6 Absolutely Ridiculous Moments in Suddenly Amish You Won’t Believe Actually Happened
“Suddenly Amish” is the latest in a line of Amish-themed reality programs, like its predecessors “Amish Mafia” or “Breaking Amish”.
You shouldn’t have high expectations of these shows, though you can understand why they keep making them.
In previous posts I gave you my biggest questions on the show. I also shared experts’ criticism of it – and the idea that it may not be all “bad”.
But, I really needed to get around to actually watching an episode. Well, I finally did it.
Not that I take much pleasure in shooting fish in a barrel, but here are six of the most ridiculous aspects I noticed on watching Episode One.
1. Bishop Vernon’s “Day of Reckoning” Setup
Let’s start with the premise of the show. The newbies have one month to prove themselves, decrees Bishop Vernon, the main authority figure on the show.
Another member of Team Amish, Allen, must take charge of preparing them for “the day of reckoning” at month’s end, when it will be decided whether they can continue on their Amish journey.
It has little in common with actually joining the Amish, that’s the silly bit of it. But for a reality show, it works to have some artificial dramatic culmination point, as the characters work to prove themselves worthy enough to be allowed into the tribe.
For people actually wanting to join the Amish, they’re going to first spend a much longer and deliberate period of time living in and adapting to a community, with less of the aggressive, timetabled testing and drama inherent in the premise here.
2. Treating the Amish as Mainly a “Lifestyle” Group
Much if not most of the English characters’ dialogue when explaining why they want to become suddenly Amish, centers around cultural or lifestyle aspects of the Amish. That’s opposed to what is purportedly at the root of being an Amish Christian – the religious faith.
To take maybe the most glaring example of this, in one scene Judah is sitting with his family still at home in the English world – when his mother expresses concern for her son being accepted, for various reasons.
At one point while she is expressing concern, she says something that is a bit hard to hear, but sounds like “you are Muslim” (and that is how the subtitles at the source – the TLC website – translated it).
Then Judah simply says that “Everything I’ve been through I feel like is leading me to this moment. All roads right now is leading to the Amish lifestyle” [emphasis added].
So this show doesn’t appear to take what it actually means to be Amish too seriously. Rather, it is more about the lifestyle and the obvious conflicts that might be generated out of the inevitable culture clashes.
Being Amish is something to try on and maybe do for awhile, rather than a lifelong spiritual commitment to a Christian church community. A lot of “Amish wannabes” may look at the Amish that way, but that doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.
3. The Outhouse Caper
Billie Jo, who prior to the show was already obsessed with the Amish, and has for years already been dressing Amish and collecting Amish knick-knacks, needs to use the bathroom at one point.
So Allen directs her to an outhouse on the property, handing her a newspaper and explaining that they can pick these up for free at the gas station, so they use these instead of toilet paper.
Of course this is silly because only a minority of Amish use outhouses (Amish in Lancaster County, where the show was filmed, have for generations used standard in-home bathrooms) and I’d be shocked if Allen actually uses one either.
Along these lines, I suspect Allen slips up at one point, as he says something about helping them experience “our way of living”…then quickly backtracks and says “the Amish way of living”. That felt like a “tell”.
On exiting the outhouse, Billie Jo inquires whether she used the right opening, and then complains of possibly having acquired a splinter that she’ll need to get one of the others to help her with.
4. Kendra’s Shaming
On the arrival of Team English, Bishop Vernon soon takes Kendra into the barn, to lecture her on her appearance and why it doesn’t work in their community (Kendra has shown up in quite revealing clothing, displaying cleavage, etc).
The ridiculousness here, on face value, is, would Kendra really be so clueless about Amish values as to show up in such revealing clothing?
Or, has the culture as a whole gotten so silly that we’re no longer cognizant that the clothing many people wear nowadays is quite revealing?
Or, is the actual ridiculousness in believing that this part wasn’t set up to play out as it did?
Kendra emerges from her barn lecture (she uses the term “slut shaming”) in tears that seem to be pretty real. So maybe she wasn’t totally in on what to expect. But I imagine the producers had to be.
5. James’ Quarantining Of The Outsiders’ Baggage To Prevent “Contamination”
James is quite a personable character on Team Amish, a roguish figure who we learn is being shunned by his home community, and who is set up to run one of the two host houses, along with his cousin Emma.
On the outsiders’ arrival at the farm house, he insists they leave their bags outside to prevent “contaminating” the home with worldly things.
They then do a baggage search, looking for electronics, brightly-colored clothing, and so on. If you go to stay at an actual Amish home, they’re not going to do such things as make you leave your bags on the front porch and then search them like some Plain version of the TSA.
Though, I can see how outsiders might imagine that they treat makeup and Android phones as a vampire does garlic and silver bullets. This is of course a setup to play up the cultural differences and create tension points, as in the final example…
6. Esmerelda’s Fake Nails Conflict
The nails are fake, and so is the conflict. Episode One ends in a stand-off between one of the characters, Esmerelda or “Esme”, and Allen, the older head man of the second host house.
James and Emma have discovered that Esmerelda is wearing fake nails and they insist she gets rid of them. Allen is called in as extra authority muscle when she refuses. “I guess I won’t be milking any cows” she proclaims, defiantly.
At the same time, she is the one that just a bit earlier on the show was explaining how she was interested in the Amish for their traditional family roles, and was hoping that the experience would help her to stop focusing on putting so much into her appearance.
If this were actual reality, you might be asking well, what did she expect, and what was she talking about earlier? This is a manufactured tension point on which to end Episode One.
Treat it as Entertainment
So it should be obvious this isn’t really a representation of actual Amish life and church. It’s purporting to be something like that, and that will be good enough for a mass audience. But this is entertainment, not reality.
The show is called “Suddenly Amish”. But the show makes no strong distinctions as to what or who is “Amish” and what’s not, and that’s what you’d expect. That allows for a lot of gray area to work within.
When most people think “Amish”, they think horse-and-buggy Amish. They don’t think Beachy Amish, or Amish Mennonites who drive cars, or any of the other groups with “Amish” in the name, but which typically have more progressive lifestyles.
I wondered, in a previous post, about the Team Amish participants, and what their actual backgrounds were – with at least some likely being former Amish, or raised Amish (they all certainly pretty much “sound Amish” in the way they speak English, as far as the accents and manner of speaking go).
But it’s likely most are more “culturally Amish” rather than actual horse-and-buggy Amish church members, or perhaps in a related Mennonite group, or any one of a number of churches where some Amish-raised people who seek a different faith journey end up.
In any case, these six examples are only a part of the abundant ridiculousness in the show.
But in its favor, I will say a number of the characters, on both Team Amish and Team English, are likable. And, that the program from what I’ve seen, does get certain things broadly right about Amish culture, society and belief.
And I’ll continue to maintain that the concept of the program – people wanting to generally improve their lives, using the vehicle of the Amish to get there – is not a bad thing in itself, especially compared to shows glorifying sex, drugs, and violence.
And yes, that is leaving aside questions like “is the show respectful of the Amish?”, which is another topic altogether.
Now, they have already released four episodes, with the fifth airing tonight. So having watched only one, I am quite behind. Maybe things do a 180 and the show takes a different direction than what the first episode presents. But…I’ve seen enough of the later episode snippets to comfortably say that no, things do not do a 180.
So, to state the obvious, I wouldn’t go to this show to try to get a solid grasp of how the Amish do things. But as long as you understand what you’re getting here, kick back, turn down your brain a little, and sure, have a watch.
