Southern Charm is a Molotov cocktail of cringe
Friendships can be difficult.
You think you know someone. You feel like you have a bond, an understanding, a like-minded frequency for the high and the low, and then — bam! — one day you find out they don’t watch Southern Charm.
“But I thought I knew you,” I want to say. How can this person be a regular viewer of The Bachelor/Bachelorette, and not have the bandwidth for this all-too-real series — currently in the maw of its fifth, amazing season on Slice — revolving around a clique of (mostly) old-moneyed dilettantes living and loving in Charleston, S.C.?
Time, I suppose, to squeeze out a Serenity Prayer. If there is one thing I am snobby about, I admit, it’s the many-faced animal kingdom of what is amorphously referred to as “reality TV.” (It’s a useless term, I will argue, akin to comparing a TBS sitcom to an HBO mega-drama in the world of “scripted” television. Not all “reality TV” is created equal.) So, yeah, while I keep up with Bachelor/Bachelorette, it is mainly for “professional” reasons, as a pop-culture reader (sigh) … but how seriously am I to take a show where one of the Romeos vying on the current season actually came festooned with a job tagline that read — and I quote — “social media participant”? Not making this up! It’s the basic-ness of the people on the show that stun-guns me every time I turn it on. Southern Charm, meanwhile … oh. Southern Charm is a sort of art.
Yes, it follows many of the tropes of a reality serial — people fall out, people fall in, there is outrageous squabbling and absurdist partying — but in its minute observation of a very particular part of America, it is Jane Goodall-like in its aim.
GOVANI continued on E8
As a disciple from the start, I agree with one critic who wrote: “The show’s most fixating tension lies at the intersection where the cast’s anachronistic Old South politesse and the exhibitionist demands of modern reality television meet.”
How many reality shows, after all, can boast a character like Shep Rose whose old-clan creds go as far back as F. Scott Fitzgerald? The author actually based the golf-playing Jordan Baker character in The Great Gatsby — Nick’s romantic interest — on Rose’s greataunt, Edith Cummings.
“Yes. My great aunt was the first female athlete on the cover of Time magazine,” confirms the fella who comes off as a charismatically hapless, if ever well-read, Peter Pan.
Then, there’s another castmember, the reformed crazypants of the bunch, Kathryn Dennis, who is a direct descendant of John C. Calhoun, the seventh vice-president of the United States under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.
Whitney Sudler-Smith — the creator of the show, who also wades through it — counts multiple stepdads in his personal bio, including one, psychiatrist Edward Stitt Fleming, who was not only related to James Bond conjuror Ian Fleming, but also founded the Psychiatric Institutes of America in the 1960s. Go figure!
Then, there’s fan favourite Patricia Altschul, SudlerSmith’s mother who, on the show, doles out both advice and martinis to her son’s friends, and exists on a spacetime continuum somewhere between Auntie Momma and Elizabeth Taylor in an old White Diamonds commercial.
Much-married, and deeply arch — especially when espousing on the Geisha arts — she’s no dummy either. She used to lecture in art history at George Washington University. And, hey, if you don’t believe me about Patricia’s icon-worthy-ness, just ask Lady Gaga. She’s the one who once out-ofblue tweeted this: “Patricia on #SouthernCharm, like looking’ in the damn mirror. Cheers queen.” The message finished off with three emojis — naturally — including a diamond, cocktail and lipstick. BOOM!
The genesis of the show was an interesting one, as SudlerSmith has explained: “Initially, I come from more of a film background … I did this pilot thinking it was going to be a documentary kind of exploring the myth of the Old South and reconstruction and all this bullsh-t. And my agent said at the time, ‘No, no, no, this should be a TV show, these characters are all compelling …’”
The basic idea? “We kind of wanted to have a bit of that Downton Abbey upstairs/ downstairs thing,” with “some of the fun tone of Animal House … And all of it with a Bravo feel (home to the House- wives galaxy). I think we’ve stayed true to that vision for the most part.”
For a long time, its biggest juice revolved around Thomas Ravenel — a former politician and very definition of Good Ol’ Boy who once actually went to jail for 10 months for drug trafficking — and his on-off, way younger squeeze, the aforementioned Kathryn, whom he managed to knock up not once but twice! All within the span of the life of the show.
Think of them as a kind of inky-dark answer to Heathcliff and Catherine. With a dash of Get Out.
This year though, it’s all tipped over, Malcolm Gladwell-speaking, I think. And not entirely for reasons that the producers can be too happy about. Onscreen — particularly in the insane episode that just aired in Canada this week — the show has pivoted around a thirsty new character named Ashley, who is the fresh woman in Thomas’s life and whose “hero” is Melania Trump.
Going after her husband’s ex in a way that instantly put her on my Top Five Reality Villains list, she’s become, as one fan tweeted, a rare uniter in America: “#Southerncharm and our dislike of Ashley is the only thing my friends and family can agree on. We can’t discuss politics without getting into a fight so we talk #Southerncharm …”
Off-screen, though, is where the real Jaws theme can be heard, and what has brought Southern Charm the kind of #MeToo press it was probably not looking for: Thomas, as People reported recently, is accused of now two sexual assault charges, including one by his former nanny. This is all playing out well after the current season was already in the can, and now the rumours say that the dude has been fired from the show. No one knows for sure.
It all amounts to a Molotov cocktail of cringe. But in the context of the reality TV arts and sciences, an unmissable one. If Thomas — or T-Rav, as he’s sometimes called — really does finally get his just desserts, it will be a fitting coda to a moment, two seasons back, when Kathryn — whilst referencing her isolation from the rest of the group — actually referenced The Scarlet Letter.
Like I said: This is not your average reality show, and it’s not your average reality either.