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Cathy Siepp has had a look at The Real Gilligan’s Island, a new reality show.
I tried to watch The Real Gilligan’s Island, the new TBS reality series in which two Skippers, two Gilligans, etc. compete to see who can be rescued first, but gave up on the wretched enterprise after 15 minutes.
I had a similar experience. Regarding the original, which “has never, not once, been off the air since its CBS premiere 40 years ago,” Cathy notes:
The Millionaire displays an unseemly Western uxoriousness toward to his one wife insulting to societies where women are fourth-class citizens, after the children and the camels. Mary Ann, besides her fondness for short-shorts, is offensively spunky to anyone who thinks women belong in burkas.
Then there’s Gilligan, the essence of the nave, childish American as Americans are so often described, ad nauseum, abroad. But bumbling, unsophisticated Gilligan has a way of ruining the plans of every Soviet cosmonaut or banana-republic dictator who drops by the island.
“Representing the average citizen at his most ordinary,” literary critic Paul Cantor wrote in his 2001 book Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture In the Age of Globalization, “Gilligan presides over a kind of democratic utopia on the island and is repeatedly called upon to act as its savior.” What’s more, he always prevails.
Given what Cathy points out, it seems to me that it’s a surprisingly good representative of America to the world.
