TOUGH AS FAILS
New reality show attempts to celebrate hard work, but tone smacks of class divide
Tough as Nails Wednesdays, CBS
Everyone’s super touchy these days, which may explain why the exuberance of CBS’S disappointing new reality competition series, Tough as Nails, strikes such a sour note in its attempt to showcase the spirit and resolve of Americans working in construction, public safety, agriculture and other labour-intensive industries.
It was barely a week ago that Sen. Tom Cotton, R-ark., arrogantly dismissed the District of Columbia’s latest bid for statehood by rebutting a favourite argument — that the District has more citizens than Wyoming — and turning it into a tool of divisiveness. “Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population,” Cotton said. “But it has three times as many workers in mining, logging and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded, working-class state.”
Wednesday’s two-hour première of Tough as Nails was a little too fluent in the same language. “Every day millions of Americans roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty to make an honest day’s living,” says creator and host Phil Keoghan at the beginning of the show, heralding its 12 contestants as prime examples of “people who really keep this country going.”
Today’s politics being what they are, it’s hard not to hear a reverse implication: that those of us who are not covered in sweat and grime by the end of the day are somehow making a dishonest living. We might not even be real Americans. (Does this sweatstain metric also apply to the executive suite at networks? Does it apply to New Zealand-born TV hosts? Is Tough as Nails, like Undercover Boss before it, an exercise in subconscious remorse about one’s bloated paycheque?)
The tone of the show, at best, patronizes to the nation’s blue-collar workforce by overpraising it without addressing ongoing issues of wages and rights; at worst, it’s a glancing blow to all those Americans who work just as hard indoors, and have been working even harder since March, when pandemic isolation efforts required them to toil remotely at home while managing the full-time care and education of children.
Keoghan and CBS have had plenty of weeks to look around, take note of the nation’s current mood and rewrite a lot of these vacuous voice-overs by recognizing the wide range of the American work ethic. Instead, Keoghan can’t stop piling on the class signifiers: These good folk, he says, are “sweating on factory floors instead of gym floors, and wearing work boots instead of workout shoes.” Rather than seem tough, it seems insecure.
Tough as Nails never fully relaxes that stance, as some of its contestants begin to parrot the narrative style, including a 35-year-old Bronx scaffold builder named Luis Yuli: “I hate to be sitting down behind a cubicle and doing paperwork. I was not born for that.”
If Yuli got the idea that he ever needed to justify his career choice, it’s probably because our culture and our politics are coated in mixed messages about character and livelihood, made worse by an ever-widening income gap and the erosion of workers’ rights.
The contestants — six women and six men who range in age from 27 to 62 — also include a drywaller, a welder, a farmer, a former Marine, an airline ticketing agent, a sheriff ’s deputy, a forester, a firefighter, a fisherman, an ironworker and a roofer. The only thing that makes the show worth watching (other than seeing some of the women outperform the men) is the contestants’ general good attitude about the work they do and the work that others do.
Tough as Nails has almost nothing new to add to the genre overall. We could just as easily be watching these nice people bake cakes or assemble Legos or any of the other activities TV likes to turn into contests. And this show pales next to Keoghan’s other show, The Amazing Race, a completed season of which has been sitting around for months while CBS dithers about when to air it. America, I ask you: What would be more entertaining right now in the dead of a deadly summer — a show in which people frantically lay brick and shovel coal, or the dreamy escapism of another frantic, jet-hopping race around the pre-pandemic world?
Sadly, CBS chose the bricklaying.