After celebrating the fake tans and drunken antics of Italian-American youths, the US reality TV machine this week unleashed its latest ethnic portrait: Russian Dolls. And not everyone is happy.
The series, which started on Thursday last week, focuses on eight characters from New York’s Brighton Beach neighborhood, which publicists for Lifetime television call “one of the most interesting and mysterious communities in the US.”
However, while Brighton Beach, also known as Little Odessa, really is home to the US’ most famous Russian diaspora, don’t expect Dolls to be exactly a documentary.
Promotional literature promises leggy blondes obsessed with money, makeup, better bodies and jewelry, while the trailer shows main characters partying, fighting and frolicking, lingerie-clad, in bed.
Some Russian-Americans fear that despite Lifetime’s promise to go “deep” into Brighton Beach, the show will instead be a deluge of cliches about hard-drinking, vulgar and greedy Russians.
If so, Lifetime will only be following in the lucrative footsteps of MTV’s hit reality show Jersey Shore.
In that series, young Italian-Americans are filmed living in a rented beach house with little more to do than behave badly, take Jacuzzis and display flesh.
So popular has the series become that main cast members, like “Snooki” and Michael “The Situation” Sorrentino, are now celebrities. Complaints from Italian-American associations about bad taste and ethnic-stereotyping have been drowned out in the roar of success.
Mandy Stadtmiller, a TV critic who previewed Dolls for the New York Post, said: “It depicts a cartoon of what it means to be Russian in Brighton Beach. That’s why some community leaders have protested. It’s clearly all in the spirit of fun, the way anything is exaggerated on television.”
Unlike MTV’s Jersey Shore, which sequesters the hard-partying cast in a dedicated house, the heroes of Dolls will be observed in their natural surroundings. Another difference, according to the more family-orientated Lifetime, is the “multi-generational” aspect of the series.
Yet, judging by advance publicity, viewers shouldn’t expect too much in the way of wizened babushkas and fairy-tale grandfathers. Five of the cast, including “skillful flirt” Anna and “handsome lady-killer” Eddie, are in their 20s. The other three — two of them women of 47 — are so well-preserved they look barely older.
Katya Fomina, who arrived in the US from Russia at the age of 11 and works for an academic archiving service, said the scenes depicted in Dolls are not necessarily false.
“I do recognize these people. I’ve seen this type of Russian before. It’s the one that will sell — just the same as with Jersey Shore,” said Fomina, 30.
However, like other Russian-Americans, she called the show “trashy.”
Ksenia Adamovitch, who works in film and splits her time between New York and Moscow, said: “There are very strong negative stereotypes. I find it extremely insulting that out of everything that could be shown about Russian-Americans, this is what gets chosen to be on TV.”
“This is what people will inevitably associate with Russians if the show takes off,” she said.
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