Candy Girls Premier

Candy Girls

E! Sunday Nights at 10:30/9:30 CT

Everybody has an opinion about video vixens—you know, the girls-with-daddy-issues that hang around in music videos, shaking their money makers in slow motion while the rapper calls them a slut. Because it’s so empowering. As a way of showing us how empowering it is to be treated as a prop, E! has created Candy Girls. Based around the “talent agency” Bella, Candy Girls purports to be an inside look into the video vixen industry. Instead, it’s just a big old mess.

The ethical dilemma of willing-female-exploitation is the most controversial touchstone the show has to offer, so it’s interesting to note that it’s the one subject E! won’t touch with a 10-foot-poll. Unlike their other exploitalicious show The Girls Next Door, E! isn’t even interested in making fun of the girls’ intelligence (sorry, Kendra), or engaging in anything that resembles an eye-opening discourse. In fact, it’s difficult to know what’s going on at all.

Candy Girls opens with a very awkward America’s Next Top Model moment where the girls are sitting in a kitchen, having breakfast together, as if they all share the same house. The viewer is given no back story as to who they work for, what unites them as a group, or what the premise of the show is. And none of these questions get any clearer as we watch biracial Olivia go to awkward auditions, Latoya-Jackson-clone Brooke laugh at everyone’s jokes, sour-faced single mom Terricka making fun of everyone, and newbie Blanca starring like a wide-eyed fawn.

The one sane, intelligent person is the group is boss Danielle, who’s company Bella has been staffing video vixens for years. Danielle tells the girls that she is going to be profiled in 944 magazine, and needs to pick two of the vixens to pose with her. In exchange for the huge amount of press coverage the two ladies (Brooke and Terricka) will get, she asks these two provisions. 1) Brooke, please try to cover the majority of your huge rack. 2) Terricka, please stop talking about your daughter ever 5 minutes.

The completely unprofessional, irrational way Brooke and Terricka respond to this request tells you all you need to know about this series. A lot of words and phrases like “confident” and “who I am” and “she don’t know me” are going to be thrown around less as statements of fact than as questions. Weaves are going to be pulled, tears are going to be shed, constant references to “putting food in my babies mouths” will be made during any argument. But rather than use these hysterics as a way of exploring these women, E! throws them into the show for their dramatic qualities, resulting in a whole bunch of bluster, with very little substance.

I remember walking out of Will Smith’s Wild Wild West as a kid with no recollection of what I had been doing for the last 2 hours. The movie made so little effect on me one way or the other that I left without remembering more than 20 seconds of footage. I feel the same way after the premier episode of Candy Girls. Just like candy, this show is cheap, disposable, and completely forgettable. But hey, if you want to know what kind of women Tyson Beckford go for, then by all means, check it out.

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