CURIOUS: In “Our America With Lisa Ling,” the host talks to outsiders, like child beauty queens above.
CURIOUS: In “Our America With Lisa Ling,” the host talks to outsiders, like child beauty queens above. (
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Lisa Ling, like Columbus, is determined to discover America.
“Our America With Lisa Ling,” her weekly show on OWN, is flat-out the best documentary series on TV right now.
While other journalists are documenting big news events — from plural marriage to devastating natural disasters — Ling is going deep inside the small ones; stories it turns out, we didn’t even know we wanted to know about.
She’s all about the oddities, the fringes, the outsiders among us who are as much a part of the fabric of this country as the nine-to-five, by-the-book regular Joes.
Despite the very personal, hand-held camera approach used in the show, Ling, with whom I spoke last week, is quick to point out that her OWN production team travels the country with her — and that she and the crew experience the same agony, joy, surprise and, yes, shock as the viewers do.
Ling says sometimes she can’t get past the horror of the stories she’s done. “The 3 a.m. Girls” for one, a show on underage prostitutes, has haunted her.
“I was interviewing one girl who was 13 or 14 when she was pimped out by her cousin,” she says. “She’d call the police every single night to get herself arrested so she’d have a safe place.
“It takes a long time to get people to open up, and I’m not a person who can turn my back,” says Ling. “I try to keep in touch with them and help them when I can.”
The task, however, can be overwhelming.
On the lighter side, Ling had a great time following some of the allegedly (are you ready?) 15 million swingers in the US.
Yes, that’s 15 million.
“At a time when 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, these folks are adamant that they aren’t cheating,” she says. “They may no longer consider their partner a sex object, yet when they see that person with someone else, it changes.”
OK, fine, but what about the people who never were and never will be sex objects?
Let’s be honest here. Not everyone looks like “Modern Family” star Sofia Vergara, and worse, according to NPR, 60 percent of Americans are overweight and/or morbidly obese.
Nobody wants to swing with a 400-pounder. Right?
Not necessarily. “Some are people you’d see on the street and think, ‘Oh, that poor person has probably never had sex, but you’d be very surprised,” she says. “There are people [who are so innocuous] you wouldn’t even see them—but they’re getting their groove on!
“They don’t discriminate [in the swinger community],” she says. “In fact, they find chemistry with people they would never have looked at before.”
And their spouses? “They’ll say with pride, ‘That’s my wife!’ You go in with a preconceived notion to every situation and are always surprised.
“I was just in a senior home,” she says, giggling, “and they were talking about sex. I was so shocked by the level of candor! And I was in a little Jewish community in Boca, and they were talking about lubrication, threesomes and all kinds of things.”
Were they reminiscing? “No!” she says. “They were talking about now—and they were in their 80s!”
How can you not love that?
The jury’s in: Ling has the best journalist job in Our America.