'New York City Housewives' - By Way of Cleveland
This real housewife of New York City did not spend yesterday contemplating the purchase of a $2,655 gown. She did spend several minutes contemplating whether to throw out Friday night's chicken or serve it for dinner.
Tasted fine.
And that, dear readers, sums up everything you need to know about the reality show that made its debut on Bravo last night, "The Real Housewives of New York City." Whether fabulously wealthy or pathetically middle-class, housewives just aren't that fascinating to watch as they buy stuff, eat stuff, talk to their children, or flirt with their private Hamptons tennis pros.
Well, the flirting might hold a soupçon of sizzle if the lass is witty and the pro is Hugh Grant. But on the Bravo show, here is what the salon-blond, heavily mascaraed "housewife," Ramona Singer, had to say about the stud as he took his shirt off: "He likes to take his shirt off."
Shakespeare, watch out.
With highlights like that — not to mention long scenes of vegetable chopping — this show may finally do for New York what "Friends," "Sex and the City," "Lipstick Jungle," "Cashmere Mafia," and even "The View" have not been able to do: Make life in Manhattan's social swirl seem about as scintillating as tea with a Vermont Teddy Bear.
The seven-episode series follows five so-called housewives (including one who is not a wife and four who have jobs) as they go about their daily lives. One, Jill Zarin, is seen sending her beautiful 15-year-old daughter to a weight-loss camp. Another, a would-be lifestyle guru, modestly hopes to "become a household name." (Be careful what you wish for, Omarosa. er ... Bethenny Frankel.) A third, Alex McCord, sighs happily that she and her husband are "each other's stylists," apparently not seeing what my four housewife friends saw as we watched the show.
"HE'S GAY!" they cried as the neatly bearded hotelier adjusted his wife's dress collar. (For the record, he could just be a supportive metrosexual.)
Then there's Countess LuAnn de Lesseps, who seems, despite her title, the least affected of the five, even though we learn that her last dog was never fully house-trained and her maid had to clean up the mess. For years. And then there is the tennis-pro-lusting Ramona.
As they talk about their homes, a price tag appears on the screen: "Avg. 4 Bedroom Condo Upper East Side: $4.4 million." Same thing happens when they shop: "Handbag: $1,500." Money is Topic A pretty much all the time as they matter-of-factly mention that schools must be private, nannies should speak French, and summers are best spent in the Hamptons, where the real estate is blah, blah, blah.
It's like listening to your uncle talk about what he spent at Syms. Okay, okay. Can you please pass the herring?
But it is not just the dollar signs that make this series so dull. It's also that a lot of the time these women look like they're playing roles copied from more glamorous New York shows.
When they get out of a car they stop and twirl. Stop me if you've seen this before. When they gather at the pool for a party that looks as spontaneous as a double kidney transplant, they somehow manage to turn the talk to pole dancing. Then the teeny-bikini ladies somehow manage to start a cat fight. Someone gets thrown into the water. It's "Middle-Age Housewives Gone Girls Gone Wild."
And this is the sweet flowering of the beacon of the free world, that teeming fulcrum of creativity, New York City?
"You don't come to New York for what they came to New York for," the editor of HeadButler.com, Jesse Kornbluth, said. "You can do what they do in Atlanta." And that is?
"Social climb," he said. "All of those women screamed 'suburb.'" Spoken like a true New Yorker. Too bad he's not a housewife.
lskenazy@yahoo.com
