two-twenty

in honor of tonight's television bitch-fest

You might think that two-twenty would care about Survivor, in light of our monumental reality television problem. You’d be wrong. We couldn’t care less. Apparently it is over and some chick won and some guy was an asshole. Whatever. Of much greater interest to us are Tuesday night’s powerhouse duo, The Simple Life and Rich Girls, affectionately referred to around here (simply) as Simple Bitches and Rich Bitches. At first we thought we might prefer bitches of the simple variety, but time has taught us that we loooove the rich bitches. They have even redeemed themselves from that horrifically boring dog-centric episode a couple weeks back.

How did relative no-names Ally Hilfiger and Jamie Gleicher* beat out professionally trashy Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie in this battle of proletarian wet dreams? It’s simple, really.

First of all, we never thought the day would come, but two-twenty is beginning to tire of Miss Hilton. It’s sort of like when Letterman knows he has a bad joke, and tries to make it funny by referring to it again and again, and then it’s funny again for a minute, and then it is TOTALLY and COMPLETELY unfunny and you change the channel. As far as Nicole Ritchie goes, we sort of feel like we might have been better off never knowing she existed.

More importantly, Simple Bitches is a one-trick-pony. The admittedly dim and over-protected, but also over-produced, duo prance gaily through Altus fucking up the lives of the Arkansan lower-middle class. Along the way they swap some spit with the locals, and maybe their digestive systems process some DNA that hasn’t been pampered since birth, but in the end it’s all about taking and not giving. The girls, the producers, and FOX oddly all seem to be telling a morality tale admonishing people not to do what they are doing, the telling of which is making them all, quite simply, rich. Somehow this intense reflexivity makes the viewer feel complicit, and interferes with one’s ability to sit back and enjoy two idiots making fools out of themselves and their stylists.

Rich Bitches, on the other hand, is about adolescents emerging from the cocoon that is high school life. Their larval nature is made even more precious and tender by the insulating effects of vast sums of money. Paradoxically, this money also creates an illusion of maturity and worldliness, nowhere more powerfully real than in the girls’ own heads. This produces some enjoyably bizarre juxtapositions, such as last week when in the same episode Ally sincerely gushed about holding hands with a boy and also referred knowingly to Klonopin as “heavy shit”.

Of course, there are also the Simple Life-esque moments, when the girls’ absolute obliviousness to the lives of those around them is made abundantly clear. In the above-mentioned episode Ally and Jaime (and the entire film crew) basically shut down a boutique for over 4 hours so they can use it as little more than a private phone booth. Their marathon cell phone conversations are instigated, ironically, by the girls’ failure to realize that planning a summer trip with a good friend and then backing out at the last minute might cause some emotional damage on the other end. Finally, one of the long-suffering salespeople has to remind the girls that she’d like to close up and go home. But it is exactly this unfeigned inability to empathize with normal people that makes the girls’ grandiose pronouncements about saving babies in Africa so pathetically funny and strangely endearing. We love the rich bitches, and we forgive them their trespasses.

In the end, perhaps it is the tone of the show that allows us to forgive them. There is very little overt situational framing and editing to make a viewer feel like they are being force-fed a reaction (in fairness, we are sure that this has more to do with MTV’s proficiency in the genre as opposed to any lack of manipulation). The comedy is self-generating. We can all remember the difficulties we faced during this period of our lives, and watching extraordinarily privileged chicks fuck things up as badly as we did – or worse – is simply satisfying.

Damn. The truth is, watching that vapid troll Jaime NOT get fucked by everyone from her prom date to her high school crush to random guys in LA is just plain too delicious. So sue us.

*People keep pestering us about where Jaime got her money. We don’t know why you think we would know. Oh, wait, we do know. Her father, Leo Gleicher, founded Innovation Luggage, which owns brands such as Samsonite, Jansport, and Timberland. Then he sold it to pay for his ex-wife’s and daughter’s extravagant spending habits.