Aspects Of The Raising McCain Pilot, Ranked From Least To Most Compelling

Someone gave notorious John McCain daughter Meghan McCain a TV show, because of course they did. As Willa Paskin noted in her review on Slate, McCain deserves some credit for not going the route of several Palins and starring in a reality show (or four), because someone as cute, obnoxious, and media-savvy as McCain probably did get offers. As Paskin goes on to note, McCain's non-fiction news-ish thing -- Raising McCain, which premiered Saturday on Pivot -- may aim higher than did Bristol Palin with her (dumb) Lifetime reality soap Life's A Tripp, but it's not good either. How not good? I've ordered some salient attributes of the show on a spectrum from least to most compelling so that you can make that judgment for yourself.

8. This set is a try-hard: We're not going to work at desks in your stodgy old TV studio, maaaaaaan! We rock the kitchen island of this super-authentic loft!

Apparently, someone on the production also thought it could hook millennials by throwing in some Catfish flavour and give McCain a toy camera.

Look how much fun she's having! That's what's important.

7. At least some stuff in the episode is obviously fake: One plotline in the episode -- which revolves around the idea of (mostly online) privacy -- has McCain facing off against her co-host, journalist Michael Moynihan, in a "Privacy Smackdown": each is going to try to dig up as much dirt as possible on the other. Moynihan engages the services of a private detective, Vinnie Parco, to do a background check on McCain, and Parco offers some stagey though interesting exposition about how much you can find out about people using online networks -- tracking where and when they use their devices to log on to public wireless networks, for example. (Moynihan later tells McCain he figured out where she lived based on her not having turned off the location on her Twitter account. Seriously.) Parco also says that once he knows where McCain lives, he can access the closed-circut cameras on her block, and later in the episode we see what is supposed to be footage of Meghan and two show staffers that was taken on these cameras.

I'm not an expert but is that CC footage really that clear? And in colour?

6. More stuff in the episode is basically pointless: A tangent about drone surveillance is just an excuse for McCain and her brother, Jimmy, to play with a glorified RC helicopter in a park for a while, eventually using it (supposedly) to follow Moynihan around town while she sends him taunting texts. I guess she's invading his privacy, and potentially might have found him doing something incriminating offline if she (by which I mean "she") were not flying it right in front of Moynihan's face. We also see McCain go on a field trip to purchase a production mascot, ending up with a bearded dragon. I guess the point is to show that McCain isn't a girly girl, as though the title card shot of her in her black Chuck Taylor high-tops hadn't already proven that in spades.

5. McCain could use some lessons in faking empathy: McCain and Moynihan interview Holly Jacobs, the founder of EndRevengePorn.org. To help McCain understand what can happen when ordinary people can't protect their privacy online, Jacobs tells her own story, in which an ex put nude photos of her on more than two hundred sites, and sent a video of her masturbating to her boss. "Literally you lived my worst nightmare," bleats McCain. THIS IS NOT ABOUT YOU, MEGHAN. How about try that again? But I guess if it made it into the broadcast, it was among the smartest things McCain said during this interview. Speaking of which....

4. McCain is either actually dumb, or infuriatingly good at playing dumb: Almost the first thing McCain says in the episode is "I don't think privacy exists anymore, and I don't really care." As I mentioned above, the topic of the episode is privacy. So either she's exaggerating her position on the matter so that she can stand in the viewer's stead while people explain to her why she should care, in which case the show really thinks the audience is as dumb as that statement makes McCain sound. Alternatively, that really is what McCain thinks and she's exactly as dumb as she sounds, in which case why am I watching her fumble her way through remedial-level learnings about how the world works? ("To judge her?" ...Yeah, okay. Maybe.)

3. Producers are smart enough to interview a friend-of-a-friend of this site: Hey, that's Cullen Hoback, director of Terms And Conditions May Apply, produced by contributor to and friend of Previously.TV, John Ramos! He tells her that if she's worried about her activities being monitored online, she shouldn't use Google. I doubt this is advice she plans to take.

2. Something is up with that brother of hers and I kind of want to find out what it is: This is the aforementioned Jimmy McCain, and his scarf.

I'm not saying. I'm just saying.

1. The second episode is about feminism: DUH THERE'S OBVIOUSLY NO WAY I'M NOT WATCHING THAT SHIT.