‘Brooklyn 11223’: The grudge report
OXYGEN’S NEW reality show about two crews of twentysomething women from Brooklyn racks up a near-impossible achievement.
It takes a premise we’ve seen a thousand times before — young folks figuring out how to make their way through the uncharted waters of their 20s — and finds a new angle on it.
Even if you’ve watched every single other reality show ever made, you’ve never seen a show quite like this one. You will not confuse it with anything else.
In the reality game, that’s astonishing.
The long-accepted law of reality shows is that they employ constant multiple crossplots. So the minute we get bored with one, we can hop over and see if there’s a new twist in any of the others. Not “Brooklyn 11223.” While it nominally has a subplot or two for each of its eight to 10 main characters, the show is really built around one incident that happened to one character years ago and has since become her obsession.
The minute any other plot shows up, someone throws a lasso around its neck and yanks it back to the obsession, which the whole cast seems happy to continue addressing.
The leader of this group is Christie Livoti, 22, from Gravesend.
Christie once dated Roberto, until she says she heard Roberto had slept with her best friend, Joey Lynn Tekulve.
Joey Lynn sort of denies it. Roberto is nowhere in sight. Christie is now dating Matthew.
So everyone has moved on, right? Wrong. Christie also broke up with Joey Lynn, with whom she had been BFF since kindergarten, and now runs with a new crew. She tells everyone who will listen, including the cameras, how betrayed she feels. Joey Lynn and Christie’s old crew wish she’d shut up, even as further rumors surface — like Christie not only knew about Joey Lynn and Roberto, but watched. Striking while the plot is hot, the producers wisely arrange to film a scene in which Christie’s crew and Joey Lynn’s crew just happen to go to the exact same patch of Coney Island’s beach and have a verbal and physical smackdown.
It’s as messy and squalid as you’d imagine.
For the record, the show’s other subplots include Joey Lynn wanting to leave Brooklyn and Valona balancing her Gerritsen Beach life with her family’s traditional Muslim values. Stuff like that. More interesting to the producers are the long stretches where both crews behave like a cross between “The Bad Girls Club” and “Mob Wives” in training.
It’s not great television in any standard sense, and the appeal of hearing about Christie, Joey Lynn and the ghost of Roberto could soon be as gone as the Dodgers. But, not for nothin’, it’s got a style of its own.