Last night, Lifetime’s Preachers’ Daughters gave us another opportunity to watch the Perry, Coleman, and Koloff TV families wrestle with the requirements of being on the one hand, a Christian clergy family, and on the other, a family in which there is at least one young unmarried daughter who isn’t altogether indifferent to sex.
(I say “TV families” because this is reality television. One must assume that behind every shocking confession or bizarre behavior there may be a producer or story editor coaching cast members and setting up scenarios. We, as viewers, don’t have unmediated access to the families we’re watching, and we don’t know what any of these people would be doing if they weren’t on television. In a way, this makes Preachers’ Daughters a delightfully recursive representation of the main challenge of being a clergy family: feeling you have to contort your lives into a picture of whatever it is the people watching you want. But I digress.)
Here are four life lessons I took away from Episode Two, which you can watch here.
1. Responding to an intrusive question with another question can be a great way to deflect the intrusive questioner.
One of the droller parts of last night’s episode is hearing the Koloff family talk about “boundaries.” By “boundaries,” they mean “things you won’t do sexually.”
Do you detect the potential for humor here? Because some people, when they talk about “healthy boundaries,” are talking about the knowledge that other people are not just extensions of oneself… and so maybe, for example, one’s adult daughter’s sexual history is not entirely one’s own business. (In fact, maybe one’s teenage daughter’s sexual behavior isn’t entirely one’s own business, at least not to the point of embarrassing her and her boyfriend by demanding they sign an explicit written contract detailing which behaviors are off-limits. [cough] VICTORIA! [/cough])
Going by the second definition, Teryn, the 30-year-old Koloff daughter, has the healthiest boundaries of the bunch. When her mom, Victoria, is barraging 20-year-old Kendra Koloff for information on what “boundaries” (in the first sense) she’s put in place with her boyfriend, Teryn asks, “Mom, do you feel like she should tell you what they do physically?” Victoria demurs: no, but she still hopes she will.
Then Teryn comes back with another question: “What if she were to tell you, ‘Actually, Mom, we’re sleeping together’?” Brava, Teryn. Victoria responds that she’d be horrified, whereupon Teryn reveals that she herself was not a virgin at marriage. This does not go well for Teryn, and the episode closes with her wondering whether her family will ever look at her the same way. But she does it, she says, so that her younger sisters will know that premarital sex is not the unforgivable sin they’ve been taught that it is, and that if they choose to have sex before marriage, Teryn will still love them and God will still love them. (We’re going to see Teryn in future episodes, right, producers? Please please please?)
2. If you lie to your parents in a way that’s almost certain to be discovered, and then you protest that you really are mature and should be trusted, you look a little ridiculous.
Sorry, Taylor Coleman. It’s nothing personal. I didn’t have the best judgment at seventeen either. And yeah, your dad Ken is a little hard on you and probably doesn’t realize how old you are. (He joked that he wanted to put your braces back on, for Pete’s sake!) But, look: If you say you’re going to be at a friend’s house when you’re really sneaking off to a party in a hotel room, you raise doubts about your prudence and good judgment. When it turns out that your friend’s mom is also your MOM’S FRIEND—not to mention her cousin and hairdresser, oh and by the way they see each other regularly—well, one begins to wonder whether you’ve thought even one step ahead.
Bonus tip: When your dad asks you, three times, what happened at your friend’s house, and when he prefaces the third time with “I’m going to give you one last chance,” the jig is up, and it’s time to confess everything.
3. A large vocabulary is an asset. If a family member has just confessed something regarding her sexual history, and you’re surprised by the news, search your vocabulary and choose your words carefully so as to avoid unfortunate double entendre.
I’m looking at you, Victoria Koloff.
4. “I’m not upset with you. I want to know how you’re feeling” is a really standup thing to say when someone tells you difficult news.
Olivia Perry, a single teen mom of a baby daughter named Eden, isn’t happy with the results of Eden’s paternity test. In a scene I found rather touching, she tells her parents, Mark and Cheryl, “I got the results of the paternity test and I don’t really understand them.” It’s likely that Olivia’s just floundering here, because the results aren’t ambiguous: they say that there’s a 99.99 percent probability that Eden’s father isn’t the fellow she was expecting or hoping. This is exactly what Mark, the pastor of Everyday Church, gently points out—and then he says the line above.
As I said in last week’s episode recap, the Perrys come off well in the show, with Mark and Cheryl more interested in keeping the lines of communication open and loving their daughters thanin dictating what No Daughter Of Mine Will Do While She’s Under My Roof etc. (Not that they don’t seem to have strong and fairly conservative convictions about good and bad behavior. But when their daughters make choices they disagree with, Mark and Cheryl appear more pained and concerned than condemnatory.) This aligns with what we’ve seen of the family’s and church’s underlying theology, which strongly emphasizes God’s unconditional love.
I also wrote last week about how the premise of Preachers’ Daughters practically ensured that it would showcase stock characters performing widely-known cultural scripts. I still think that’s mostly the case, because after all the show has to stay true to the genre of reality television. But the three families represent more diversity in theology and parenting than I first would have guessed. The introduction of Teryn Koloff was very effective, a balance to Victoria Koloff’s over-the-top concern with young Christian women’s sexual behavior. (I should probably say “TV Victoria Koloff,” because again, we don’t have access to the untelevised personae of any of these people.) I don’t know whether the three families ever wind up meeting each other. Their Twitter accounts suggest they are friendly with one another, but those introductions may not be part of the show. I hope we do see them meet, though. I think Teryn and Olivia, for example, could have a really interesting conversation.
