'Charm School' sells redemption but it's all show
Coincidence can be a beautiful thing, and it's something of a relief that VH1's new reality contest, the unwieldily named "Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School Starring Mo'Nique," arrives just after the nation met the Rutgers women's basketball team. It may not surprise anyone -- except, perhaps, producers at VH1 -- that a group of young women can be poised, unified, and classy enough to make a positive mark on pop culture. But it's worth giving the network another reminder.
VH1 has gone through a string of iterations over the years, from music network to purveyor of pop culture lists, but it seems to have found new life in the "Flavor of Love" franchise, an empire built on the supposed joys of the catfight. Needless to say, the original show, a "Bachelor" parody starring the rapper Flavor Flav , didn't do women any favors -- especially not African-American women, who made up the majority of the contestants.
Its contributions included the practice of handing out stripper nicknames, from "Hottie" to "Buckwild," and encouraging women to claw at each other like hyperactive toddlers. And it turned into such a hit that one recurring character won her own spinoff, "I Love New York," in which she chose among a group of undesirable men while showcasing her breast implants and false eyelashes.
Yes, it's all supposed to be good, campy fun, but the joke gets old almost immediately, and in light of this week's Don Imus debacle, it deserves to be retired. Such is the national mood, I hope, as "Charm School" hits the air tomorrow night at 10. Here, 13 contestants from the past two seasons of "Flavor of Love" -- last seen crying, spitting, and taking clumsy swipes at each other -- return in trashy outfits to a giant rented house, purportedly to learn how to behave themselves better. (The last woman standing also wins $50,000.)
Presiding as schoolmistress is the comedian Mo'Nique; VH1 notes on its website that she has earned four NAACP Image Awards. Here, her first move is to eliminate "those disgusting nicknames," an act she dramatizes by tossing a series of name tags into a fire. VH1, however, doesn't drop them; the women are now identified with double names, as in "Brooke/Pumkin" or "Larissa/Bootz." And they often use the old names to reference one another, when they're not hurling epithets like "bitch" and, yes, "ho."
What's worst is the mocking lip service the show gives to the idea of redemption. VH1 is selling the series as a Pygmalion story, and a few contestants voice their willingness to change. Some admit, to the cameras, that their mothers were embarrassed by "Flavor of Love," and that they hope to use this show to make amends. Then they proceed to put themselves in a string of humiliating situations, such as traveling in the kind of short school bus that high school boys like to mock.
In tomorrow's premiere, they're sent on a camping trip; we watch them struggle to walk two miles up a hill, then trip their way through a military obstacle course. Yes, we're treated to a good, long look at one contestant's thong underwear as she tries to climb over a rope wall. And yes, we see a continuous reel of fighting clips from "Flavor of Love."
Mo'Nique looks as if she's having a good enough time, mugging through her lip gloss and laughing at the contestants' ample tears. Same for the "Charm School" contestants themselves, who seem implicitly to understand what's expected of them. They sneer, hurl insults, and try their best to vamp in schoolgirl uniforms, all in the service of remaining on TV. It bears repeating that some women think those trade-offs aren't worthwhile.
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to viewerdiscretion.net 
