Whew! An authority of sorts on the Pioneer Woman confirms that what comes through in the TV version is barely watchable

Food Network's caption: "The Beauty Shot: A dedicated blogger, Ree shoots a winning closeup of her husband Ladd's favorite sandwich."

by Ken

No doubt it says most about the sheltered little world I live in that I had never heard of the Pioneer Woman or her blog until I read Amanda Fortini's "O Pioneer Woman!: The creation of a domestic idyll" in the May 9 New Yorker For the similarly blighted, Pioneer Woman is the nom de blog of Ree Drummond, "whose crazily popular musings about life on an Oklahoma cattle ranch garner approximately 23.3 million page views per month," as Fortini puts it in a follow-up piece on the magazine's Culture Desk blog.

As Fortini explains in the new blog piece:

Online, Drummond peddles a fantasy for urbanites and suburbanites compelled to spend their waking lives toiling in florescent-lit cubicles, or running errands in the stale air of big-chain retail stores. The Pioneer Woman blog, with its plein-air shots of ranch life, anthropomorphized animals, adorable children, and bright, glistening food, puts one in mind of a glossy lifestyle magazine with minimal text and colorful, inviting images. To produce these pictures, Drummond uses still photography -- never the shaggier, less-obliging video -- then heavily photoshops them so that every subject, from her kids to the cows grazing in her pastures, looks alluring, lush, sherbet-hued (“like dessert,” I previously wrote).

Given those numbers, it's hardly surprising that Food Network decided to make The Pioneer Woman a TV show. And, having had my curiosity moderately piqued by Fortini's original New Yorker piece, I watched an episode, or tried to. It seemed to me roughly like watching paint dry.

So I was fascinated to see the new blog piece, "The Pioneer Woman Gets Lost on the Range," and to learn that whatever one may think of the blog persona, it's very different from what's coming across on TV.

The real-life Pioneer Woman, a.k.a. Ree Drummond—whom I wrote about for the May 4th, 2011, issue of the magazine—is sharp, animated, and always cracking wise. Yet on the show she comes off as nervous, stiff, and enervated, as if she can’t muster up much enthusiasm for her own endeavor. She speaks in a near-monotone, pausing awkwardly between thoughts (not long enough here, too long there), and when she tells a joke, there’s no oomph in her delivery.

The show, a mere thirty minutes long, is thus surprisingly boring and difficult to follow. Drummond seems detached from what’s coming out of her mouth: not feeling the words, but reciting them, like a timid schoolgirl auditioning for a play. “I just love football food. I’m gettin’ excited,” she says, flatly, during the most recent episode, in which she prepares for “The Big Game” (chez Drummond, this means Arizona versus Arizona State). Midway into this second season, Drummond may still be suffering from stage fright: “It never occurred to me that I was going to have to talk to a camera,” she told the Los Angeles Times. But her almost willful lack of telegenic charisma could also be a sign that she’s aware, on some level, that television is not her medium.

It's in this context, searching for an explanation for the disparity, that Fortini offers the above-quoted descripton of the "technology" of the blog, which she contrasts with that of the TV show:

Television, by contrast, is a far less gauzy medium, particularly now that high-definition enhances every pore to galactic proportions.

The result is that the romanticized world of the blog doesn’t translate to the small screen. It’s one thing to portray a fantasy in silent, polished images, but it’s quite another to watch it move and talk and breathe in all its mundane imperfection. Under the harsh, unforgiving glare of the TV cameras, Drummond looks pale and in need of some Nigella-style glamming up. Her kids look like regular kids, not Precious Moments figurines. And her husband, Ladd, whom she calls “Marlboro Man,” seems preoccupied, impatient, and occasionally brusque, not the faultless cowboy hero of her fairy tale. Everything is deflated somehow, slightly drabber, less shiny and fabulous. “Realistic” might be another word for it.

Meanwhile, the quotidian details of her life come off as fancier than one might expect. In the first episode of this second season, she whips up “spicy pop pulled pork” (the “pop” refers to the soda she pours on it) and “perfect potatoes au gratin” in a huge supplementary kitchen, part of a guesthouse that is surely bigger than the homes of most of her viewers. So cavernous is this place (nicknamed “The Lodge”) that the tapping sound of a whisk against a glass bowl creates an audible echo. When the camera pans around, we glimpse the red knobs of her Wolf range and a full array of crayon-colored Le Creuset casserole cookware.

Nobody's much impressed with the food the Pioneer Woman is churning out on the show, Fortini says.

Of course, her cooking is beside the point. The Food Network is betting that viewers will want to fantasize about—and perhaps try to emulate—her lifestyle. “Be there as she shares her authentic life with you…” say the narrator in the promo video, sounding the “authentic” note a little too loudly. Who’s to say whose life is more “authentic,” Drummond’s or her viewers’? This is a television show about a pioneer woman, after all.

As Fortini's original piece made clear, the Pioneer Woman isn't exactly a hardy frontierswoman -- these turn out to be, as she notes here, surprisingly up-scale people. But as she notes, on the blog she has put together what is apparently an appealing enough frontier fantasy to draw those zillions of hits.

It's not a fantasy that's of the slightest interest to met. But I'm really relieved to discover that what's on the TV show really doesn't even tickle that fantasy. It may perhaps work for the already-hooked, but for the rest of us? Have you tried to watch an episode?

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