'The Fairy Jobmother,'
fairly off the mark
Lifetime series sets about to get people back to work
By Tom Conroy
Oct 28, 2010
Unemployment can be an infantilizing experience. Nonetheless, it’s surprising that a new reality show that’s meant to help out-of-work adults would so closely resemble “Supernanny.”
Lifetime’s series “The Fairy Jobmother” takes a no-nonsense approach to getting idle workers back into the job force, but unlike “Supernanny,” it fails to convince us that the approach is effective or even necessary. Viewers will finish the show feeling they’ve been manipulated poorly.
In the premiere, airing tonight at 11 (the regular time slot is 9 p.m. Thursdays), an Englishwoman named Hayley Taylor, who is described as a career specialist but may have been hired more for her physical and vocal resemblance to Jo Frost of “Supernanny,” takes over the lives of a couple from Hanford, Calif., Shawn and Michelle Aughe, young parents who have been unemployed for years.
Like most of the couples on “Supernanny,” the Aughes live in a home that is out of control. Shawn is useless when he’s watching their two children, and no one seems to be doing any housework. Taylor rightly describes the situation in a catch phrase of Jo Frost’s: “It’s not acceptable.”
Rather than setting the couple to work on their résumés, Taylor sits them down for a brief counseling session that cures Shawn’s lifetime of resentment about his own father’s alleged bad parenting.
She then goes over their finances, pointing out that the money they’re getting from public assistance isn’t enough. Sounding more politically conservative than the average TV host, she tells them that no one has a “God-given right” to get money for nothing.
Then Taylor has them clean house.
The usefulness of Taylor’s more on-point counseling is debatable. She makes them work for nothing at a nearby dairy farm, where Shawn performs some sort of intimate examination on a cow. Then she has them pass out résumés to downtown businesses.
Taylor’s interview advice is rather obvious: Make eye contact, maintain good posture.
A suspiciously well-timed crisis occurs: The couple receive an eviction notice that says they need to pay all their back rent in three days. Of course, even if they get a job immediately, they won’t have a paycheck by then, but this fact is ignored.
The Aughes’ job interviews, which Taylor monitors remotely, feel a little fake. If a camera weren’t in the room, it’s unlikely that the interviewers would be smiling so fixedly, and Michelle almost definitely wouldn’t have said aloud, “Oh, my God. I’m so messing up.”
Without spoiling the ending, we can say that the results seem to have little to do with anything Taylor taught the couple. All they really needed was someone to tell them to try at all. Perhaps future episodes will feature clients whose problems are more complex.
Real people looking for work won’t get much from this episode. People looking for entertainment won’t either.
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