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 hen I told a friend recently how much I thought she'd like So Notorious, VH1's mock reality show about Tori Spelling, she crinkled her nose and said, "Oh, I don't like Tori Spelling." Yes, yes: That's the point.
I can't imagine anyone actually liking Tori Spelling, except maybe Mr. Tori Spelling II and a niche audience of gay men. Tori Spelling is spoiled and frivolous without even being beautiful, which is one thing American audiences won't tolerate. If you want to dress up your toy dog and carry on like a diva, you better be gorgeous, or we'll despise you forever (see: Star Jones). Still, despite an initial wave of positive press about the show's self-mockery, people retained some idea that in order to like So Notorious you needed to like Tori Spelling. In fact, the show is made for people fed-up with Tori Spelling. Hell, it's made for people fed-up with the entire
culture of rail-thin, Hollywood ditzes — which these days seems to be everyone except glossy magazines and a few thirteen-year-old girls. Hey, I like hot pictures of Lindsay Lohan as much as the next red-blooded American, but when Vanity Fair and The New York Times start to blather on about her talent and cultural significance, it's just embarrassing.
So Notorious, which ended its first season on VH1 last Sunday, is written by Chris Alberghini and Mike Chessler, the men behind Murphy Brown, The Nanny, Whoopi, and Reba. Those shows could be clever but are saddled with sentimentality. So Notorious counterbalances the gushy stuff with satire; Spelling encouraged them to write with their claws out. The result isn't always laugh-out-loud funny, but it's usually fun. In one episode, Spelling cowers in the aisles of a sex-toy store to avoid being seen by Shannen Doherty. She later videotapes herself in cringe-worthy S&M mode to prove to Steven Soderbergh she can "really get into the mind of a Brazilian street whore." (The last scene shows Soderbergh's assistants howling at the recording.) She makes fun of herself so relentlessly that even people who despise her will be hard-put not to admire her pluck. It's the same wheels-off self-deprecation she brought to her role in 1999's Trick, a forgettable gay romantic comedy which called for her to perform an entire song tone-deaf and hammy.
I was skeptical that a satire about Tori Spelling would play at a time when her most notable role, as Beverly Hills 90210's ultimate cockblocker, has already been tossed into the '90s dustbin. (It's not so much that I didn't like Tori Spelling, it's that I never thought about her at all.) But you don't need to know the rumors about her bulimia or plastic surgery to think jokes about bulimia and
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Tori Spelling is spoiled and frivolous without even being beautiful, which is one thing American audiences won't tolerate.
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plastic surgery are funny. When her housekeeper, a maternal black woman she calls "Nanny," makes a sarcastic comment about her fake boobs, Spelling protests, "Nanny, these are mine!" Nanny nods patiently. "That's right. You bought 'em, they're yours." The first season ended on a bit of a weak note, with a Mother's Day storyline that reunited Spelling and her over-the-top Beverly Hills socialite mother, played by Loni Anderson with a face so pinched by plastic surgery it's more scary than funny. Still, there were some amusing moments. During church, as Tori whined about how embarrassing and inappropriate her mother was, her cell phone started ringing loudly, bringing the service to a halt.
The show was originally intended for NBC, which ordered a pilot and passed, but it works much better on VH1, which has become the sly go-to channel for couch potatoes with a weakness for pop culture and goofy countdowns. VH1's audience gets the show's inside jokes and eats up the larger Hollywood satire, like an episode in which Spelling is introduced to a trendy Scientology-style religion called "Wholeness." Even those who didn't know Spelling are now familiar with her life's major plot points. In fact, she may be more popular than she ever was, in the way that VH1 has turned Public Enemy hype man Flavor Flav into a star when he wasn't one the first time around.
These days, Tori Spelling is now back in the tabloids. A few weeks ago, Us Weekly ran a story about her then-fiancé, Dean McDermott, getting a series of ridiculous Tori Spelling tattoos in her honor. This week's People has a lavish photo spread of the couple's barefoot Fiji wedding, which took place not long after her first marriage ended in divorce. Ahh, Hollywood — there is rarely a happy ending. But with this material, there is, we can hope, a second season. n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Sarah Hepola has been a high-school teacher, a playwright, a film critic, a music editor and a travel columnist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, Salon, and on NPR. She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. |
©2006 Sarah Hepola and hooksexup.com.
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