Meet two perfectly nice and accomplished female doctors... and a clique of materialistic reality TV crazies
Bravo's newest offering, Married to Medicine, may not be worth watching week in and week out. But it is worth taking a few moments to mull over... at least after the glittery gem-toned enamel that Sunday's premiere was coated in stops blinding your eyes.
As bizarre as the longevity of this trend might seem, we're still in a white-hot cultural moment for shows about glamorous women enjoying lives of luxury thanks to their successful husbands. (See: The Real Housewives franchise, Basketball Wives, Love & Hip Hop, etc.) The grueling year-round schedule of Housewivesin particularkeeps Bravo viewers tethered to their TVs as the cameras hop from gaggles of shiny-haired women in Atlanta to New York to Miami to New Jersey to Orange County to Beverly Hills and back again. So it's little surprise that Andy Cohen and his Bravo minions would seek a way to tap further into this zeitgeist while angling for a new and interesting twist. Enter Married to Medicine's group of female black doctors and wives, both white and black, of doctors.
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Wait, what?
Black female doctors don't seem like the obvious target for a network like Bravo, which trades primarily in fake-tanned, forty-something women yanking out each others' hair extensions and throwing glasses of chardonnay at poolside gatherings. And that's exactly why the announcement of Married to Medicine triggered some upset, particularly in the black medical community. Students at Howard University even went so far as to set up a petition on Change.org asking the network to cancel the program "for the sake of integrity and character of black female physicians." As they point out in the petition, commercials for the show look to associate "black females in medicine with materialism, "cat fights," and unprofessionalism."
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Clearly, the petition went unnoticed by Bravo. And if last night's premiere episode of Married to Medicine is any indication, cat fights and unprofessionalismare the name of the game with this group which includes relatively few actual black female doctors.
The series opens with a birthday party at self-described "Queen Bee" Mariah's house, where we meet fellow cast members Toya, Kari, and the all-out lunatic of the bunch, Quad. None of them are doctors. Instead, their husbands are successful doctors. And it appears from their bios that their time is filled managing their households, doing charity work, and planning parties.Remember, after all, that this is a Bravo show, so the majority of interactions (read: fights) between the women need to take place at each other's events (read: shoe launch party, child's birthday party, etc.). Meanwhile, the two actual female doctors of the group, Dr. Simone Whitford and Dr. Jackie Walters (both OB/GYNs), come across as levelheaded and self-aware. In other words, they could not seem more out of place.
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