When a reality show is promoted as being from “Kim Kardashian and the producers of ‘Love Island USA,’” it arrives with certain expectations.
When that show is set in Scottsdale? Even more.
“Team Moms: Baseball,” a new reality series on Paramount+, arrives with just such a pedigree. As for the expectations, it certainly lives up to them. Or down to them, depending on how you think of these things.
At times it embodies every Scottsdale cliché – rich people, mostly White, off in their own world, living a life of luxury, blowing the occasional wrinkle in a life of privilege way out of proportion.
Add in the reality-show element of gossip, backbiting and the occasional face-to-face confrontation (though relatively mild, at least in the first four episodes)
and you have a show that, at least when it’s snarky, is intermittently entertaining, in a feel-bad-about-yourself-for-watching kind of way.
It’s gross, though never really engrossing.
Watch it on Paramount+
What is 'Team Moms: Baseball' about?
When it’s not snarky, it’s just boring. Luckily, if that’s how you want to put it, it’s snarky most of the time.
The show, which begins streaming on Thursday, Sept. 24, revolves around families whose sons are enrolled at Legendary Prep Academy, a private school in Scottsdale in which students, according to the parents in the show, go to class for two hours a day and spend the rest of their time training to be the best baseball players they can be.
Sounds a little backward, yes, but these kinds of academies have sprung up in lots of places, offering training in lots of sports. As a longtime youth sports coach, I can attest that the parents of any preschool kid who accidentally scores a goal in a soccer game immediately dream of college scholarships and who knows what else, despite the likelihood of that happening being statistically insignificant.
These are those parents, only with the money and the ambition to take it several steps farther.
Some are flat-out delusional, admittedly treating their kids’ childhoods like a business, refusing time off. They talk about the millions their children will earn one day. Good luck and godspeed, but a lot of things are going to have to go just right for that scenario.
Others are more realistic. A couple of parents from different families acknowledge, at least once in the first four episodes provided for critics, that these are just kids, not players about to sign major-league contracts — though that acknowledgement comes in opposition to the family that trains so hard all the time.
Think 'Dance Moms' on the diamond
Like most of these kinds of shows — think “Dance Moms” on the diamond — it’s really about the parents. Some of them (you see this a lot in youth sports, too) are obviously trying to live out their own sports dreams through their children. There’s a little on-the-field action, but the plotline that dominates the first four episodes involves Nina, the owner of a Pilates studio who volunteers to train with the boys at the academy.
At some point before the series starts, we learn, another boy teased her son by saying he saw his mom on OnlyFans. This led to a violent confrontation in which Nina’s son was choked. Later, while doing Pilates, the boy who choked her son couldn’t complete an exercise move, and Nina called him a “little (expletive).”
This drama is the defining event of the series, at least through the first four episodes. It’s all kind of crazy and obviously not exactly appropriate behavior on anyone’s part. But you would think that nothing so galling had ever happened in the history of … I don’t know, history. The other parents are incensed. Nina is alternately apologetic and defensive. Since this is a reality show, there are at least three confrontations, one a group effort and a couple of one-on-ones (though one is half-hearted).
There are group outings, competitions, happy hours and, every now and then, baseball games. As ever in these kinds of shows, the kids are just sort of afterthoughts, at least in terms of the show’s production. Collateral damage, if you will.
I’m not going into a lot of detail about the families because, honestly, they seem desperate enough for attention already. You’ll have to watch and discover on your own whether your friends and neighbors are among the participants.
One thing, though. You may not recognize them.
Like most reality shows, 'Team Moms: Baseball' has little to do with reality
I have no doubt all of these parents love their children. In everyday, non-reality-show life, they may be sterling examples of good parenting, for all I know. But that’s the thing. We don’t know.
The irony of reality shows is that they rarely have anything to do with reality. Producers and editors shoot hundreds of hours of footage, enabling them to create characters the same way the director and editor of a feature film or a TV drama would. You can make heroes and villains by what you air and what you leave on the cutting-room floor. “Team Moms: Baseball” has both, and they sometimes change sides, as with any drama.
No one in their right mind would want to spend time with these people in real life, if they are anything like they appear in the show. Too many fights, too many baseball hats worn backwards, too much, too much. But the show asks us to spend time with them on TV.
If you’re a fan of reality TV, you may want to. If you’re a fan of actual reality, probably not.
How to watch 'Team Moms: Scottsdale'
Streaming on Paramount+ beginning Thursday, Sept. 24.
Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com.Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Subscribe to the weekly Watchlist newsletter.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 'Team Moms: Baseball' turns Scottsdale clichés into genuinely gross TV
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