Your Behavior is Very Naughty

While I do enjoy Commander In Chief and am still trying to figure out how to get paid to watch the Food Network, I have one particular guilty pleasure every friday night.

Supernanny.

I happened upon this show about two months ago and I've watched almost every week since (but I missed last week - damn!).

Let me try to explain my fascination with this show by backing up a little bit. It seems in the last few years I've been in numerous situations with friends and family where we are simply stunned by children's behavior in public. Running around in restaurants, yelling at the top of their lungs in grocery stores, and all while the parents barely seem to notice. And our collective reaction is always the same: "Our parents would never let us get away with that when we were kids."

Enter Supernanny. Here is a show where a bright young woman actually tells parents what they're doing wrong and what they should be doing instead. As monstrous as the children on the show can be (you know producers are searching for the most extreme cases possible), Supernanny - or, Jo Frost, as she actually does have a real name - places most of the attention and problem-solving where it belongs. WIth the parents.

But there's something else going on, something subversive...even dirty, if you will. While the show, the U.S. version of the British edition also starring Frost, makes obvious references to Mary Poppins (the title sequence shows a silouette of Frost holding an umbrella while surrounded by kids), I think they're also aiming for another reference in a very subtle, skillful way.

Frost is a grounded, practical, fun, strict yet warm person with the families. But the commercials, print ads and promo shots seem to emphasize the paradoxical image of her strict, school-marm shtick (stern glasses, finger-wagging) with her short skirts (for a nanny, anyway) and ample, jacket-busting bosom.

Quite frankly, she looks and sometimes acts like a nanny by day and a dominatrix by night.

To see what I mean, check out the above pic provided by ABC as a promo shot. Tell me she doesn't look like she's about to give a spanking.

And that's why I love the show. Not because I have any dominatrix/spanking yearnings, but because I think Frost is actually aware of this dual image and occassionally, slyly plays around with it without losing one iota of credibility as a professional nanny. According to the ABC website, she even made "Your behavior is very naughty" a "national catchphrase."

After all, two of her Top Ten Rules (included in her book, of course) include "discipline" and "restraint." I couldn't make this up if I wanted to. It's all right there: Supernanny...who loves to spank.

Great TV, man. Great TV.