'The Amandas,'
the fun side of OCD
The boss on this Style Network reality series is a neat freak
By Tom Conroy
Jan 30, 2012
Most reality shows set in workplaces feature bosses who make their subordinates’ lives miserable through some combination of megalomania, insensitivity or pure spite. If the shows work, we love to hate the bosses. If they don’t, we love to change the channel.
The Style Network’s new reality series “The Amandas” features a difficult boss who nonetheless wins our sympathy. Amanda LeBlanc runs a company that helps people organize their homes, presiding over a staff of young women she calls the Amandas. Over the course of the show, she drives her staffers a little crazy with her perfectionism, but since she admits that she is “extremely OCD,” we tend to sympathize with her as well as with her underlings.
The mildly comic effect, along with the wish-fulfillment aspect of watching typically untidy spaces being straightened out by someone else, makes for pleasant viewing.
In the first episode, airing tonight at 8 p.m., Amanda and her team help a couple with four boys, including a set of 5-year-old triplets, redesign their closets and their laundry room, which doubles as the father’s painting studio. Meanwhile, they throw an open house at Amanda’s home, using it as a showcase for her techniques.
Amanda is an attractive wife and mother who gets additional sympathy points when she says that she had to move to Birmingham, Ala., after her home in New Orleans was flooded during Hurricane Katrina. She calls that “the ultimate purge.”
Her staffers — the only man being Duncan, the obligatory gay-acting personal assistant — have varying levels of commitment to Amanda’s quest for order. Some seem to think she’s crazy. Even while they’re peeling linoleum tiles from the laundry-room floor, she makes them wear clothes that are better suited to the office or a nice cocktail party.
The girls are all telegenic, perhaps suspiciously so. One is a beauty-pageant winner. Another says she just finished law school and is trying to figure out what to do when she grows up. Let’s hope her parents or whoever else paid for her tuition don’t see this episode.
Viewers may glean some tips on how they might reorganize their own living spaces, but this isn’t an instructional show. It mainly focuses on creating the usual reality-show story arc out of the redesign process.
Everyone starts out energetically; then the girls tire; they suffer a setback; Amanda comes in and berates them; they learn their lesson, pull together, and (spoiler alert!) get the job done on time. We’ll let it be a surprise and won’t divulge whether the clients are delighted or merely pleased.
The open-house subplot is essentially a condensed version of the same arc. A highlight comes when Amanda lets her guests poke through her lingerie drawer.
The main difference in “The Amandas” from most such shows — besides the sight of girls in pumps trying to scrape up glue — is in the berating section. Usually the boss reduces his or her employees to tears. In this show, Amanda weeps as she tries to explain to her staffers that they’ve been given a gift: the ability to help other people improve their lives.
The girls finally turn on the waterworks too. Then the editors cut to a shot of the nonchalant Dustin, texting.
At another point, Amanda explains to her client that she went into this business because she has a lot of anxiety and straightening things up helps calm her down.
As an old saying has it, a perfectionist is someone who takes great pains and gives them to other people. Amanda makes one assistant center the lettering on a paint box and tells another to remove the lids from the storage boxes, because “lids on any container are a mental block.”
Fortunately, someone seems to have cleared the closets of wire hangers.
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