To call Yummy Mummies car-crash television is to understate how garish, stupid, poorly executed, and dutifully offensive it is.
Channel Seven's reality series, which adds a baby bump to the Real Housewives format of contentious divas, is so bad it makes previous Seven lowlights such as Bringing Sexy Back look like The Sopranos.
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Promo: Yummy Mummies
A reality show chronicling the life of four wealthy mothers-to-be. Vision courtesy Seven Network
The four central characters are dipped in ersatz luxury, although it wears so tackily thin it's hard to imagine there's an aspirational appeal to the show. "You're pregnant – it doesn't mean you're dying," declares Rachel Watts, the liveliest of a Melbourne-based trio, and from the agenda is predicated on shopping, leisure and self-promotion. It's direly predictable: a trip to the jewellery store uses Rihanna's Diamonds as the intro, and that's as original as this take on a familiar format gets.
The narrative is so contrived suspension of disbelief is impossible. The expectant Melbourne mothers are dispatched to Adelaide to attend the baby shower of Maria DiGeronimo, whose tacky, delusional entitlement is the crutch of the first two episodes.
Maria is one of those sui generis reality television discoveries – a natural at generating soundbites and scenarios that are in alternately daft, dumb or just damaging. Matched by her mother, Margherita, she has a meltdown at a suburban reception centre and barks commands such as "you better call the balloon lady!"
There is a formula and skill set that goes into making chewy, confrontational reality soaps, and no-one working on Yummy Mummies displays the slightest sign of mastering either. Sunday night's debut was resorting to filler – Margherita gets a dance lesson so she can entertain the guests – halfway through the episode.
Only rarely do the producers generate spectacle so ludicrous that you couldn't help laughing: see Maria and her crew arriving at the baby shower on Tuesday night's second episode in a horse-drawn carriage.
"This girl is ridic," Rachel says of Maria, which is both true and why she's so clearly the focus. Her endless excess also hides the tired trope of having women compete for amusement and the way that the endless invoking of designer brands replaces the actual idea of giving birth.
![The cast of Yummy Mummies from left Maria Di Geronimo, Lorinksa Merrington, Jane Scandizzo and Rachel Watts.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170713001512im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/6/k/e/h/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gx6fuw.png/1499847007369.jpg)
Expenditure is a camouflage against the physical reality of having a baby. Various women express concern about breastfeeding or their partners witnessing the dilation of their cervix.
In the world of Yummy Mummies women express disdain for their pregnant bodies. "She made us feel uncomfortable," complains Maria when a woman breastfeeds a baby at the table next to them in an Adelaide café. Given that the mother's face is revealed and that it's a multi-camera shoot, you'd have to assume the sequence is contrived. The show is so insipid and ugly that it doesn't celebrate its cast, it just treats them as cannon fodder.
![Yummy Mummies' Maria Di Geronimo](http://web.archive.org./web/20170713001512im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/6/k/e/g/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gx6fuw.png/1499847007211.jpg)
What an atrocity.
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