All My Babies’ Mamas

The premise of this doomed reality show started with this question: “How did a guy like me end up with 10 baby mamas and 11 kids?” The guy was Carlos “Shawty Lo” Walker, an Atlanta based rap artist of middling success and the answer to the question of how he ended up with 11 children by 10 different women is, like the riddle of the Sphinx, a mystery that may never be known. What we do know is that in 2012 the Oxygen network had greenlit a reality show focusing on Shawty Lo and his unconventional family life. The project began filming and had enough in the can to create a sizzle reel (a short video featuring clips of the show) that found its way online and erupted a nationwide controversy.

The sizzle reel video depicts some seriously rough around the edges scenes of Shawty Lo and his gaggle of brood mares describing their place in the hierarchy of Baby Mama’s with the woman having titles like “Shady Baby Mama”, Fighter Baby Mama”, “Bougie Baby Mama” and my personal favorite the “Baby Mama from Hell”. While the show seemed to perpetuate some of the more reprehensible stereotypes of urban life it also showed a man who was taking care of his children despite how trifling the whole situation looked at first glance. There was also drama with a capital “D” as several of the women vied for the top position in the ranks of women in Shawty Lo’s life. It also featured some pretty funny spots especially the segment where Shawty Lo struggled mightily to recall all 11 of his children’s names.
Sadly all of the less than positive aspects of the show caused a major uproar resulting in an online petition that garnered over 40,000 signatures and pressured Oxygen to cancel the show before it ever even got a chance to air. The hypocrisy of this action by the network was not lost on me since the most prominent show on Oxygen is a reality program called The Bad Girls Club that exists for the sole purpose of showing 20-something aged women behave like violent, drunken, slutty animals. But at least Oxygen has some type of standards.