Jeff Chan, “Adam Ruins Everything (Season 2, Episode 10: Adam Ruins the Suburbs)” (2017)
Dedicated as it is to overturning comfortable assumptions and stereotypes about everyday life, the comedy documentary series “Adam Ruins Everything” turns its attention to that most American cultural institution – the suburbs – and mows down three ideals upholding suburbia and the beliefs and values associated with them. Comedian host Adam Conover confronts a homeowner trying to start his lawnmower on Sunday morning to explain how lawns came to be part of the housing package, how their inclusion reflects and upholds the values of elitism, social competition and conformity, and the threat they actually pose (through water consumption and the use of herbicides and pesticides) to local environments and ecosystems. Conover then explains how cul-de-sacs and (by extension) the design and planning of American-styled suburbs harm people’s physical health and mental well-being by discouraging physical activities like walking and forcing them to use cars, and by separating homes from local shops and businesses, schools, parks and other community facilities. Children face traffic hazards so their parents bundle them into the home where they spend hours playing computer games. Elderly people who can no longer drive end up imprisoned in homes they can no longer maintain.
If all this weren’t bad enough – and Conover doesn’t have the time to explain how the phenomenon of suburbia (and even exurbia) arose as a result of deliberate decisions on the part of past US government policies, often in collusion with private companies, to privilege the use of cars over public transport – the episode then explores the dark racist side of suburban planning and how it and bank home loan policies discriminating against African Americans and other minorities led to institutional segregation (in which African Americans and minorities ended up stuck in inner cities while white people fled to the suburbs) and created two urban Americas existing in parallel, in which white children go to well-funded schools with good teachers and facilities, and non-white children attend schools with inadequate or broken facilities and mediocre levels of instruction from poorly paid teachers in insecure jobs. Over time, black people and other minority groups were unable to build up family and personal wealth that would enable them to escape the problems, crime and violence of inner city living, and this condemned them to continued institutional poverty. In part, the discrimination also led to the other extreme of governments over-compensating these disadvantaged groups by encouraging profligate borrowing that in turn precipitated the subprime mortgage loan crisis and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.
While the episode is entertaining and informative, it really does not go far enough to explore how US suburbia and the attitudes and values underpinning this phenomenon have been generated by government and corporate collusion and how they continue to survive and flourish through a combination of ignorance, reliance on a biased news media that encourages fear of other people, especially if they are of different skin tone or religion, and collusion between governments at all levels (national, state, local) and corporations to keep people divided and separate along racial lines, all the better to exploit them for profit. Any faults with the model of suburbia resulting in health problems like obesity or depression, public health issues like drug addiction, or high rates of traffic accidents, are usually blamed on the victims or just ignored. The notion that owning a house in the suburbs with two huge gas-guzzling cars equates to self-reliance and freedom is chopped at in the episode but otherwise the myth’s origin and how it is sustained by the media go unexplored.
The episode happily closes with suggestions as to how suburban dwellers can try to improve their communities by adopting new models of suburban design that encourage physical activity and interaction with others.