'All About Aubrey,'
if you must know
New Oxygen series follows the life of Aubrey O’Day
By Tom Conroy
Mar 7, 2011
Aubrey O’Day has a particularly contemporary problem: Having been transformed into an actual entertainer by a reality show, and then having transformed herself into a tabloid celebrity, she’s attempting to relaunch herself as an entertainer on another reality show.
The attempt is chronicled in Oxygen's new series “All About Aubrey,” which is a cut above most similar celebrity vanity productions, but just barely. O’Day’s hunger for fame is so obvious that it comes across as guileless. And she reveals enough vulnerability and talent that viewers will find themselves rooting for her, probably despite themselves.
O’Day was a member of the girl group Danity Kane, which was put together by Sean “Diddy” Combs for the MTV reality show “Making the Band” and then, defying all expectations, scored two No. 1 albums. Conforming to all expectations, the girls began bickering, and O’Day was kicked out of the group by Combs on TV.
In the premiere, airing tonight at 10, O’Day says that after a few years of paparazzi-driven fame for being famous, she has decided to work seriously on her solo career. “I’m coming for another 15 minutes,” she says. She introduces us to her manager, her vocal coach, her choreographer, her stylist and her hair stylist, usually with a list of their other famous clients.
Her manager, Johnny Wright, tells her that for a few years, it seemed that she was just trying to get her name in the media. O’Day responds that for a while “celebrity was paying and artistry wasn’t.” No one points out to her that this is still largely true.
As is customary in this type of show, O’Day has recently acquired a live-in hanger-on, a friend and former magazine editor named Krystal. Krystal immediately grates on O’Day’s best friend, Stephanie, but fortunately, this doesn’t overwhelm the show.
The friends’ dialogue is sometimes so awkwardly delivered that, in combination with the visuals of overly made-up girls in flashy clothes and bad lighting, the show starts to feel like a pornographic film. In the tease for upcoming episodes, we see Krystal and Aubrey taking a picture of themselves naked in a sauna.
One of the drawbacks of celebrity life, evidently, is that your friends won’t lie when you ask them if you need to lose weight. Krystal says O’Day could stand to lose 5 or 10 pounds. Her choreographer, Gil Duldulao, says, “Wow, honey, you’re looking a little hefty there,” and says she could lose 10 or 15.
O’Day’s resistance to improving her diet is usually played for comedy, but in a rather moving moment, Gil makes her wash off her makeup and stand in front of a mirror in her bra. Though she actually looks prettier and is only overweight by Hollywood standards, she starts to cry.
“It’s not easy to have to be anorexic all the time,” she says, adding that the skinny girl from Danity Kane is “not who I am anymore.”
But we’re not really getting a serious look at the sorrows of stardom. Much of the action is the usual celebreality filler.
O’Day goes on a bad double date with Stephanie, who nags her for always looking for bad boys. In the most contrived moment, O’Day tells Krystal, who is acting as her assistant in lieu of rent, that she wants to preserve her male dog’s sperm.
When the collection kit arrives, the women discuss the procedure graphically and then enlist O’Day’s hair stylist, Cesar, to lend a hand. The scene leaves something to the imagination, but in this case, that makes it worse.
Despite this new low in reality TV, viewers will probably finish “All About Aubrey” liking O’Day a little more than they did before. It’s nice to think that if artistry doesn’t work out for her, she’ll always have celebrity to fall back on.
|
|
|
