Step Right Up to See the NYC Reality Freak Show

The latest issue of NY Magazine includes an article called "The NYC Reality Freak Show," which meanders in circles analyzing Bravo's recent string of NYC-focused reality TV shows, in a quest to answer: "In NYC Prep, as in The Real Housewives of New York City, Manhattan is a kind of moral hell, corrupted by money and power and baubles and drinks. Is it really this bad?"

Yes, it's that bad, and why wouldn't it be? If the grown women on Real Housewives -- who did not grow up in the money-obsessed era of Paris Hilton and the like -- act like spoiled children with over-sized wallets, then how are NYC private school teenagers going to act?

And please spare us the excuses from these kids for why they have ended up being unfairly misrepresented as spoiled brats on television:

. . . [S]ome of the NYC Prep cast I interviewed suggested that the people they were onscreen were not the people they were in real life. Kelli, for example, says that she doesn’t live alone—on the show, she lives in an apartment while her parents stay in the Hamptons, popping in once in a while—and also claims to have never been interested in Sebastian, on whom she is supposed to have an unrequited crush.

Really, Kelli? So the producers forced you and your parents to pretend that you live alone for six nights of the week, and then they forced you to giggle on camera about how great it is to go out every night when you live with only your brother? Or was it the shock of seeing what you actually look and sound like on television that subsequently made you recant?

Obviously, good reality shows are like fun mirrors (in continuing with the freak show metaphor). Talented producers pick up on potentially sensational personality traits that are already present in each cast member, and they exaggerate them to grab the viewer's attention and mold a television character. (Clockwise from top left: Sexually-confused PC, queen bee Jessie, trying-too-hard Kelli, over-driven Camille, wannabe-playboy Sebastian, and status-seeking Taylor.)

But, while exaggerated, these traits are not made up. Real Housewife Bethenny Frankel says it best in the same article:

Frankel was approached for The Real Housewives by a producer at a polo match in the Hamptons, but initially turned it down. “I thought it would be tragic, just tragic, a bunch of women drinking and acting like idiots, and I would be the idiot who’d been on two reality shows,” she says. But she went to a party where she met the rest of the cast and changed her mind. “I thought, Maybe I should do this, because there is no way I could look like a crazy person with all these crazy people.” She lets out a guffaw. “You can’t believe these shows are real, because you don’t believe that people could be this insane, but everything is 100 percent genuine.” She sighs.

And (to the producers' chagrin, I'm sure) Bethenny has succeeded in coming off as the only remotely non-crazy Housewife.

Of course, it's nice to have a stable Bethenny character once in a while, so that there's someone who says aloud exactly what you're already thinking about the rest of the wacky cast. But, come on, it's the crazies that make for great television -- just as the freaks make for great circus acts.