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GCB is DOA

Did any of you watch “GCB” last night? It’s the ABC show based on the snarky novel “Good Christian Bitches,” about rich women from the Park Cities neighborhoods of Dallas (technically they’re their own towns, but that’s a distinction without a difference outside of Dallas). The joke is that these wealthy women are church-going hypocrites. […]

Did any of you watch “GCB” last night? It’s the ABC show based on the snarky novel “Good Christian Bitches,” about rich women from the Park Cities neighborhoods of Dallas (technically they’re their own towns, but that’s a distinction without a difference outside of Dallas). The joke is that these wealthy women are church-going hypocrites. It sounds like shooting fish in a barrel, but actually the sociology of this sort of thing — or is it cultural anthropology? — is pretty fascinating. Longtime readers know that I lived in Dallas from 2003 to 2010, and married a Dallas girl. I have never lived in a place where the religious and social worlds were so interesting. The world of “GCB” really does exist. Or rather, the world that “GCB” purports to send up — a social environment of extreme wealth, materialist vulgarity, sensuality, bitchiness, and purple piety — really exists. And it is ripe for satire.

“GCB” is not satire. It’s a minstrel show, and based on last night’s episode, it’s just not funny. Nobody enjoys making fun of this sort of thing more than people from Dallas — their version of the “Keep Austin Weird” bumper sticker is “Keep Dallas Plastic” — and Mrs. Dreher and I were excited about last night’s premiere. But we barely laughed at all, and, well, it just seemed like somebody from California’s idea of what bitchy Park Cities women are. Except the writer is not from California, but is from Natchitoches, Louisiana — Bobby Harling, author of “Steel Magnolias.” Natchitoches is not Dallas, though, and the whole effect was kind of like reading a French intellectual’s description of going to Disneyworld. You could recognize the types, and you knew what he was getting at, but it was wildly overplayed.

What “GCB” desperately needs is subtlety and wit. It’s not smart; in fact, it’s actively stupid. One of Mrs. Dreher’s Dallas friends e-mailed to say, “The writer confused Plano with the Highland Park. No Highland Park woman would have John 3:16 on the back of her car.” That friend, an acute observer of the ways of Dallas’s religious and class tribes, forwarded the following image, taken from the pages of a local parenting magazine. “This is the real Dallas,” she said:

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