We can’t really be surprised that Paula Abdul has opted to abase herself on Bravo’s “Hey Paula,” a reality series about her life as a vivacious, if unmoored, narcissist.
So many stars with X’d-out eyes from the old cartoons — Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Carmen Electra, Ozzy Osbourne, Farrah Fawcett, Ryan O’Neal, Danny Bonaduce, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Anna Nicole Smith — have been this way before. A reality series, like a memoir for at-sea writers, is a station of the cross for the aimless famous, as routine as making a commercial in Japan or suspiciously losing a lot of weight.
Nonetheless a high number of the celebrities who have done reality shows have subsequently been arrested, on charges ranging from drunk driving to drug possession to domestic violence. Many of the reality stars have entered rehab, or fallen gravely ill. One of the stars is dead.
Celebrity reality shows tend to chronicle the slow, bad-faith period of a star’s life before a crackup. Watchers of reality television retroactively recognize this phase as the time when, for example, the future divorcés Nick and Jessica or Britney and Kevin or Carmen and Dave give each other expensive presents, make impressive commitments and seem to burst with hope.
Paris, Anna Nicole, Danny, Ozzy and Farrah also made ludicrous pretenses of devoting themselves before God and camera to starting anew: learning compassion and self-reliance and pulling socks up. And then the shows ended, and we found the codas in Life & Style and Us magazines: sickness, divorce, addiction, arrests, overdose.
The genre that VH1 calls celebreality has taken up the slack where F. Scott Fitzgerald left off: rich party people making one heroic stab at being human and then — spectacularly — losing it all. One difference between reality television and novels, however, is that these television personalities have flesh-and-blood lives offstage. They have, in other words, something to lose that Gatsby did not.
As Ms. Abdul makes clear, however, the star’s most cherished fantasy of a show like “Hey Paula” is precisely that it will reveal that flesh and blood, and document the “real” life. In her case Ms. Abdul wants nothing more than to be seen for what she is, namely a great girl: an enterprising, lonely, funny, daffy and tireless performer. Ms. Abdul is understandably proud of her uncanny likability, as well as her flirty rapport with guys and girls on the street.
But she seems to have taken this pride a step too far, and that’s what makes her a celebrity.
The reasoning goes: If only people see how cool I am mixing it up with my fans, then they won’t think I’m just Simon Cowell’s bimbo or a floozy pillfreak. They’ll see me as a sexy, supportive, fun little powerhouse.
While it’s not clear that this logic seized anyone but Ms. Abdul, she still brought her vision to the screen. And no one has stopped her.
She’s not a bad person, really. She makes herself laugh; I like that. (“What doctor is your face wearing?” she imagines asking someone notorious for plastic surgery.) And on tonight’s episode, when she faces a crisis — the reactions to her incoherent TV interviews last January — the carefully created sentences she uses to explain her slurry, stumbly self-presentation says it all. “I’ve never been drunk,” she says. “I don’t do recreational drugs.”
This seems true, or at least not readily falsifiable. The word recreational leaves plenty of room, anyhow, for prescription pain medication, which Ms. Abdul has said she takes for a chronic neurological disorder. She also suffers from insomnia and keeps up a brutally demanding schedule.
That schedule is on ample, almost boring display in “Hey Paula.” The whole series so far (tonight’s episode is its third) sometimes seems like a courtroom exhibit meant to show how busy and temperate she is. As she keeps not drinking in episode after episode, her speech falls apart, while we’re repeatedly told how little she’s slept, how much she’s traveled, and how so, so, so, so tired she is.
Years ago only minor celebrities looking to kick-start their careers or has-beens cruising for comebacks made reality shows. The thinking was that sweethearts couldn’t compete with reptilian pros in the open market, but that they were so loved by their families, friends and publicists that the audience merely needed to see them in situ to fall in love.
Who knows how much Heisenberg principle takes over once the reality cameras roll in to a house (often selected for the occasion), once the slug-a-bed stars are brought back into fighting shape (surgery? pills?), and once limos, trailers and S.U.V.’s and even private planes are commandeered to accommodate the “unobtrusive” reality crew?
To a one, and Paula Abdul is no exception, celebrities on reality shows appear to exist surrounded to suffocation by stylists, assistants and makeup artists whom they consider their “best friends.” To these paid best friends, they give inane lectures and absurdist riffs about their miscellaneous needs, most of them physical. The best friends say virtually nothing, except to praise the appearance of the celebrity and offer her food and drink. With great volatility, the celebrity alternately embraces them and shouts them down.
And what would have happened without the cameras? Who knows? Certainly Fitzgerald’s cinematic writing style did as much to amplify as to critique the glamour in “The Great Gatsby” and “Tender Is the Night.” The same is no doubt in effect on Bravo, and then there’s what happens to the real person, Paula Abdul, when the series ends.
In a brass-tacks way, I’m beginning to wonder about the responsibility of E!, which televised “The Anna Nicole Show,” as well as VH1, MTV, Fox and all the other celebreality specialists. Are the producers destroying the celebrities? Are the celebrities destroying themselves? And why are all their best friends not protecting them?
Paula Abdul a Reality Series about her Life
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