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In Consumed: The Rachel Ray Sucks Community: Getting together to share and form a community — of dislike.
Consumer culture, and indeed popular culture, revolve in large part around shared admiration, shared likes: fandom, in a word, is a thing that can bring us together. But what about shared dislikes? Can a community form around that? What is the opposite of a fan club? The answer is the Rachael Ray Sucks Community. Gathering by way of the blogging and social-networking site LiveJournal, this group has more than 1,000 members, who are quite active in posting their latest thoughts and observations about the various shortcomings, flaws and disagreeable traits of Rachael Ray, the television food personality. “This community,” the official explanation reads, “was created for people that hate the untalented twit known as Rachael Ray.” The most important rule for those who wish to join: “You must be anti-Rachael!” ….
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Additional link: Rachel Ray Sucks Community.
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Reader Comments
Do you see this kind of phenomenon as good, bad, or neither?
Assuming, for the moment, that Rachel Ray is mediocre, and for the sake of argument, that she ought to be repelled by discerning viewers. You could then see an “RR Sucks” community as a legitimate form of resistance to banal, uninspired programming that values looks over substance.
But you might also argue that by defining themselves as a group in opposition to RR, they’re just playing into the hands of evil network heads who will take any kind of publicity they can get.
Any thoughts? (Again, the question assumes RR actually does suck.)
I think there’s a lot of territory in betwen resistance, and playing into the hands of evil network heads, and they’re in that territory. That is, I don’t think it’s resistance, per se, and I think I basically say in the column that negative buzz isn’t necessarily a bad thing — assuming there’s a counterbalance of enough positive buzz, which RR clearly has. On the other hand, if this is their point of view, then this is their point of view, and it seems off to me to imply that they would have to keep it to themselves or else they’re playing into the networks hands.
As for me pronouncing on the good v bad question, that’s sort of antithetical to what Consumed is about. I’m more interested in readers decideing that kind of thing for themselves.
So what do you think?
I agree. I suppose the execution and context are important. I’m frustrated when people don’t desire anything from their TV but satisfaction. So, in this case, just despising RR (“I hate RR; give me some other bland personality, network heads!”) is all fine and well, but it’s more heartening when TV is an inspiration for some fresh riff on culture — like that comparison of RR to the Joker. It seems like a defeat would be if people couldn’t imagine anything but better TV shows than they already have, but it’s never as black-and-white as that, and of course, any community like this will be a hodge-podge.