Last week, I found myself watching something awful: A TLC/Discovery+ dating show called MILF Manor, which is almost but not quite a 30 Rock joke come to life. A crew of toned, plastic-surgeried, bikini-wearing 40-to-60-year-olds are staying in a Mexican villa, competing on a dating show. And it turns out the pool of prospective suitors is composed entirely of … their very own sons! This show is operating on the very frontiers of acceptability, and you can tell because the audience reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes are giving it either zero stars or five. “This show is degenerate, disgusting, and an affront to any and all morals! I must see more!” one five-starrer kvelled.
Hunter Hargraves, associate professor in the Department of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Fullerton, has just published Uncomfortable Television, which is about how squicked-out, shaky, and disturbed postmillennial TV tends to leave its viewers—and why, sometimes, we kind of like to feel that way. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s been watching MILF Manor, so I called him up to debrief. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Rebecca Onion: I am so glad to have a theorist of uncomfortable television here to explain to me the deep feelings of discomfort I have while watching MILF Manor. We see the sons and moms in double beds, right next to one another, and part of the game becomes which MILF can “cock block” a relationship developing between her son and a MILF she dislikes. So there’s, uh, the incest stuff. But also—and maybe I see it this way because I’m the same age as some of these contestants—the show’s attitude toward the aging female body was overwhelmingly uncomfortable to me.
Hunter Hargraves: It’s interesting that this show is airing at the same sort of pop-cultural moment as something like 80 for Brady, which is this much more comical and safe way of showing the aging female body and desire, because it’s sort of displaced onto football fan culture. But in the case of MILF Manor, these women are taking so much pleasure in these awkward games—like the one where they have to pick their son out of a lineup by feeling up all of the young men’s abs. They’re living for it!
The show doles out the moments of extreme discomfort around incest so artfully. There’s one moment at the end of that abs game, after a contestant feels someone’s chest and guesses it’s her son, then gets un-blindfolded and sees that it’s not, and says—I wished you were my son! Oh god!!! And then there’s this one confessional scene where the son says he’s uncomfortable that his mom is showing off her boobs to an extent he perceives as too much. And she literally says, You used to like them when you were little! He goes I was hungry, Mom, and I wanted to die.
That’s the Orange County mom, Kelly, who is kind of the most unabashedly sexual, playing into the Orange County MILF stereotype.
It’s fascinating how they’re giving the camera exactly what it wants. Basically saying, We suspect you’re thinking about this twentysomething man breastfeeding with this MILF. Let’s actually say it.
Totally. It’s interesting that you picked up on the idea of the rhythm of discomfort. That’s one of the things I’m trying to say in my argument about how TV has changed over the last 20 years. We all know what discomfort looks like on a topical level: the exploitation of ordinary people on reality TV, more sex, more violence, more profanity. There’s also more acknowledging of taboos that were never really shown on TV. But all of those topical forms of discomfort are sort of couched in form and genre—there’s something about how TV is built and structured that also helps create this discomfort.
In the case of MILF Manor it’s that there’s no host! All the instructions are sort of coming in by disembodied text message. Normally, in a dating program you get a reassuring father figure, like The Bachelor’s Chris Harrison—now canceled, of course –and that’s how you get guided through the ritual, the process. Here, there are no rituals. There’s going to be an embarrassing game, and people are eliminated kind of randomly and as a surprise. But there’s no host walking the audience through this, which kind of adds to the feeling of disorientation.
Yes! I didn’t put my finger on that, but that’s correct. There’s another game in the second episode where the sons and mothers have to write down a big secret. And the rules of the game are confusing—in part, I’m now realizing, because the host is not there to direct them. They forget whether they’re supposed to be guessing the secret, or not guessing it, and how you win the game. They’re sitting around a living room on couches, kind of piled on one another, trying to figure out the rules, and it’s like an awkward charades night at a house party that just isn’t quite gelling.
The whole conceit of the show revolves around the moment in the first episode when the mothers and sons see one another for the first time, and realize they will be on the show together. I don’t know why you couldn’t have a host facilitate that moment and introduce it all, but it may have to do with the fact that Discovery+ is really cheap and efficient in terms of the kind of reality programming they produce. This isn’t Fuckboy Island. This isn’t The Bachelor. This isn’t something that has a lot of money behind it.
And when you don’t have a host, there’s also a lot of gossip. It’s how they move the narrative forward, by having people retell what they’ve heard and check in with each other. But the gossip here means that mothers and sons know secrets about each other. So there’s that moment when our hero Kelly tells Stephanie that her son said he had a big package. And Stephanie’s like, Why are you telling me this? I don’t want to know this!
I think she pulls her head into the neck of her shirt, so as not to be seen. Discomfort!
And the show is kind of like, jazz hands, putting the incest taboo right in front of everyone. But that’s also what the structure and rhythm of the show demand. If someone tells you something in confidence, you are automatically going to repeat it to everyone.
OK, this idea explains another extremely uncomfortable moment in the show, which is when, during the “secrets” game with the bulletin board and the slips of paper, a son, Jimmy, reveals something that is “too much”: that he got pinkeye by “eating ass.”
They kept bleeping out the word “eating,” which I love.
The whole group is disgusted, and Pola, who had been vibing with Jimmy on a date earlier, declares she’s no longer interested. But the pinkeye reveal gets eclipsed when Jimmy’s mother, SoYoung, is revealed as the person who wrote “I slept with my son’s best friend” as her “secret.” When Jimmy finds out, he is highly upset. It feels like neither Jimmy nor his mom SoYoung knew what kind of discomfiting thing was right to say in this game!
That also happens in part because no one is explaining the rules. I feel like SoYoung might have chosen a different secret if her head had been in the game. But it was confusing!
SoYoung’s secret showed you something about being a MILF. What she said skirted the incest taboo too closely. The friend was only one degree of separation away from her son. Whereas “I had an orgy with seven women,” which was another son’s secret, was risqué, but didn’t get too close, in that uncanny valley of the incest taboo.
Let’s talk about Charlene, who’s the most uncomfortable woman on here, to me. Charlene is not as toned and skinny and well-kempt in the reality TV way as the other women. She looks like a million women in my age bracket I encounter at school drop-offs and birthday parties. The very first episode, I think she says, I’m the biggest girl here, and then some of the other ones are kind of mean about it behind her back. Everyone else has these toned bodies and buccal-fat-removal faces. If this were really MILF Island Charlene would be the one the host would say “We no longer want to hit that” to, while dismissing her from the show.
Her son is a former exotic dancer, which made me wonder if that was how she ended up on here. But also, she’s from Jersey. I’m a big Real Housewives fan, and on that show, the housewives all represent different reality TV types. Something of the same situation may be going on here—some form of citation, where someone like Kelly could have been cast on the Real Housewives of O.C., or Charlene would have been a candidate for the Real Housewives of New Jersey, if things were different and she had a million bucks stashed away.
I think that moment of vulnerability in that first episode is sort of tied to the fact that they don’t know what the hell is going on. She still has a lot of bravado, she carries herself with confidence, later on.
I think my discomfort with her is amplified on two levels: One, by being just about her age, and two, by not really being a reality TV watcher. For me I’m just like, This poor lady. Why are they throwing her into the deep end in her flowing caftan? But I’m also just sort of alienated by the fundamental idea of the show, that these women are going to “find love,” actually end up with these men. Wanting to have sex with a younger man is one thing. They’re going to be in a couple with a 20-year-old?
Well, we’re four episodes in and we have no idea what the trajectory will be—how many episodes it takes until they get paired up. On The Bachelor we’re spending all season working towards that proposal. On MILF Manor, no one’s talking about marriage in that way. They’re talking about a very valid form of intimacy and companionship that at least feels right to all of them—most of the sons have sort of admitted, or are playing the role perfectly, that they’re sincerely into older women, and maybe have experience dating women in this age bracket.
You argue that watching uncomfortable TV has political and social effects, that it translates into some way of being in the world. Like the people of the 1950s whose TVs taught them about the suburban, white-collar, middle-class postwar fantasy, we are learning something from our uncomfortable TV. What am I getting from MILF Manor, and from how I feel, seeing it?
Our television still teaches us how to live in our world. It’s just that the economic and social realities of today are marked by precarity, anxiety, crisis, dread. I make a distinction: Discomfort while watching TV is mild. It’s not pain, right? It’s mild inconvenience, it’s irritation, it’s kind of creepiness, but it’s not full-on, visceral disgust that makes you say, I’m going to turn this off. I’m going to not participate.
And that’s kind of like what living in our system of economic and social realities can be like. It’s the frustration you have because you’re on the phone with your health care provider, and all you’re getting are automated messages, and you’re saying “Representative!” more and more loudly. That’s a form of discomfort that is now kind of normalized and kind of expected.
And so, our entertainment programming reflects the same thing as well. Girls is a great example of this. We know that television has gotten us on board with antiheroes, but think about how Lena Dunham is irritating in part because being irritating is kind of a survival skill that you have to use in order to get ahead in the post-recession economy
How we read discomfort is something that’s very subjective. As a queer male watching MILF Manor, I think it’s slightly less uncomfortable for me. In a lot of queer communities, intergenerational dating is a lot more common.
Even our conversation about Charlene shows that. I see her as deeply uncomfortable to view, and you, not so much.
Even though we think of discomfort as being something that’s just so, like, individual, like individually perceived, it’s a vibe that is also embedded in the very forms and structures and aesthetics and styles that these programs have.
That’s why MILF Manor is interesting to me. It’s not just the incest factor, right? It’s also how the show is structured that helps us kind of acclimate to that discomfort and to kind of even enjoy that discomfort. The premiere of the American version of The Office was almost two decades ago. We’ve had two decades of kind of awkward, cringe-y comedies that helped acculturate us to these kinds of like forms and scenarios. MILF Manor is kind of a really textbook example of how these systems of discomfort proliferate in our society.
