Baddie, Baddie Shot-o-Clock: A Warning

A revulsion towards the newest episode of Zeus', "Baddies: Southwest," entitled, "Bunnies, Brawls, and BB's"

Lately, I’ve been toiling, craving the longer form, and in my explorations of that form, I’ve lost the appetite for an immediacy. Instead, I’ve been preoccupied with the delays of edits and rewrites, contemplations and self-doubts. But my procrastinatory resolve has been so challenged, has been so perturbed by the most recent Baddies episode, that it might shake me from my stasis.

I seek to sound the warning, in such desperation. And by my desperation, I’ll eschew my most recent fixations, those of elongation and depth, and I’ll return to my original manifest: I’ll write as it comes.

Only the most alarming compels this, and that should say the most about “Bunnies, Brawls, and BB’s.” Its majority unfolds well within the typical Baddies framework. They fight. They patronize the club. They discuss the fight. They discuss the club. They fight again. Rinse. Repeat. As always, a house meeting or two punctuates the sequence. But, towards the episode’s latter, this house meeting took a disappointing turn. After Tommie traded barbs with Akbar and Rollie, Tinkabella seized her moment, where she talked her shit, stepped to Tommie, and Tommie responded, holding her own and maintaining that usual, though Tommie-esque, mania. But, and no sooner than Tink had stepped, Tommie revealed a weapon. She withdrew a handgun. She fired it.

The events that followed soon revealed the handgun’s true identity. It was a BB gun, meant to appear as a hand gun, used like a handgun, terrorized like a handgun, that Tommie had brandished. And some of the girls laughed. A few eye-rolls spread. The reactions were mixed throughout the larger cast, but they were notably congruent amongst production, in so far as Natalie Nunn speaks for production. To the producers, this was just Tommie being Tommie, a mundane moment, one that merely colors and adds to the wider Baddie lore.

I disagree. There must be a much more dubious, a more hesitant, and a fearful response to Tommie’s act, and I worry that the absence of such a response speaks to a regrettable misunderstanding, one that confuses the structural underpinnings of Baddies with aesthetic ornament.

Baddies wasn’t born from wanton violence, despite its best marketing intentions. One could make the argument that Baddies wasn’t born from violence at all¹. But, towards the goal of positively constructing the Baddies universe, we can say that, in order to exist, Baddies must converse with a form of controlled violence. If we striate violence, we find that there are forms of the physical kind, and that, of those physical kinds, there are those, more than others, that are digestible to the public². For example, and you’ll forgive my rhetorical crudeness, the public has little appetite for mass shootings, especially school shootings, a category whose phenomena routinely shake and depress the nation³. However, the U.S. also has a bustling MMA, or Mixed Martial Arts, culture. There’s a subset of the populace devoted to, and enthusiastic about, violence dealt hand-to-hand, among mutual combatants. And among many more categories, there still remains the odder one of “cat fights”⁴. Simply, these are physical fights appearing between women. Some of the most sensational, cultural moments exist within this category. The entirety of the Bad Girls Club rests within in it, much of Love and Hip Hop, a certain amount of Real Housewives. The list goes on⁵. The audience has a certain tolerance for — expectation of, even — violence within the reality-televisional landscape.

But towards the Baddies universe specifically⁶, there’s also an ever-escalating will. The Baddies audience is attracted, in some amounts, to sensation. And a recurring stimuli dulls over time. It can’t project the same feeling. Thus, as time progresses, the sensation’s maintenance is propelled by one or both of two things: (1) an increased saturation of the sensation. The stimuli must occur more often; (2) an increased potency of sensation. The stimuli, proportional to its typical dosage, must impart higher stimulation. There must either be more frequent violence, or there must be harsher displays of it.

Until now, Baddies has opted for the former. Unlike other baddies-universe programming, Zeus Baddies doesn’t confront its viewers with the steepest incline of sheer violence, where it instead captivates them with a never-ending portion of mundane violence, the typical fisticuffs, benign, non-lethal, pseudo-street shit. And accordingly, while many Zeus Baddies have sought clout and camera time through escalatory trials, moments where they’ve tried to up the ante, where they’ve tried to deepen the violence rather than mass-produce it, they’ve only been successful in their implications; they’ve been able to attempt to escalate beyond hand-to-hand fighting, which, in itself, draws cameras and creates sensation, but the actual executions of these escalations have gone perpetually hindered.

And the reason why this makes sense also speaks to why Tommie’s behavior so recklessly imperils the Zeus Baddies franchise — or even the baddies-universe at large.

In the presence of both a violent modality and a professional goal of escalation, one can’t introduce the ballistic concept. Now, I speak here as a pacifist, as one who doesn’t want folks to die. I also speak here as a selfish rat, one who wants the baddies-world to continue. And in so far as I speak in both of these capacities, I must rebuke Tommie’s behavior. It leads to death. I say this because, based off of the violent and escalatory assumptions we’ve already made, to bring a BB gun onto set, to fire it, while others, in the moment, think it an entire firearm, is to create precedent, and it’s to require and allow an escalation. It allows an escalation because, where security is unable or unwilling the prevent a BB gun’s entry, security can’t too prevent the more lethal entries. And towards the creation of precedent and the requirement of escalation, Tommie’s act fulfills both in that it not only affirms, in the minds of aspiring-Baddies, that a BB gun is fair and exceptional game, given that Tommie’s BB gun was allowed on set and on camera, but it also demands aspiring-Baddies to think beyond a BB gun as they ponder a path towards Baddies accomplishment, towards doing one’s “big one.”

Thus, we must ask, “My love, what’s beyond a BB gun, whose presence amongst the Baddies folk only evoked fears of a real gun?” We must ask ourselves, “If this episode’s most sensational moment was Black women running, in fear we should add, from what they believed to be a loaded handgun, then how does one move beyond that?”

And naturally, there’s only one choice. In order to move beyond a BB gun, whose acclaim and sensation came only from perceptions that it was, in fact, a real gun, the only real option is the employment of the more lethal utensil. I speak of the knife and the handgun.

What happens after a Baddie fires a loaded handgun? What happens once the bullets rain upon the girls? Only death, only severity remain. And, while we despise the murders, the abuse, our real frustration is what such an escalation would do the Zeus Baddies’ longevity.

As it stands, I already predict that a certain reckoning will occur. It will encompass the extreme degrees of violence, a certain sexual impropriety, and other inaccesses. Were there a death amongst the baddies, I also think that it would propel that baddies-verse to a level of national spotlight with which the genre is unacquainted. And I also think that the added scrutiny would severely limit the genre’s creative license. And thus, when Tommie invites this conduct, that lethal conduct, what Tommie does, as she relishes in the BB gun fire, is she threatens to accelerate the inevitable destruction of Baddies. How could she do that to us? How could she do that me?

We must stand against the impulse to deepen violence, preferring that problematic impulse to expand the violence.

Thank you.

Cheryl McDonnahugh.

1. Here, I’ll exclude examinations of those arguments. They neither aid nor hinder our purposes. So, I’ll leave them for a later day.

2. Here, we assume a relationship between the Baddies production and the public, a subset of which comprises the Baddies audience.

3. There’s an alternative analysis of this which might find differently, but, again, we won’t engage it.

4. I use quotation marks because the term is inappropriate and inaccurate. Why this is, that rests in one of those longer forms over which I've been toiling. So here, I’ll use the term because it reflects a well-defined behavioral category, one that communicates the acts and actors I’m describing.

5. Again, this historical context belongs to a larger treatment of "Baddies”, a forthcoming treatment. Thus, I want to forgo any explanations that might lead me down premature rabbit holes.

6. I use the word ‘specifically’ because I want to discuss the Baddies universe specifically. I don’t use it because I want to claim that this is especial to Baddies and Baddies alone.