Barely two weeks since its debut, E!’s “I Am Cait” is already in serious trouble.
While tabloid interest in and social media chatter about Caitlyn Jenner may remain strong, actual viewer numbers are down — way down! — suggesting that TV’s great transgender hope might actually be a dud on arrival.
The problem with “I Am Cait” isn’t its lack of ambition. If anything, the show suffers from an overdose of the stuff. In less than 60 minutes of screen time, “Cait” shifts from “Real Housewives”-type fluff to Lifetime-like melodrama to “60 Minutes”-style seriousness. There are makeup shots and bikini drama and seemingly endless glasses of Champagne — along with occasional Kardashian, Kanye and junior Jenner cameos thrown in. But mostly, it’s all Cait all the time — awkwardly (and, yes, bravely) negotiating her late-in-life rebirth for all of America to see.
Which leaves viewers unsure what exactly they’re watching. Unlike the conventional Kardashian franchises, “I Am Cait” is delivered as TV with a message: Caitlyn Jenner’s transition is valid, her activism vital and her future very much a work-in-progress. As she embraces her new body, designer wardrobe and trans BFFs, Cait is doing good in order to feel good about her senior-age shape-shifting.
Gone are the wife, the dad pants and the gaggle of kids, replaced by talk of hormone therapies, sex work and the fight for civil rights (even as a Republican!). It’s a 180-degree pivot — and if Cait herself seems unable (or is it unwilling?) to process it all, how are the twittering and tindering and snapchatting masses supposed keep up?
Beyond the sheer confusion of it all, “I Am Cait” suffers from many of the same ills that plagued HBO’s gay-themed “Looking” and other television shows rooted in identity politics: A boring chief protagonist whose minority status does not a personality make. Indeed, throughout the Kardashian television canon, no character was . . . well . . . duller than Bruce Jenner. He was a good husband, great dad and enviable golf player (and, of course, Olympic deity). But a scintillating on-air presence? Meh — not so much. Bruce worked well as a background presence; Caitlyn, however, struggles to carry a scene.
Ultimately, Jenner suffers from an acute sense of ho-humness that no amount of makeup, surgery or Vanity Fair covers can erase. As Cait, she may now be the most visible member of America’s most-talked-about minority group. But no matter how hard she tries, Cait simply can’t undo Bruce’s decades of boring white-dudeness.
Back in April, Jenner and Diane Sawyer talked about Cait’s story actually being the most compelling in the entire Kardashian saga. More than three months later, that narrative has yet to materialize. But it should — and with six episodes of “I Am Cait” remaining, there’s no reason why it couldn’t.
Yet fixing “I Am Cait” will require a rethink as radical as the process that turned Bruce into Caitlyn. Yes, keep the politicking — but lower the volume. With her hilltop mansions and forest hideaways and endless SUVs, Cait just can’t cut it as the trans community’s activist-in-chief. Instead of preaching — albeit nobly — about how she and her sisters seek to live, Cait should simply just live. And not as an officially sanctioned trans person, but simply as a person.
Mostly — and I shudder to write this — Jenner needs to reach back out to (and get on the air!) the people who helped make her a reality star in the first place: Her bodacious brood of Kardashian hot-mess-ness. Because ultimately, whether it’s Kris or Kylie or Kim, no member of the Kardashian industrial complex is strong (or smart!) enough to stand on her own. Their cultural validity only works as a familial organism — feeding and co-branding and synergizing off each other.
And while she may have a new face, hot bod and totally different gender, even Caitlyn Jenner is simply no exception.
Poster Comment:
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Bruce would make a good VP for Jeb Bush.
It all started when Bruce thought he was Brooke Shields ..
