When Peacock introduced {that a} cache of outdated Bravo exhibits could be touchdown on the streaming service this week, I believed it could be significantly enjoyable, in a queasily nostalgic method, to revisit NYC Prep. That present, a 2009 one-season oddity meant to be a real-life Gossip Lady, was a fascination of mine again in my relative youth. I used to be in my mid-20s when it premiered, far sufficient away from teenagehood to seek out all of it exotically foolish, however perhaps shut sufficient that the children on the sequence have been nonetheless vaguely of my generational cohort. It was enjoyable anthropology, inane and awkward and surprisingly poignant.
No less than, that’s how I remembered it, and the way I coated it for work again then. Thus I eagerly dove again on this week, excited to reconnect with these wealthy metropolis youths: haughty P.C., his quietly besotted bestie Jessie, littlest playboy Sebastian, his public college paramour Taylor, nerdy Camille, timid and lovelorn Kelli. What particulars of their televised lives had I forgotten? Was P.C.’s journey to Mexico truly as subtextually fraught as I as soon as thought? Urgent play felt like stepping right into a novelty time machine, an Epcot trip that I hoped would whisk me off to the salad days of the late aughts for just a few hours.
As an alternative, I instantly felt depressed. How fallacious all of it is! On the time of the present’s airing, we have been just a few years into Fb, not but steeped within the miseries of Twitter and Instagram and TikTok. The present teeters on the sting of our present period, by which youngsters are eternally broadcasting their lives, inviting the world in. From that present-day perspective, NYC Prep is bone chilling. I sat in entrance of the TV this week desirous to yell, “Don’t go in there!” as if I used to be watching a horror film.
However we should always have identified again then, too. Whether or not or not NYC Prep foreshadowed the appearance of public adolescence, it was lots dangerous in its personal phrases. Some individuals mentioned as a lot on the time; I actually bear in mind a slew of web feedback questioning, with no small quantity of disdain, why any of us have been watching the present. A actuality sequence about wealthy teenagers making fools of themselves was not a brand new idea—there was Laguna Seaside, there was Wealthy Women. However these have been safely on MTV, land of the younger. NYC Prep’s placement on Bravo put it straight within the eyeline of grownups, individuals already then skilled to tear the Actual Housewives aside each week.
The present was in all probability neither standard nor enduring sufficient to earn its stars an excessive amount of vitriol. (And, once more, there have been no Instagram accounts to troll or in any other case harass.) However there have been nonetheless materials unfavourable results. Camille switched colleges for murky causes. There have been reviews of P.C.’s household being upset about his involvement. And naturally there are the little doubt myriad non-public embarrassments that we’ll by no means find out about. Whether or not or not any of the solid members look again on the present fondly, it was a dumb, boggling threat for a TV community and a coterie of oldsters (and viewers members) to allow them to take.
And what was it for, actually? The present is stilted and boring. The languid ramble of Laguna Seaside was a tremendous setting for untrained teenagers to make tv. However NYC Prep forces everybody right into a Housewives template—there are one million faux dinners and occasions cluttering their schedules, all meant to determine the concept they’re bustling little adults. It’s all so patently false, and the children are dangerous on the act. We have been little doubt conscious of the artifice again then, however our tolerance for such issues was maybe increased than it’s all these ragged years later. Watching this solid of kids play Restaurant and Get together is exhausting and unhappy, an interminable highschool theater manufacturing of a textual content far past their scope.
The romance is the ickiest side, pressured love triangles and dangerous kisses that, particularly on poor Taylor’s half, seem to be a coerced ordeal. She’s the one I fear about most, the youngest and least wealthy and standing within the brightest highlight. Maybe tellingly, Us Weekly’s “the place are they now” piece from just a few years in the past has no updates about her.
Perhaps it’s a mistake to deliver the present again up in any respect. NYC Prep ought to in all probability have stayed lifeless, a misplaced artifact of a less complicated and perhaps barely much less silly age. (Or, silly another way.) I believed that I’d really feel a swell of “have been we ever so younger” wistfulness watching the present, however it as an alternative stirred one thing revulsed and existentially unsettled. I immediately regretted my participation in any of it. And there’s the grim realization that we on no account realized any classes from NYC Prep. There wasn’t any efficient mass hand wringing about observing the lives of youngsters; we simply shrugged and handed them ever extra apps.
No less than, I suppose, the whole lot these days is much less codified and formal than it’s on NYC Prep, much less packaged for grownup consumption. A TikTok video floating anonymously in an enormous ocean of different movies is realer and perhaps extra innocent than a staged camera-crew outing to a Japanese restaurant in Gramercy. That’s the place, in fact, Sebastian units eyes on Taylor within the first episode: the gang sitting in an unpleasant banquette, stammering out their exposition, greater than somewhat uncomfortable, tragically naïve to all that’s coming. If solely we might cross via the display and make an apology.
