Kriti Mehrotra
With Lifetime’s ‘I Was Honey Boo Boo’ pulling back the curtain on the life of a young personality who was reality television’s crowning jewel for a few years in the 2010s, we get a biopic unlike any other. It centers around Alana Frances Thompson as she opens up about not only what it was like to be a child star but also her complex relationship with the family’s matriarch, June “Mama June” Stroud. Alana herself narrates this Katie Boland-directed original through a series of confessional interviews, but what makes it even more poignant is the dramatic, in-depth recreations of all her experiences.
I Was Honey Boo Boo is Essentially Alana Thompson’s Tell-All
‘I Was Honey Boo Boo’ kicks off right from the early days of Georgia native Alana Thompson’s career as a pageant girl and reality star, with her mother being by her side at every step of the way. So, the role of the former as a child is taken on by Vale Cooper in this documentary film, whereas Isabelle Ayres plays the teen-her, and the character of Mama June is portrayed by Chelsea Larkin. This mother-daughter duo had actually burst onto the scene thanks to TLC’s child beauty pageant following ‘Toddlers & Tiaras’ in 2011, just for it to soon culminate in them getting their own reality show.
After all, Alana’s larger-than-life personality was such that professionals knew fans would eat up a spin-off focusing entirely on her day-to-day adventures, which is precisely what transpired. In other words, the young girl went from iconically saying, “A dolla makes me holla, Honey Boo Boo child” on ‘Toddlers & Tiaras’ to leading her own show titled ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’ in 2012. However, per her own accounts, this is when everything changed between her and her mother, with all the pressure of the family falling on her shoulders despite her being the youngest of four.
TLC scouts had reportedly originally approached the family to help them break a “cycle of pain,” considering their history of teen pregnancies and other issues, but it soon turned to much more. That’s because Mama June suddenly saw the potential of what their life could be, resulting in her beginning to treat Alana as a “little moneymaker,” which made their relationship primarily transactional. This continued even after their time on television came to a close following several controversies and legal issues from Mama’s side, by the end of which Alana was also legally in the custody of her immediate elder sister, third-born Lauryn “Pumpkin” Shannon.
Honey Boo Boo Has Been Surrounded By Dysfunction, Grief, and Pain
When ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’ premiered on TLC back in 2012, it gained a lot of traction owing to the hillbilly-like culture the family had embraced, only for it to be canceled for good in 2014. According to reports, the cancellation order was given after it came to light that Mama June was again dating an ex after his release from prison for being a child sex offender. This was Mark McDaniel, who had allegedly also molested her firstborn, Anna “Chickadee” Toney. They did manage to get another spin-off three years later, titled ‘Mama June: From Not to Hot,’ yet it was later rebranded as ‘Mama June: Road to Redemption’ and then ‘Mama June: Family Crisis.’
Spanning 4 seasons, this reality series followed Mama’s weight loss, plastic surgeries, toxic relationship with convicted felon Eugene “Geno” Doak, issues with drugs, and losing custody of Alana. The family, including her second-born Jessica “Chubbs” Shannon, did try to hold an intervention for the matriarch during this period, all of which was filmed, but nothing panned out as they’d hoped. In fact, when Alana, as Honey Boo Boo, joined the lone season of ‘Dancing with the Stars: Junior’ in 2018, it was her mother who reportedly kept all her earnings before blowing it off on drugs.
Mama June often promised to do better and be there for her daughters, as indicated throughout their reality show as well as this Lifetime biopic, but she kept on disappointing them time after time. The prime examples of this are: she decided to go to rehab but then checked herself out after merely 12 hours to be with Geno; the couple was arrested for possession of cocaine in 2019; and she was in so much debt that lenders once trailed Pumpkin for days as intimidation. All of this understandably shook Alana a lot, especially considering she was just a teenager at the time, so Pumpkin took her in following the 2019 arrest and was later granted full legal custody in June 2022.
Despite Everything, Alana Thompson Continues to Share Her Family’s Story to Hopefully Break the Cycle
Formerly Honey Boo Boo, Alana has never shied away from expressing how she has felt about her mother, her family, and all their experiences, so she is continuing to do so even today. She admittedly hasn’t really been in touch with her father, Mike “Sugar Bear” Thompson, following a 2014 car crash when he reportedly swerved into oncoming traffic until they collided with a truck. The entire family was in the car, so it left one of her sisters concussed and gave Mama June the resolve she needed to leave him for good, despite already having been fighting with him for months over cheating allegations.
As for Alana’s relationship with her mother, it truly fell apart in the late 2010s after she had had enough of Mama choosing cosmetic beauty, men, money, and rugs over her. She knew in her heart that the woman who raised her wasn’t a great example of what she wanted her future to look like, so she took her fate into her own hands and relocated to Denver, Colorado. That’s where she still resides alongside her long-term boyfriend, Dralin Carswell, all the while attending the private Jesuit Regis University to earn a degree in Nursing in the hopes of one day having a career that helps others. When she graduates, she will be the first in her family to have a college degree, so she is extra proud of this feat.
However, since then, Alana has actually decided to be the bigger person and forgive her mother, even though it was hard, owing to how she spent most of her life feeling abandoned by her. “At the end of the day, she’s my mom,” she once candidly said. “When she was bad in her addiction, I just kept thinking about the day she’d recover. [Now that she is sober,] we’re going pretty good. Hopefully, it lasts. I just no longer have any expectations for her.” Therefore, she decided to do this biopic to open up about the relationship between herself and her mother, along with the fact that she now hopes to leave the cycle of dysfunction behind. Yet, it’s imperative to note that despite a lot of this original production’s focus being on family, it completely skipped her eldest sister Chickadee’s death from cancer on September 9, 2023.
Read More: I Was Honey Boo Boo: Filming Locations and Cast Details
