Jailbirds (Netflix series): Seems forced and in a tired genre

The whole "real life in prison" series / special has been done to death. I can understand that it would be difficult to come up with new and interesting material for this type of thing seeing as how prison actually is meant to be routine and boring so it is understandable that this would be a bit boring.

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Obviously attempting to ride the coattails of Orange is the new Black, Jailbirds follows various "characters" in a women's prison in Sacramento, California. We get to know a bunch of the inmates and see the day to day life of these people who are in prison for the most part, not the most terrible offenses and most of them are not doing very long stretches of prison sentences.

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For the most part, a lot of these women seem as though they are probably pretty ok people unlike some of the people you see on the men's versions of this show and a lot of their stories are pretty tragic. The case of the girl named "Monster" is particularly tragic because the pics and stories of her past show her as an extremely attractive and gifted entrepreneur in NYC who just let it fall apart. Obviously, getting sent to prison can be a low point in a person's life, but these girls seem to be handling it pretty well.

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While the show primarily focuses on the women, they are housed in a detention facility that is shared by men so we get a glimpse into that side of things also but I suppose that doesn't really matter since it is such a small part of the actual series.

I know someone who was featured on a short-lived reality show that was about personal trainers. While it was being filmed and after, she informed me that the producers would constantly tell the people involved in the show that "we need to bring some drama to the table" and wow did they ever. I do not mean this in a positive way because the show, which was meant to be about fitness, quickly spiraled into a shouting match over seemingly irrelevant shite and the show, as a consequence was pretty tough to watch and was scrapped after one season.

This forced drama seems to be a large part of what is wrong with Jailbirds. I think the presence of the camera, and the guarantee of more screen-time if someone acts up, motivates the prisoners to do precisely that. They start senseless arguments with one another that I don't' think would have happened if not for the film crew. Just like in the aforementioned fitness reality show, the people who act crazy do not come across as the stars, they come across as the annoying people in the show.

The show doesn't really have much of a story and to be honest how could an environment where every day is exactly the same really be all that captivating? It should come as no surprise that except for the occasional and likely staged fist-fight, this show gets really boring, really fast.

On the scale of "Urgh!" to "Wowsers!" I give Jailbirds the overall rating of.....