‘Dad Camp’: Reality TV as social service

“Dad Camp” opens with a dash of bad faith. On the new VH1 series, six expecting couples participate in a month-long therapy program in which the men are psychologically and emotionally retrained in hopes of becoming better fathers.

Upon arriving at the group house, having just been shown birthing videos, the men are offered a night out on the town, while their partners stay at home and swap stories over salad and play with a fetal doppler. It’s a blatant set-up. Like clockwork, the men misbehave — drinking heavily, flirting, and in one case, kissing a woman — all while the cameras roll.

The next day, the men are taken to task by Dr. Jeff Gardere, the show’s iron fist, but the ensuing session has an odd effect. Even though it works, the trick is so obvious that Gardere — Dr. Jeff to his patients, his agent, and the cameras — almost cedes the moral high ground. Instead, he’s an enabler, one of the many that have helped along on these young men’s long paths of misbehavior. Sure, they didn’t pick up on the fact that they were being egged on, but any reasonable viewer could see it. On shows like these, bad habits aren’t just enacted by the subjects.

“Dad Camp” is part of VH1’s current ritual soul cleansing, swapping out the last of the celebrity dating shows for a reality programming slate emphasizing personal responsibility and growth. It’s one of the final steps in the complete reframing of reality television as a social service. The show even goes so far as to excerpt a speech from Barack Obama in the opening montage: “It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.” (Can government subsidies for reality TV production houses be that far away?)

Influenced by a range of deadbeat-dude makeover shows — including “Intervention,” “From G’s to Gents” and “Tool Academy” — “Dad Camp” feels like a clear companion piece to MTV’s “16 and Pregnant,” a show as vital for its depictions of know-nothing teenage fathers as for young mothers overwhelmed by unanticipated responsibilities.

No one here is a teenager, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have teenage problems. The six couples reflect a range of ages, backgrounds and ailments: One of the men is a chronic marijuana smoker, another is routinely unfaithful, another spends too much time playing videogames. That they err is human and expected; that they’re built for redemption is, of course, unclear.

As is the norm in programs of this sort, everyone lives together in the same house, though in this case, the women get large beds and their boyfriends sleep on cots in one warren next to a table with baby books. Future episodes will have the men wearing pregnancy suits and looking after lifelike, robotic babies that scream through the night.

As a taskmaster, Dr. Jeff lacks the preternatural calm of Dr. Drew, instead talking to his charges with some of the condescending punch of a drill-camp sergeant. “The babies have to trust you too,” he tells the men, who’ve clearly never considered that their babies wouldn’t, when in fact they were considering their babies at all. “My kid’s gonna have to like me whether he likes it or not,” says Donta, who appears to be the most volatile of the men. Earlier, he was shown barking at his girlfriend Bri: “I’ma keep smoking weed, I’ma keep getting high, I’ma keep drinking, and I’ma keep going out!”

All reprehensible choices, to be sure, but not the only questionable decisions made in these partnerships. “Dad Camp” is focused on the men in the relationship, but appears to leave unexplored the psychology of the young women who would accept their loutish behavior. In the premiere, two of the women obliquely refer to their own absent fathers. In the reunion show for the recently completed second season of “16 and Pregnant,” when Dr. Drew asked the assembled young women who among them had their birth father in their lives presently, only 3 of 10 raised their hands.

Certainly the urge to keep a crumbling, ill-conceived relationship together is understandable, but as other shows in this vein have demonstrated, sometimes going it alone is a preferable option. At the end of “Dad Camp,” the men who’ve successfully completed the therapy will be judged one more time: Their girlfriends will decide whether to allow them to be involved in their children’s lives. Of course, this decision has real-world consequences, and reality-TV consequences too. Which spin-off will the moms want to star in? A portrait of a troubled young couple learning parenthood on the fly, or a show helping to rehabilitate the moms who may well end “Dad Camp” even more disappointed and frustrated than they began it.

calendar@latimes.com