Paula Deen's back, y'all, and she took them lemons she was pelted with and made herself a honkin' lemon meringue pie. She just launched PDN, or the Paula Deen Network online. For just about 10 bucks a month you can soak yourself in all things Deen, including the entire back catalog of her show that ran on Food Network. It was the smartest move, if not the only move, that she could've made. All she has to do now is hope that her rabidly loyal fanbase of elders can figure out how to work the TV with the keyboard attached.
I have incredibly mixed feelings about Paula Deen. I took no joy in seeing her empire deflate like a souffle after she admitted to using the N-word on occasion. For Chrissakes, she is a woman in her late 60s who grew up in the Deep South. I don't condone it but I understand it, and I saw a ton of hypocrisy when the whole thing went down.
She also handled it very poorly. Oh, how I wished she would've taken the opportunity to make it a teachable moment, where Americans could honestly talk about what it was like to be a cracker in the Jim Crow South and how she has come to grips with her prejudiced past. But she just flustered and dug a deeper trench for herself, then peeked out and watched just about every single company that had done business with her desert and join the Union Army. But Deen is not hateful like Donald Sterling, nor even like Shaquille O'Neal, who openly mocked a disabled man on Twitter and lost zero endorsements as a result. Americans made an example of her while real diversity problems continue unabated.
Deen has promised to air a "documentary" about the entire debacle on her site but it has yet to be uploaded. What she has uploaded, however, is a pastiche of cornball "game shows," a really dull reality TV show called Paula's World, and tons of videos of her sons cooking. The principal investor in the venture is Najafi Companies, the same folks who bring us SkyMall, home to $2,250 "lifesize" Bigfoot Garden Yeti lawn ornaments and Cylon-esque head massage helmets.
I was excited at the idea of online game shows, especially with names like What Did Paula Deen Just Put In My Mouth?, but boy howdy, are they ever bad. Deen There Done That featured her son in a bad wig, calling himself Stink Fartindale and quizzing contestants about his mom's life. The "show" takes place in her living room with about 30 townsfolk gathered 'round. The same goes for Name That Grub and Sketch Your Supper. Deen has said that she loves having her own online network because she gets total creative control, but in this case a few suits with some "Hollywood ideas" could really have helped. Not everyone finds your boys as delightful as you do, Paula, and an entire show based on trivia about you is not enough to hold anyone's interest for very long. Watching these clips was like being forced to watch someone's home movies, probably because that's exactly what they are.
There are two other people who figure prominently on the network. One is her somewhat effeminate creative director Brandon Branch and the other is her bodyguard, Hollis "Black As This Board" Johnson, as she referred to him in the midst of the scandal. She surrounds herself with diversity, you see. But she always has. One of the things I used to like about her show was that she regularly had on her black friends. It never occurred to me that she might feel superior to them, nor apparently did it occur to them, since so many of them have defended her.
In this so-called post-racial landscape, to be a Southern woman you are either held up as a steel magnolia or pilloried. Deen went from being a Scarlett O'Hara who was on welfare and made a ball gown out of her damask curtains to being Eichmann in Jerusalem. Neither are the truth. She is a complicated person with a complicated past. Now she's launching what is basically a digital Hee Haw, and Jesus bless her and her economic endeavors. As God as her witness, she'll never lose money again.
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