TLC's ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’ is wildly misleading.

“A spectacle like nothing else … their lifestyle will blow your mind,” proclaims the commercial for TLC’s newest show, “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding,” which debuted in a “sneak peek” Sunday night. (The official premiere is June 3.) A re-broadcast of the British Channel 4 show of the same name that has attracted millions of viewers and widespread media attention, the series documents the lavish weddings, as well as engagements, first communions, and other milestone events, of Irish Traveller and Roma communities. The “spectacle” includes teenage brides and grooms, elaborate dresses that can weigh in at more than 70 pounds (including one that lights up in the dark), bouffant hairdos, spray tans, stretch limos, and scantily clad female guests. “From the makeup to the miniskirts, from the heels to the hair,” TLC declares at the beginning of each episode, “it’s the outrageous, it’s the unbelievable, it’s ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.’”

What’s most outrageous, however, aren’t the celebrations on display: It’s the show’s voyeuristic, stereotypical, judgmental, and shallow depiction of one of the world’s most misunderstood and, at times, abused minorities. “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding” (a terrible, degrading title to begin with) claims to offer one-of-a-kind insight into a unique community, but it manages to achieve the opposite. Viewers are instead offered an overly simplistic view of the cultures of Travellers and Roma—two distinct groups, though the show happily conflates them into one category—with scarcely any historical or political context about their place in the United Kingdom and Europe more broadly.

To watch “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding” is to see Travellers and Roma as uneducated, flashy, and closed-minded people who live in mobile-home parks and throw enormous parties. This was easily confirmed on Twitter Sunday night, as viewers called the show “crazy” and “a trainwreck,” and referred to the women on it as “whores” and “hookers.” The show’s representation of its subjects was best summarized by one viewer who tweeted, “So far they get married @ 16, live in trailers & dress like sluts.” The truth about Travellers and Roma, however, is infinitely complex—and both Channel 4 and TLC have wronged these communities, as well as the show’s viewers, by failing to tell it.

That TLC’s version of the show—which has substituted an American narrator for Channel 4’s British one, but uses the same content—would be biased was clear from the network’s p.r. that preceded it. A press release described Travellers and Roma as living in a “hidden world” and having a “highly secretive community.” From the get-go, TLC’s language perpetuated a dangerous stereotype by instructing viewers to see these people as other, as aliens living outside the mainstream by choice. This sort of language carried into the show; in the two hours it was on Sunday night, words like “mysterious” and “suspicious” came up again and again.

The narrator also tells the audience early in the first episode that Travellers and Roma “are at odds with the world that judges them at face value.” Yet, in the first two hours of footage, there is no real examination of why this is. In addition to failing to clearly explain the differences between the two groups’ origins—Travellers are ethnic Irish, while the Roma came from Eastern Europe (and originally, historians think, India)—there is no explanation of why tradition dictated for centuries that they live nomadic lifestyles, or of how rampant prejudice against them evolved over generations. Granted, the second episode reports that 90 percent of Traveller land requests are rejected, and it shows Travellers being evicted from their trailers camps. But the back-story offered is simply that the local council had instructed the residents to leave and they had refused. A twelve-year-old Traveller boy named Jerry tells the camera that this happened “[j]ust cause they don’t like Gypsies”—and the show seems happy to leave it at that. No one on the council is interviewed, nor did the show bother to find a historian who might have been able to offer some genuine insight into the tensions over land between Travellers and non-Travellers. (The production team also betrays its own bias against the community’s way of life when a soon-to-be-bride says looking for a trailer to live in after getting married is no different than looking for a house, and a man behind the camera exclaims, “No, it’s not!”)