The Brilliance of Bravo

By Heather Huntington on July 20th, 2009

• Share
• Link to StumbleUpon
• 2 Comments

I don’t know who the network execs are over at Bravo, but can I just say: kudos to you. I have recently been introduced to the wonders that are NYC Prep and Real Housewives of New Jersey and all I can say is, well, bravo.

I’m no stranger to the Real Housewives world, having indulged in the odd guilty pleasure-filled hour or so of the Orange County and New York predecessors. But, while they were fun, none of them really grabbed me. Atlanta interested me even less. So when New Jersey came around I was just not sure if I was interested in another batch of spoiled, undeserving cretins parading around. Plus, I’m from Boston, which has a pretty substantial element of Jersey in it to begin with, so I just felt very ‘been there, done that.’

When will I learn? I’d seen a few headlines here and there about fights and arrests, but I was still unprepared for the fireworks when I finally sat down to watch. Real Housewives of New Jersey has the staple elements present–several ridiculous, over-fortunate, over-surgeried, baby-brained cougars trading bitchy barbs and serial shopping for their enormous and ostentatious digs. But now you add the Sopranos element, the uber-bourgeois stereotypical Jersey tackiness that no amount of fortune can roust out and it is riveting. The accents, the hair, the makeup, the fake bake–mama mia, it is marvelous. It’s hard to decide what I like the best: Dina’s unbelievably tacky decoration, Caroline’s hilarious mafia-like concerns for her family and/or safety, Jacqueline’s weird ’50s housewife fetish that leaves her trotting after her big-man husband like a lovesick teenager, Teresa’s freakishly low hairline and unbearable children, or Danielle’s sociopathic self-infatuation. And her plastic surgery. O, the crazy lopsided boobs and fake nose and insane brow. O the wonder.

In a way, NYC Prep is like a Real Housewives 20 years earlier–albeit the snotty, self-aggrandizing, foundation-attending, title-seeking New York version, but still. For me, this one is even more fascinating. I think because they grew up in New York, these kids are frightfully well spoken for teenagers, and in their own way quite adult. That would be interesting enough, but then you couple that with the mind-staggeringly overblown egos and senses of entitlement in teens that have everything and it is just riveting. While I watch, I know I am giving into the baser instinct of rubbernecking, but it can’t be helped, I’m afraid. I fill up with equal parts bile and wonder for these little monsters, all the while thanking God or Buddha or anyone who will listen really that I did not go to an ivy league school.

In fact, that might be it, really. While it’s true that the casting directors at Bravo are keenly attuned people, picking just the right mix to put together an irresistible potion of schadenfreude that they dole out to viewers in a weekly half hour episode, maybe there is more to the shows than that.  Maybe they are in fact cautionary tales that viewers can imbibe to learn how not to be? Medicine that tastes good and is good for you? A selling point for living in fly over country if there ever was one. Iowa here I come! Just make sure I have a cable hook up when I get there.