This Week on The Baby Borrowers

For a show being lauded some places as the "antidote" to teen pregnancy and for "educating teens about unplanned pregnancy," The Baby Borrowers focuses far too much on teenage drama to be taken seriously.

In my review of last week's first episode, I panned NBC for resorting to stereotypes, referring to Kelly and Austin as the "preppy southern couple" and Daton and Morgan as "California surfers." But what was cheesy in the introductory phase of the show became downright obnoxious as they continue it. That alone may be enough to make me stop watching.

Last night's episode showed two days of the social experiment. In it, the teens spent their first nights with the babies, and then one of the parents had to get up and go to work in order to earn money for food and rent. We learn from the announcer that for most of the teens, this is the first real day of work they've ever done. Eight of the ten participants are 18 and the other two are 20, so the fact that they've never worked says something about which types of teens the show's producers picked. I digress.

For the most part, last night focused on the drama of two couples. Alicea and Cory fight and bicker, but mostly we see Alicea avoiding responsibility and acting like the spoiled child she is. She refuses to help at all with the baby, she goes to work at a sawmill dressed to go clubbing, and cannot even muster the patience to figure out how to make the baby's formula in the morning. Cory, for his part, tries his best. He stays up all night with the crying baby, but, when the baby's diaper needs changing on a playdate, Cory tries to pass the duty off to Kelly (one of the other teens) simply because she smelled it first.

Sean and Kelsey face similar problems. Kelsey had great confidence in her parenting skills before coming onto the show, but now cannot deal with the real, crying baby. Her anxiety gives her stomach problems, and she shuts down, locking herself in the bathroom. This leaves Sean with the baby, and no one to go to work. The next day, Kelsey goes to work, not because they need the money (somehow I doubt NBC will let either the babies or the teens starve), but because she wants to escape the baby burden.

We get to see barely any successes. We do see that Kelly has rebounded nicely from her panic attack over the pregnancy vest. The moments we get to see Jordan and Sasha (my favorites by far) are rare, but they do provide (again) the one truly heartening moment of the entire episode. When the mothers of the teen girls come to visit for a few hours, Sasha's mom begins crying after seeing how well the couple are working as a team and managing the new responsibilities. She realizes she harbored doubts about her daughter's ability that turn out to be unfounded.

These extremely brief moments are not what the show is about though. Instead, we're watching teenagers who've never worked before try to handle the tough task of raising children. The producers want us to see failure and drama, and that's mostly what we get.