A full six-years after the presidential election that launched Sarah Palin and the town of Wasilla, Alaska, to global prominence, MTV has now debuted a “comedic docu-series” about life there, naturally titled Slednecks. Rehashing the tried-and-true Jersey Shore model, it follows a group of friends aged 19-24 who boldly proclaim that they embody all that is tough, wild, raunchy and wonderful about life in the northernmost state.
The 90-minute debut episode boasts little in the way of plot. The main narrative focuses on couple Kelly and Sierra, who have known each other since kindergarten, having grown up on the same trailer park. They’ve been dating for two years and live together in a house that is aggressively unfinished. This is a Wasilla trait: the whole cast pride themselves on the homes they seemingly throw together piecemeal, finishing them whenever the mood strikes them. Forget Martha Stewart-style tablescapes: the young stars’ cabins often lack dry walls and indoor plumbing, while insulation and hanging wires created an unironic rustic chic that no dining table repurposed from a barn door could ever achieve.
Within the first few minutes, Sierra has thrown Kelly out of their house, literally tossing his belongings from the second floor down into the embankment of snow below. By the end of the episode, they will have gotten back together, discussed marriage, broken up after Kelly got so drunk he failed to remember asking some other female friends to strip at a party, and started an ongoing tit-for-tat that will surely escalate throughout the series. (Perhaps: Sierra steals Kelly’s shoes; Kelly covers the windows of Sierra’s car; Sierra blows up Kelly’s beloved couch and remaining clothes Looney Tunes-style with dynamite in the middle of a rock quarry.)
Other consistent lines of narrative are more difficult to piece together, a hallmark of MTV’s reality fare. The newest Wasilla denizen is a young woman named Jackie, who is Inupiat Eskimo. Having moved from a small village in the Arctic Circle to take a mining job, she is patronised in an uncomfortably colonialist manner. The other friends laugh nervously when her father drops in at her birthday celebration wearing a full, hooded wolf coat. Given that the party has included a game called “Alaskan cups”, a version of the college staple flip cup where the players must remove an article of clothing every time their coin misses the cup, his concern does not seem misplaced.
When Sierra, whose “only hobby” is modeling, wants to recruit Jackie for a “Wild Women of Alaska” calendar, her female friends beg her to participate, thinking it will be hilarious to see how “conservative” Jackie fares in a risqué photoshoot and assuring her that it wouldn’t be an authentic “wild woman” calendar without her presence – she being the native daughter. When the women shop for clothes for their photoshoot and Amber suggests they wear fur thong bikinis, Jackie becomes withdrawn. “I can’t wear things like that,” she tells Sierra. “What would my family say?” She visits her aunt to receive a squirrel-and-wolverine coat which took members of her tribe five years to make, with instructions to take care of it. During the shoot, the women laugh and cheer at seeing Jackie fully covered in native dress while they romp in bikinis.
In between the drinking, air boat racing, wakeboarding in sub-zero temperatures, doing shots of caribou blood, and stripping (both casual and professional – Dylan works as a “go-go dancer” to support his family and when his friend Zeke complains about his dismal financial situation, urges him to give the profession a try), there are moments of actual reality that feel disastrously out of place in such an exploitative, self-congratulatory sleazefest. Big Mike, for instance, expresses his respect for Jackie’s relationship with her father, as he “like most kids in Alaska” grew up in foster care. Other than miner Jackie and air boat shop workers Kelly and Trevor, the group seems to be noticeably un- and underemployed. Dylan’s mother glows with pride about his stripping job. Sierra sells cigarette lighters bearing her image in soft-porn poses. Each cast member’s number of tattoos seems to be in inverse relationship with her employment opportunities – although Tosca, who hooked up with both Kelly and Trevor in quick succession, is studying to be a mortician.
Slednecks is a mash-up of MTV reality shows past and present. There are Jackass-like explosions, Road Rules-style competitions, and Real World-esque cabin fever. For all of its claims at being “so real”, the most striking attribute of Slednecks is how highly produced it is. It is self-consciously “sexy”, “risky”, and “dangerous”. In the wake of the cancellation of TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Slednecks lustily steps up to the task of providing viewers a chance to revel and gawk at how a certain socioeconomic stratum lives. And also, how moose apparently casually walk around Wasilla.
