DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT I WAS ALTERNATELY FASCINATED AND appalled by last week’s premiere of “The Real Housewives of Orange County.”
Bravo’s portrayal of life in Coto de Caza is a highly skewed one. But it’s there to be skewed. And if these materially lucky ladies are happy to put their lives on display for fleeting fame and our viewing entertainment, why not enjoy it?
Bottom line,this is a business publication, after all,Hollywood’s recent obsession with Orange County is a plus, a non-stop awareness-raising campaign that brands the county as wealthy, trendy and beautiful.
If it also portrays us as shallow and selfish, well, you take the bad with the good.
Somebody’s going to be the center of the TV eye. The “spoiled rich” paradigm has been applied to Dallas, Beverly Hills and Miami Beach. Now it’s our turn. Not bad company all in all,and a better way to be stereotyped than receiving the Newark treatment.
I suspect most Americans still struggle to locate Orange County on a map, and they’re often given little reason to differentiate the county from Los Angeles (see Arte Moreno). So at a minimum, shows like this new one help to establish that there is a there here.
Is it for better or for worse? You be the judge. Below are abridged excerpts of what journalists from around the country were saying last week.
,Rick Reiff
“The Real Housewives of Orange County” is a persistently diverting journey by producers and camera crews in search of the glib, the flippant and the ostensibly hip of Southern California.
The happy hunting ground the cameras scour happens to be the very same locale as Fox’s prime-time soap “The O.C.” “Real Housewives,” however, says as much about the state of reality TV as it does about the strange land south of Los Angeles. People seem less and less reluctant to let cameras and microphones intrude into the most personal corners of their lives.
The series stands on its own as a penetrating tour of the chilly hearts, meandering minds, wobbly marriages and shimmering swimming pools of Orange County. Until the Fox series came along, “the O.C.” was never called “The O.C.” and was known principally as a conservative Republican enclave where the airport is named after John Wayne and oceanfront property is reserved for the very, very super-rich.
The five women profiled in “Real Housewives” aren’t wildly wealthy, but most do live in casual comfort; some of their houses might remind you of Tony and Carmela’s place way back in New Jersey.
,Tom Shales, Washington Post
The show is set in Coto de Caza, a gated community where, we come to learn, 85% of the women have had breast implants, the average house costs $1.6 million and a Mercedes with a broken window button is immediately replaced with a brand-new BMW. Since this is reality television, it turns out, of course, that this seeming paradise is in fact a kind of materialistic hell and, one way or another, the women are all leading lives of quiet unhappiness, if not flat-out desperation.
The most appealing character is Lauri, the divorced single mother, who is a knockout but also sweet and a little clueless. She is always lamenting that, because of the divorce, she has been exiled from the mega-mansions of Coto de Caza to an “itty-bitty” town house. She doesn’t know how lucky she is.
,Charles McGrath, New York Times
The women on the “Real Housewives of Orange County” had my mouth dropping open more often than it does on a visit to the dentist. These women are shameless. In this new “reality” series, five women living in a wealthy, gated community flaunt their homes, kids and medically enhanced chests to the rest of us poor sods.
,Mary-Ann McBride, Albuquerque Journal
It’s “Laguna Beach” for grown-ups! It’s a real-life “Desperate Housewives” set in the world of “The O.C.”!
Entertaining in the way the problems of the rich often are, “The Real Housewives” is not mean-spirited like the competition in “Unanimous,” but many of the values on display are just as morally bankrupt.
,Rob Owen, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
If everything you know about Orange County, Calif., comes from television like “The O.C.” on Fox, or MTV’s reality show “Laguna Beach,” you might think the place is nothing more than a den of rich, spoiled airheads.
Well, how about doing a little more research, by say tuning into “The Real Housewives of Orange County?”
Go back in TV history to shows like “Dynasty” or “Dallas,” and it’s self-evident. Americans love to watch wealth. “The Real Housewives of Orange County” may be a reality show, but it follows directly in that tradition, which makes me ashamed to say, I am hopelessly addicted to it.
,Madeline Brand and Andrew Wallerstein, NPR’s “Day to Day”
The biggest brat of the bunch is Slade, Jo’s Hummer-driving husband-to-be. Viewers won’t be surprised to learn he’s twice divorced. Who could stand to be with a guy who remembers how old he was when he got his “first taste of seven figures?”
“They probably think I’ve got it going on,” Slade says, referring to his middle-aged racing bike body.
Barf bag, anyone?
,Ill Radsken, Boston Herald
California used to be a state, but these days it seems to serve mainly as a backdrop for reality shows.
Viewers get to peek into a world of extraordinary privilege, and at the end may come away glad to be spared this sort of success. In one scene, a 16-year-old complains that the window on her Mercedes is broken; her parents buy her a new BMW.
“That’s how we show how we love each other in this family,” the girl says. “We buy each other things.”
The obsession with appearances and materialism,from cars to houses to Botox to breast implants,makes “Housewives” a case study for everything that is shallow and pathetic about our society.
Of course, that’s also what makes it so entertaining.
,Edward P. Smith Denver Post Staff Writer
