ALL FOR ONE: The Southern wives of TLC’s “The Sisterhood,” a new reality series premiering tonight. (
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“Amen
!” you’re thinking. “Finally, a reality show about Southern preachers’ wives!”
Right off you’re thinking televangelists, out-of-control Tammy Faye Baker types or, bless their souls, the hundreds of Dolly Parton look-a-likes God was good enough to put on TV.
Failing that you’d settle for the more buttoned-down, reigning queen of preacher wives, Victoria Osteen.
Unfortunately, the first preacher-wife show, “The Sister
hood,” premiering on TLC tonight, is nothing more — or less — than “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” but co-starring God.
No big, dyed-blond ’do’s, no insane eyeliner, no white Rolls-Royces.
On this show we have four African-American preacher’s wives, but like those “Real Housewives” who don’t even have husbands, here two of the four preacher wives are married to pastors who don’t have churches.
And like every tired “Wives” show that came before them, they follow the tried-and-true formula.
First, they all meet and then have a party to welcome the new woman to town so they can then fight and get catty and jealous.
Oy veah, as the one white preacher — a “Jewish believer in Jesus,” the program notes say — in the group might say.
That would be Brian, husband of Tara, a weightlifter.
Brian, too, is a weightlifter, but a white Jewish Baptist pastor lifter who got tossed out of his last church faster than a copy of the Communist Manifesto on Wall Street.
The couple, who named one of their children after a clothing line, are kind of clueless. What else could account for him saying things like, “Shalom, y’all!”
Dominique, Tara’s frenemy, is also married to a man without a church — apparently because they drove it into the ground financially.
That doesn’t mean they don’t live well, which may come from Tara’s salon/boutique, which she calls, “Home of the $39 Weave.”
Christina, a Dominican, is married to Pastor Anthony, who teaches his teen daughters how to put a condom on a banana.
It’s not as horrible as it sounds and, for sure, while he’s playing to the camera, he also tells his daughters: “This is tough for me, but when I was a teen, I got crabs, I got two or three STDs.”
TMI, pastor, TMI!
Ivy and Pastor Mark are the most normal couple, and are well on their way to building a mega-church — and really, nothing says “money in the bank” like a reality show. I wish there was more, God help me, to love here.
But when you have Dominique and Tara arguing and threatening each over the Almighty, there’s not much to renew my faith in God.