Since reviewing the second half of the first season of The Secret Life of the American Teenager, when we discovered just how horrible the show was both in terms of creative and thematic elements, we’ve since avoided it like the plague. Why rag on a show whose following seems content to wallow in the intellectual depravity the series endorses when you can just as easily stay away? So we did. Now, with its third season complete, we’re checking back in to see if the series has matured and grown into its own. Sad to say, if it’s actually possible, The Secret Life of the American Teenager has only gotten worse with the acting plummeting to new lows of Soap Opera levels of melodrama and poorly directed body language.
Volume six includes the second half of the third season which sees Adrian (Francia Raisa) pregnant with Ben’s (Ken Baumann) child, Amy (Shailene Woodley) and Ricky (Daren Kagasoff) raising their child despite the return of Ricky’s alcoholic mother, Ashley (India Eisley) dropping out of the public sphere in favor of home schooling, and other ridiculous overblown moments of teenage drama lacking any parallels to reality. Do teenagers get pregnant? Yes. Do their parents talk to them about the risks of sex? Sure. Does any of it happen the way it does here? Ever? No, not even close.
Holy god, no one talks like this. Someone sign these writers up for community college courses in writing dialogue.
This isn’t hyperbole: the showrunners of The Secret Life have assembled one of the worst casts of young actors on television. Chosen for their resemblance to Abercrombie models, the male actors have an emotional range that rivals a corpse, but they have the All-American look that makes them every parent’s dream to be the teenage guy that steals their daughter’s virginity. The female leads just blurt out their lines with little to no inflection, seemingly oblivious to possibility of injecting dialog with some semblance of emotion. You would get equally powerful performances from a computer-generated voice which spits out spoken words after you type them in. What’s worse is that the adult cast is just as bad, despite having some recognizable veterans in their midst, which leads us to an inevitable conclusion.
The Secret Life’s problems stem as much from the acting as it does from the writing and direction, both of which are inept and utterly deplorable. With your average Soap Opera, you know you’re going to get clichéd story elements (amnesia, impostors, affairs, etc.) performed by actors hamming it up in accordance with what audiences have come to expect of the genre. The musical cues lack subtlety and the wringing of garments over even the smallest shreds of bad news is without equal – or it should be. The Secret Life oozes these same elements out of every pore, but it doesn’t make sense. Even with all the heavy-handed moralizing of 7th Heaven, the show where many of the directors and writers for The Secret Life cut their teeth, it was never so unapologetically brazen in its repetitive messages of “sex will destroy your life, your parents’ lives, your friends’ lives, and will make you an awkward teenage parent.” By contrast, 7th Heaven presented sex as a common topic but it never condemned it with such unrepentant vitriol.
While the majority of The Secret Life’s production values deserves little more than a dismissive wave for having such low standards, there is one facet that deserves a bit of reflection. The Secret Life features Luke Zimmerman, an actor with Down syndrome, as a functional character with the same affliction. It’s rare to see a show feature a character with this affliction in a way that doesn’t demand that you sympathize with the character because of it. The Secret Life downplay’s Zimmerman’s condition and lets him play his character straight, albeit with a bit of difficulty in understanding him, but never in such a way that it detracts from his ability to play the role. It’s a great approach, but it’s ultimately undermined by the poor adult actors around him who overact to such a degree that it looks like their talking down to him.
DVD Bonus Features
There are none.
"The Secret Life of the American Teenager: Volume Six" is on sale June 7, 2011 and is not rated. Drama. Directed by Keith Truesdell, Anson Williams. Written by Brenda Hampton, Elaine Arata, Jeffrey Rodgers. Starring Daren Kagasoff, Francia Raisa, Megan Park, Shailene Woodley, India Eisley, Ken Baumann.
