there was a story on a family that was advocating for the fundamentalist Christian wives submit to their husbands in all things (finances, decision making, etc.) lifestyle. The wife in the family said something about feminists disapproving, which had my mom and I yelling down the hall at each other about how these feminists certainly do. The wife in the story went on about how this works and how happy she is, with one exception: she wanted her husband to talk to her more. This really sticks out to me a decade later: her husband was, she said, giving her everything, except the one thing she really wanted, which was just for them to talk to each other.
I bring this story up because I felt like I was watching almost the same dynamic play out on Hockey Wives. Brandon and Maripier were the most obvious example of it, and Maripier was the only one who brought it up specifically as a complaint, but they weren't the only ones. Brijet Whitney, in talking about what's going to happen now with her husband's career, says, "I feel like I'm treading softly. I have my own feelings; I don't necessarily know what his are, but I want to be there for him." Noureen says, "[Ryan]'s a very reserved person. I have a habit of trying to fill space." I hope this is just something that's coming out of a mix of the show's editing process and what they manage to capture on camera, and not a full picture of these couple's relationship patterns. A relationship where your partner can't or won't talk to you doesn't seem like a very good partnership to me. And if this is more generally how most opposite-sex relationships work, then there's an even bigger problem on display. Oh, how I would love a Captain Awkward column about the relationships in this show.