I broke. And it’s embarrassing to admit just how fully I succumbed after repeating over and over that I would never go down that road of tarnished televised cobblestones. My only excuse is a virus took over my body for a couple of days and I became housebound and I needed entertainment that wouldn’t require me to expend even a smidgen of energy. I’d been planning on rewatching all of Twin Peaks, but I was terrified of the effect a dancing dwarf speaking backwards in a blood-red room could have on my already fragile being. So with my health in mind, I turned away from the Log Lady and investigators craving damn fine cups of coffee and instead scrolled through the On Demand menu and eventually settled on the very first ever episode of – wait for it – Southern Charm.
To give you some background, I’m not averse to reality television, something my faithful readers already know. For a few years now, I’ve covered several incarnations of The Real Housewives. I’ve swum through the murky water I’m certain Jax has peed in to write about Vanderpump Rules. I laughed my ass off as I chronicled the ridiculousness of twenty very young adults stranded on an island while searching for their production-approved soulmates on Are You the One? I was paid nicely to recap that and I almost blew the entire thing even before it started by writing in the first draft of my first recap that the premise of the show was “preposterous.” Turns out producers don’t much care for such a term, but since writers don’t much care for being critiqued, I used a synonym, got my point across, and cashed my check. I’d post to Facebook or Twitter that one of my new pieces was up and I kept receiving messages back that the show I really should be covering was the one about people cavorting through the streets and on the plantations of Charleston. I got this feedback so often that I finally publicly announced I would not be watching or recapping Southern Charm because I feared doing so would literally destroy whatever was left of my already blackened soul. But reader? I caved. Hard.
The odd thing about Southern Charm was that I heard about it constantly, yet I walked in completely cold. I had no idea the show starred a man in his fifties. I didn’t know a girl from the last season of The Real World I ever watched was a cast member. I’d seen images of the redhead – the one I thought looked very much like Emma Stone probably would look on meth – a few times when I checked out People, but I didn’t know a single thing about her, including the fact that there’s a very good chance the chick really enjoys meth. And I certainly didn’t know the theme song for the show was some horrible little ditty about money and honey bees, nor did I know I would have to eventually end up apologizing to my psyche once those lyrics sunk deep inside my head and I found myself humming the tune in the motherfucking shower.
It took a few episodes for me to get invested and then a few more to accept the weird disparity that not all the southerners on the show have accents, but now that I’ve seen – God – the entire series and I’ve made a tentative peace with my total allotment of wasted time, I have some reactions. First, that Thomas guy looks like a cross between a weasel with rabies and a bulldog with an eating disorder and his hybrid creatureness was never more evident than when he foamed at the mouth at his own dinner party and went around the table explaining to all his guests why they sucked. That event didn’t happen until season three, but my loathing for him formed almost immediately. I realize I am not a girl who has ever been swayed by the lure of a surname, but I cannot for the life of me figure out this man’s appeal. Yes, there’s a bridge named after his family. Sure, he’s got his very own plantation where slaves undoubtedly toiled in the fields before they were finally freed by a President Thomas’ father still hates. (The guy likes to show his Lincoln dismay by throwing away five-dollar bills lest he have to catch even a glimpse of that President’s face.) But Thomas struck me – and I mean immediately – as a tool. I saw no real shades of an actual gentleman in his actions or in his interviews. His swagger looked like it smelled. And his utter refusal to roll on a condom while hitting the six-thousand-thread-count sheets with a girl who’s three years older than my high school students – a girl whose lineage he could recite even though I’m relatively sure he still doesn’t know her favorite color (which we know is not periwinkle) – was hard to watch.
When Thomas came to the conclusion that it would be an excellent idea to run for Senate while also being a participant on a reality show, I laughed for about five minutes straight – then I remembered who’s currently running our vast nation and my laughter ceased. Still, that this guy was followed around campaign events by Bravo cameras would be priceless in its lunacy if it were not also a sterling example of exactly how far in the shitter this country is. As for his relationship that has been the center of this show, I came in cold and therefore had no idea of the shrieking carnage that was to come on the deck of a yacht, so I initially harbored some sympathy for the almost-teenager who wanted the guy’s love, even though I took note early on of the hard look that glinted in her eyes whenever she was denied love or a glass of sweetened tea. I thought Thomas an absolute fool, but I credited him for breaking up with a girl who wanted to get knocked up more than any person with ovaries I’ve ever seen. But when the first season ended with an epilogue and the words “Nine months later” appeared in white letters across a black screen like the dark opening credits of the darkest Woody Allen film ever made, I shook my head back and forth so violently that I now very much require a massage by a strong Swedish woman who’s got some rage issues to work out.
So Kathryn got pregnant and she got exactly what she thought she wanted, but she had no idea that ending up with a baby fathered by a wealthy creep would mean she’d be stuck in the boonies with no Starbucks to be found. She didn’t realize the man wouldn’t thank her during his campaign speeches because some constituents aren’t all that keen on electing a man who used to have a drug problem and was sent to prison and then reformed himself by impregnating a young woman who’s prone to anger. But the second my sympathies fell on Kathryn, she would react to a conflict by pointing into someone’s face or screaming at them to shut the fuck up or denying that she slept with almost every person on the cast born with testicles. This is a girl who was sired in the reality television generation; what such a thing should mean is that she should know there’s no way to keep a secret that she had sex with three people who appear in the opening credits of a show she’s on. So when she later sat on reunion couches and made bold statements and swore she was telling the truth and everyone else was lying about any number of matters, it became impossible to believe her. As the seasons stretched on and her uterus stretched out, the girl became scarier and ickier to watch; there’s just something inherently gross about a mother of two young children having to repeat to herself that she will behave for an entire evening before she walks into a cocktail party, immediately forgets the affirmation she practiced in the car, and proceeds to tell half the guests just how much she hates them.
We know now she failed a drug test before the season three reunion, an outcome that should come as a shock to nobody with a pulse who also realizes the level of twitching she did on that couch was clearly coke-induced. Even worse than her jittery countenance, though, were her vapid statements and the rolling sweeps of the eyes making her look like an adolescent who had just been grounded and had her phone taken away as punishment. Her insistence that being a mother should be some bullshit free pass for her delusions of tawdry grandeur annoyed me. And though I don’t know if anything actually happened with Thomas and Landon – I’d like to give Landon more credit in terms of who she’d slum it in the sheets with, but just willing to be on this show in the first place probably means that ship’s already sailed – but the vitriol Kathryn spewed against this squinty-eyed girl who likes horses and giggling in the moonlight seemed excessive, as did her refusal to listen to anything resembling reason.
Kathryn’s back this season like everyone knew would happen and she’s allegedly sober. Until she proves her progress in a legal setting, she will not have access to her children and there’s something perverse about watching this play out for our entertainment. It was probably during hour twelve of my viewing (I know…) when I felt something that wasn’t virus-induced enter my brain and that thing was shame because watching this trainwreck makes me complicit somehow and I’d tell you that I began to feel very badly about myself and who I must be at my core to expose myself to custody issues involving a fifty-something year old former felon with a Huguenot name and a twenty-something newly sprung from rehab, but luckily Craig came on the screen and I was able to pity someone other than myself.
Ah, Craig. Whether we’re talking about New Craig or Old Craig, I think the discussion really begins and ends with his pants. While Shep – a guy who looks like every member of the Alpha Beta fraternity from Revenge of the Nerds was thrown into a blender with a little backwash and then frozen until he was permanently molded into a real human boy – dons Speedos whenever he’s around any body of water, Craig shows up in public with salmon colored pants and pocket squares and slicked hair and all I can say is this kid should thank the Gods of Genetics for giving him dimples because they almost manage to cancel out the effect of all those plaids and pastels. In the last few seasons we’ve watched as Craig decided he should totally be allowed to work from home to better nurse his chronic hangovers and then attempt to wrest control of a bourbon company he knew absolutely nothing about because his mother used to tell him how wonderful he is and somehow those musings of maternal love corrupted his sanity. Craig tried in vain to keep up financially with the man-boys around him who will never have to work a day in their lives and then lied about having finished law school. This season he was introduced while carving wooden beams into what I’m guessing are stakes that he can perhaps use to drive into the heart of anyone who questions him about the reality that he’ll take and actually pass the Bar, but at least the guy is doing that carving in pants nobody from JCrew came up with on a dare.
I think we’re supposed to view Craig as pathetic, but I don’t multitask all that well and I’m way too busy finding Whitney pathetic to spread any pity Craig’s way. Whitney is one of the executive producers of this show, a man who directed one of the most ungodly awful documentaries I’ve ever seen – and I once watched a YouTube documentary that explored how Jon Benet Ramsey never actually died and was instead hidden away until she could emerge later in life as Katy Perry. Whitney’s film about Halston somehow managed to be more about the filmmaker than the designer and I guffawed my way through his vanity project when I watched the thing a few years ago. (Please know it takes a seriously special strand of hideous to get me to use the word “guffaw,” let alone actually do it and then do yourself a gigantic favor and never watch the movie because, much like Human Centipede, your life will be better before you see it.) In any case, Whitney is Richie Rich-rich and he wears clothing with asymmetrical zippers and he hangs out with people in their twenties and asks people if they had sex by sticking his finger into a hole created by his other hand. He is the only man to play a guitar on television and not look instantly sexier as a result. He lives in sprawling lofts and sometimes with his mother, a true southern dame who uses a bell to ring for her daily martini. I can’t help that I quite like Whitney’s mother. I sort of hate myself for liking her, but I get a kick out of a person who lounges about in flowing caftans and uses an atomizer to spritz on her perfume and spends her days yammering away about etiquette while young women stop by her mansion to borrow jewels as she sits in a tufted chair and makes needlepoint designs inspired by her newest dog. She’s ridiculous for sure, but I do not find her hateful and I agree with much of what she says, though she almost officially lost me when she announced that her skeevy son is perfect. I forgave her – a mother’s love can be blind and deaf – and I also have to admit (though I could very well take this statement back and claim it’s my medicine making me speak crazy) that I appreciate how Whitney says what he has to say and then just sits back and sips his drink. I think who one chooses to be friends with is rather telling and Whitney is close friends with Thomas and that’s a major strike against him, but he has been honest about his impressions of Thomas’ relationship with Kathryn and not a single bit of me thinks Whitney’s negativity about the fertile one is because she chose another man over him. I think he took one look at the misery Thomas walked straight into and doesn’t feel in the least bit envious.
The only person on this show I cannot work up any hatred for is Cameran, the one who was on The Real World. The woman looks like a tiny Miss America and narrates the show with the right amount of snark and keeps her marriage entirely off-camera. She’s never brawled with anyone and openly muses that she very well may never want children. She dresses appropriately for every occasion, chose not to meet up with Kathryn because she didn’t see the point in faking a friendship with a lunatic, and snagged a real estate job by complimenting the woman interviewing her in a manner that was both subtle and genius. I don’t require much in my reality show participants; if someone acts rationally when a camera is aimed at his or her face, I’m an instant fan. I’m easy like that.
What does fully freak me out about this show is the reason it exists in the first place. I’m not talking here about programming choices or networks that run episodes on an endless loop until we all crack and start watching. What I’m talking about here is why Whitney thought his life should be a show. Here’s a man who clearly doesn’t need to work. He’s an only child in a family laden down with money that’s controlled by a mother who deems him walking perfection. Yet he still pitched the idea for this series and my guess is he looked at his life and the lives of a few of his friends and said to himself the very thing that makes me physically queasy: “My life is so fascinating that of course I should be on TV. Besides, who needs talent anymore to be famous?” I look at the women who populate The Real Housewives franchise and I can’t help but begrudgingly admit that so many of them have seriously hustled to build serious brands. I’m not talking about the synthetic handbags made in Gretchen Christine’s garage; I’m talking about actual brands that have become incredibly successful and though some of those successes occurred as marriages came crumbling down in high-def, at least these women used their time in front of the cameras to move ahead financially. What, pray tell, are the Southern Charmers going to get out of their exposure besides more exposure, the likes of which prove crippling for so many participants of this odd and pervasive genre? I’m sure Shep gets laid even more than he did before despite announcing to the universe at large that he “hates feelings” and doesn’t ever use protection during sex because “it feels too good,” but Shep has a ton of money and doesn’t really have to worry about a future. But what about Craig? Will a law firm ever hire this guy after he was shown drunk, arrogant, and lying about a degree on TV? Cameran has conducted herself well enough that this show probably won’t harm her career, but what about Kathryn? Her brand is now Druggy Psychopath and it might not have turned out that way if she’d stayed away from the heat of the lights, if she wasn’t raised in a time that taught the young people of the world that nothing you say matters unless it’s recorded by a body mic.
Every formal event on this show has ended with tears, screams, and a growing fetus. Every lie has eventually seen the stark light of day. Senate races have gone down in flames. The guy who lost that Senate race and still longs for a career in politics recently recommended that his friend recover from the pain of a breakup by fucking random women in the bathroom of the next bar he wanders into – and he suggested this knowing he was being filmed. That same wannabe Senator then groped a girl at a pool party and introduced her with the words, “She’s twenty-four and just broke up with her boyfriend.” Then a grin so leering crept across his face and I became absolutely certain that I’d need an extra few days of bed rest and maybe some therapy involving leeches to ever feel better again.
Nell Kalter teaches Film and Media at a school in New York. She is the author of the books THAT YEAR and STUDENT, both available on amazon.com in paperback and for your Kindle. Also be sure to check out her website at nellkalter.com Her Twitter is @nell_kalter