Editor’s Note: This story contains some potentially offensive material.
ABC’s new bigoted anti-Catholic show The Real O’Neals makes fun of Catholic teachings and believers to the point that if the network had targeted any other religious group for these attacks, journalists would call it hate speech.
In the two-episode premiere, (sandwiched around an episode of Modern Family, I’m guessing they were going for the gay-friendly audience), there were 93 separate visual or verbal reminders that this was a show making fun of Catholics and eight admissions of Catholic sins, and I laughed out loud exactly once (at a random, non-Catholic joke).
“Jesus” appeared 52 seconds into the opening scene because “mom always told us to behave as if Jesus were watching.” Only two minutes later, the gay 16-year-old protagonist Kenny O’Neal (Noah Galvin) is handed condoms and pressured to have sex by his girlfriend. Which leads to a ridiculous scene where Kenny talks to a hunky male model in the mirror, then a statue of Mary above the toilet as flushed condoms cause the bowl to overflow. “Come on, girl, help me out,” he pleads.
The mother, Eileen O’Neal (Martha Plimpton), is a stereotypical holier-than-thou character who lays the Catholic guilt on thick and makes everything about religion. She pressures the waitress to donate money to poor children in Africa. “Karen needs to make her own moral decisions. It’s her soul that’s going to hell if she doesn’t give you money.” She makes pancakes in the shape of Jesus to get her son to eat them: “This is my fourth Jesus!” She doesn’t allow her family to go in Jacuzzis; she calls it “The Devil’s Chowder … because of the nudity and bacteria.”
Eileen wants to present the O’Neals as the perfect Irish Catholic family to her church community, but by the end of the first episode, all that comes crashing down as it is revealed at parish bingo night that she and her husband Pat (Jay R. Ferguson) are going to divorce, older son Jimmy has an eating disorder, younger daughter Shannon is a thief, and Kenny is gay. They’re “just your typical all-American, Catholic, divorcing, disgraced, law-breaking, gay family.”
The second episode, “The Real Papaya,” deals with the fallout from those very public revelations and the very first scene depicts Kenny waking up in hell, which, coincidentally, is what being forced to watch a second episode of The Real O’Neals feels like.
Eileen is in denial about her son being gay and tries to convince him he’s not by getting him to have sex with his girlfriend. Seriously. She says, “It’s like when you were little and you said you hated papaya, but you hadn’t even tried it. Then once you tried it, you couldn’t get enough.” Even worse, she tries to blame the Church, even though it was the priest who was trying to teach compassion to her.
This vile attempt at humor has ABC teaming up with the vicious, conservative-hating Dan Savage, who is an executive producer of the show based loosely on his life. Savage is a gay sex advice columnist and a media darling who regularly tries to say outrageous things about Christians and conservatives for publicity.
After ABC ordered the pilot for The Real O’Neals in 2015, MRC organized a protest, along with other conservative and religious organizations, to boot the anti-religious bigot from prime time TV. Based on these awful first few episodes, he won’t last long. Critics are already bashing the show and, bigotry aside, it is simply not funny. I’m just being real.
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