As far back as Puck on the third season of “The Real World,” reality TV participants have gone out of their way to appear obnoxious, probably because it gets them more airtime. MTV encourages this behavior further by giving the biggest jerks from “The Real World” a second chance at fame by casting them on “The Real World/Road Rules Challenge.”
Kelly Cutrone, who achieved some celebrity as Lauren and Whitney’s rude, nasty boss on MTV’s series “The Hills” and “The City,” has hit the jerk jackpot: She is now the star of her own celebreality show, “Kell on Earth.” As a bonus, it’s on Bravo, a channel that Kelly’s clients and friends in the fashion business probably watch.
Despite that menacing title, the show is actually pretty tame. Kelly seems to be trying to appear more likable. And the work she and her associates do is not only relatively unglamorous but trivial in the grand scheme of things. While the show is no more of a time waster than most reality TV, it keeps reminding us that there’s really no reason to keep watching.
The series premiere, airing tonight at 10 p.m., focuses on Kelly’s activities during a recent New York Fashion Week. Her firm, People’s Revolution, seems to be a public relations firm, although Kelly’s duties include organizing the activity backstage at one of her clients’ shows at Bryant Park.
The hour opens with Kelly attempting to justify her abrasiveness. As people like her usually do, she says that she’s tough because her business is tough. Fashion, she says, is war, and most of her underlings won’t survive.
Her senior staffers talk a similarly hard line. A partner named Emily says, “You say I’m a bitch like it’s a bad thing.”
When the action gets rolling, it’s somewhat disappointing that in her starring role, Kelly isn’t as nasty as she was on “The City,” in which she once asked a model to whom she had just been introduced whether she was anorexic. (Kelly explained that she was simply being honest.)
On “Kell on Earth,” though Kelly is somewhat harsh when colleagues fail to come through, there’s little of the public humiliation that she visited on her underlings in her MTV days.
Part of the campaign to soften Kelly’s image is the footage of her with her daughter, Ava. A single mother, Kelly explains that she works “24/7/365” so that she can provide for Ava, but she doesn’t seem to have considered taking a pay cut and reducing her hours to, say, 18/6/300 so that they could actually spend time together.
One evening, Kelly goes to her apartment — which is above her offices — bounces Ava on the bed for two minutes and then goes back to work.
Without spoiling the best punch line in the episode, let’s just say that at one point Ava says something that suggests that egotism may be genetic.
The interplay in the People’s Revolution office is a typical combination of camaraderie and sniping. Like most bad bosses, Kelly plays favorites. She’s very buddy-buddy with a new assistant named Andrew, who comes to one Fashion Week show wearing a sequined dress.
A young, recently promoted staffer named Stefanie is the focus of much of the action and a bit of Kelly’s irritation. We see the staff going to great pains to plan the seating in the front rows of a Fashion Week show — “it’s an art,” says Andrew — and then Stefanie has technical problems with the printer.
Andrew explains that the seating chart is basically what their clients “are paying us thousands and thousands of dollars for.”
Although the staffers have explained that it’s not just egos that are involved, most viewers will be stunned by the triviality of what they’ve spent nearly an hour watching. The show makes it worse by ending the episode on this cliff-hanger. Will Stefanie get the printer to work? Is it a paper jam — or something more serious?
Another poor choice was including a pointless visit by Ashley Dupré, the prostitute who was Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s undoing. She is ID’d onscreen as “Kelly’s friend,” even though Kelly lost a client when Ashley showed up at his show last year. Kelly justifies their friendship by saying that there’s not that much difference between what she does with her clients and what Ashley does.
Worse, Ashley is accompanied by her mother, who seems delighted to be on camera. This merely helps remind viewers that there is so much reality TV now because so many of us are fame whores.
Tom Conroy is a Connecticut writer and longtime TV critic.
