'High Society,' about
as low as you get
CW reality series purports to examine the good life
By Tom Conroy
Mar 9, 2010
Reality TV producers try hard to find supposed villains who will be described as the kind of people you love to hate.
The producers of The CW’s “High Society” have managed to find villains whom viewers will hate to hate. In other words, the new reality series is filled with boors whose deliberately outrageous behavior is simply unpleasant and tiresome to watch.
Worse, the series centers on a young woman who is neither particularly charming nor particularly edgy, so when viewers aren’t being annoyed, they will be bored.
The series, premiering Wednesday at 9:30 p.m., chronicles the life of Tinsley Mortimer, who says in voice-over in the premiere episode, “People call me a socialite.” In the premiere, she is in the process of divorcing her husband, Topper, whose great-grandfather was an early Standard Oil executive and who is presumably actual high society.
Tinsley explains that people in her husband’s circle avoid publicity. She, however, insists on attending paparazzi-bait events, purportedly in order to promote her line of handbags, and she says that that may have been a factor in the end of her marriage.
Give the producers credit for basically admitting that if Ms. Mortimer really were upper class, she wouldn’t be on this show.
The other characters we meet in the premiere are even more dubious. Some of them seem only peripherally connected to Tinsley, suggesting that they may simply have been recruited for their willingness to be obnoxious on camera.
A young man named Paul Johnson Calderon is seen throwing a drink in someone’s face and begging his mother to give him more money out of his trust fund. He denies published reports that he stole a woman’s purse.
In one of those unlikely setups that seem to have been staged for the show, Tinsley’s sister Dabney shares a hotel suite with a “trust fund partier” named Jules Kirby, who is feuding with Paul. She says that she doesn’t make friends with fat people, gays, blacks or Jews and that she thinks people should be able to use the N-word. In a painful sequence, she instructs the hotel chambermaid in how to put her monogrammed sheets on her bed — “not like the crappy job you usually do.”
Tinsley’s mother drops in occasionally to remind her how much she wishes Tinsley had stayed with Topper.
In the second episode, Tinsley spends some time in Paris with her new boyfriend, a German prince named Casimir, who bullies her and the camera crew. It’s unclear whether he does this because of his upper-class aversion to publicity or because he’s a controlling jerk.
For someone who has made herself a minor celebrity, Tinsley comes across as oddly passive. Overcome with how far she’s fallen in moving from her Upper East Side apartment to her spacious new loft, she curls up on her bed and cries.
Since she has revealed virtually no personality up to this point, it’s hard either to sympathize or to enjoy a little Schadenfreude.
The first two episodes fail to introduce an intriguing storyline, suggesting that the rest of the season will be more of the same: loud, meaningless arguments, contrived drama and shots that look like poorly lit outtakes from “Sex and the City,” with less attractive actors.
An actual glimpse into high society might be interesting, but most of us have spent enough time with poseurs and moneyed morons, whether on reality TV or in real life.
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