Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [8]
Here in the spring of 2009, work has begun to trickle down our way. We can currently afford weekly groceries, and our bodies, finally free of pharmaceutical impediments, have regained their rightful sizes. Stunningly, one of the plants has even come back to life. We live for Tuesday nights and always say the same thing after The Real Housewives is over: “I wish this show were ten hours long.”
What troubles me, though, is as much as they are mocked, the housewives are also being celebrated. Quick visits to the Bravo message boards during the second season revealed an outpouring of ungrammatical love and support, even for the ones I consider the vilest. It’s working: they are crossing over. As the self-appointed gatekeeper of truth, I plead with anyone who’s still reading to not let it happen. Do not feel for them, do not buy their muffins or their skin cream, do not buy their books (publishers, I’m talking to you). Don’t let “these people” use their freak-fame to step over to legitimacy. Legitimacy belongs to us: the real, the poor, and the decent. We must come together, finally, and laugh at the laughable, the terrible. Yes, at them, not with them, at them, at them, at them, at them! And although Bethenny Frankel’s book is at number twenty-three on Amazon and mine is, when I last checked, substantially higher, I have a little attackive of my own: Reality Star. No one’s getting across.
2
FAKETASTIC
Melissa de la Cruz
MTV’S THE HILLS GETS A LOT OF GRIEF for its relationship to reality. Mainly that it has none. The situations are scripted! The drama is forced! What Teen Vogue intern also graces its cover? C’mon! That’s not reality, that’s…orchestrated! Manipulated! Fake! Fake! Fake! And yet, for all the rotten tomatoes hurled at it, the documented lives of young women in Los Angeles is one of the highest-rated shows on the network and has made tabloid sensations out of its stars.
So what’s going on here? I, for one, am addicted to The Hills. I love the fairy-tale-in-LA premise, with its shiny Range Rovers and club openings in place of carriages and royal balls—and the toothsome and uncomplicated prettiness of its former main attraction. Lauren Conrad is the epitome of eye candy. I could watch Lauren watch paint dry (with that glazed-eye look of concern she has when listening to someone else talk). She has a fresh-faced California beauty that recalls a young Alicia Silverstone: that hair! (so thick, so blonde, so glossy!), those teeth! (so white! so blinding!), all wrapped up in a friendly, accessible package.
She’s the benevolent princess we all knew in high school: rich, pretty, and so nice. You know, the girl even the nerds worshipped because she would let them do her math homework. We like Lauren. We root for Lauren. And yet—we also kind of hate her, the way we hate anyone who seems perfect and perfectly smug. Lauren isn’t quite smug, but she is self-serving, and showed her true colors in the love triangle that capitulated The Hills from tame Melrose Place reality copy-cat into riveting must-see TV (at least for those of us who like our entertainment sprinkled with a thrilling dash of high school pettiness). I am speaking, of course, about her reaction to the creation of Speidi.
From the beginning, Heidi Montag, the ditzy blonde working her way up as a club promoter, was the perfect foil to Lauren’s rosy-cheeked golden-girl ideal. Unlike Lauren, Heidi was more of a hard-luck case—the Lea Thompson in Some Kind of Wonderful role, if you will. The sort of pretty girl from the sticks running with the Beverly Hills chicks. Heidi is from Crested Butte, Colorado. Her parents are divorced. With a big nose and flat chest, she wasn’t as attractive as Lauren, but like most of us, she passed for cute because she tried. (When Heidi had a nose job and her