Gordon Ramsay; Savannah Guthrie
It was a summer that won't be remembered fondly, at least by the broadcast networks. Despite a flurry of new shows, from CBS' Dogs in the City to ABC's Glass House, there wasn't much to crow about — at least until NBC's Summer Olympics ratings juggernaut came along. Cable fared better, launching new hits like A&E's Longmire and TNT's Perception and opening events like History's Hatfields & McCoys to big numbers. Here are some of this summer's highs and lows.
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Honey Boo Boo
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo star Alana Thompson has taken the world by storm with her signature phrases and eccentric family — and we got to witness it all firsthand.
In the video below, Alana, who's joined by her mother June, tells TVGuide.com about her Toddlers & Tiaras spin-off, why she loves being recognized by fans and where she got the name "Honey Boo Boo Child." Plus: Watch for Alana's impromptu singing and runway "walk-off."
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Katie Cazorla
Can Katie prevail in a nail battle?
Katie Cazorla may be a fan of Toddlers & Tiaras, but on Sunday's episode of Nail Files, she's learning that watching the drama and living it are two different things. The Painted Nail owner has a run-in with an opinionated pageant "dad" in Las Vegas when she's asked to judge a children's beauty pageant.
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Anderson Cooper and Courteney Cox
Courteney Cox believes that "everything is better" with ranch dressing, but that may not be the case with Anderson Cooper.
On Tuesday's Anderson, Cooper surprises the Cougar Town star with a huge bowl of her favorite salad condiment ...
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Toddlers and Tiaras
Wendy Dickey has put 3-year-old daughter Paisley in "60-something" pageants, including Miss Sugarplum Fairy, as seen on this week's Toddlers & Tiaras (Wednesdays, 10/9c, TLC). Like many featured on the show, Dickey's parenting philosophy is unorthodox. Below, Dickey talks about bribing her child with sugar, emphasizing beauty at such a young age and referring to her child as "a little turd"...
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Abby Lee Miller
Dance Moms (Wednesdays, 10/9c, Lifetime) has enough bickering to put Real Housewives to shame and enough questionable parenting to make Toddlers & Tiaras seem like Sesame Street in comparison. At its center: Abby Lee Miller, who runs the Abby Lee Dance Company in Pittsburgh. Miller's "tough love" method of teaching features plenty of barking, scant praise (at least as far as what we're privy to, per the show's editing) and a pyramid, which she uses to rank her favorite students on a weekly basis. Viewers are, unsurprisingly, harrowed and riveted.
We spoke to Miller about the theatrics of her vocation and show, and to hear her tell it, the pyramid is made-for-TV invention. Peppering her speech with reminders about her and her studio's accomplishments, Miller told us about her background, the impetus for her toughness and why she wishes she could teach orphans...
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Tori and Brock
TLC's Toddlers & Tiaras (Wednesdays at 10/9c) is often criticized for exhibiting bad parenting, but this week's episode is garnering the opposite response. We were introduced to Brock Ritter, a now-8-year-old, self-described "diva," who lives in Michigan and pursues his interests in dancing, pageantry and occasionally dressing up like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, despite teasing and what society dictates as gender-normative behavior. (Watch a clip of Brock in action.)
We spoke with Brock's mom, Tori, about letting her son be himself, pageantry criticism and what Brock's father thinks of all this...
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Annette Hill
No show provokes a gut reaction like Toddlers & Tiaras (Wednesdays, 10/9c, TLC). Those who aren't entranced by the very specific, extremely odd cultural world of child beauty pageants tend to wring their hands and decry the behavior on display as despicable or abusive. Reality TV has a way of bringing out the armchair psychologists, but to tackle the issues the show brings up, we thought we'd talk to an expert on the side of the pageants: Annette Hill runs the circuit Universal Royalty Beauty Pageants that the show frequently profiles. She is outspoken, passionate and more than a little defensive over criticism. Still, she runs her business like an open book, having incorporated TV coverage from the start and keeping her pageants open to the public. (In the interest of providing full disclosure, she also invited me down to their nationals pageant in November. Should the invitation stand come pageant time, I will absolutely take her up on it.)
Below, we hit Hill with just about every critique we could think of: the idea that pageants sexualize children, the toll pageants could take on the competitors' psyches, the unease that seeing a child in full makeup can provoke, the curse of the stage parent. Gamely, she tackles the ire head on...
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Makenzie
Just when you thought it was safe to go to a kiddie pageant...
Last night, the reason we need Child Protective Services returned to once again remind the world that terrible parents come in all shapes and sizes. Granted, Toddlers & Tiaras, the look inside the world of weird pre-pubescent beauty competitions, has always been...
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Eden
"Can you put her on the cover?" Mickie Wood asks me as we finish our conversation about her 6-year-old daughter, Eden Wood, who makes her fifth overall appearance (and third as "a feature") on Wednesday's Season 4 premiere of Toddlers & Tiaras (TLC, 10/9c). When Wood realizes this interview is for a website not a magazine, she's much less pushy than you might expect for someone who fits the profile of "stage mom." She has "somewhat of a smattering" of a pageant history herself and started orchestrating Eden's pageant career when her daughter was just over a year old.
Wood is just as much of a character on the phone as her daughter has to be onstage. She starts the conversation singing Tony Basil's "Mickey" (in reference to her own name), describes her daughter as kicking some "bootay" onstage, exhibits the savvy of a reality-TV vet and expresses befuddlement over Leah Remini describing her daughter as "luscious" after she performed her must-be-heard-to-be-believed song "Cutie Patootie" on The Talk last year.
We talked to Wood about pageant stigma, facials for 6-year-olds and why Eden's beauty queen days may be numbered...
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