TV Review: The D'Amelio Show
A Tragedy in 8 acts
The D’amelio show on Hulu is not what it appears to be from the advertising. The audience was lead to believe it would be the heir apparent to Keeping up with the Kardashians, a light formless show that kept the conversation about the most famous family in America afloat. The D’amelio show probably started this way, it was maybe pitched and marketed this way but after one episode it is clear that this show has become something else. The D’amelio Show is Gimme Shelter for Gen Z. It was supposed to be an easy fun representation of the culture. It did represent the culture just not the way anyone expected. The D’amelio Show becomes a dark exploration of a new kind of fame and the two girls at the center of it.
Charli D’amelio is America’s sweetheart. She is the most followed person on TikTok, the app du jour of children and social media junkies. Charli is the popular girl from your high school who you like despite her bratty friends. She is pretty and charming and a little stiff but she does not seem to have any evil in her heart. She is affable in all the ways we want her to be.
Dixie D'amelio is her older sister who is less famous but along for the ride. She has a music career that she’s trying really hard to pursue. She has less of Charli’s charm. Her vibe is very much cast out older sister. The audience can tell that Charli was the golden child long before TikTok. Dixie doesn’t have the following Charli does but she does participate in the TikTok world. In any other family her 55 million followers would be nothing to sneeze at.
The D’amelio show was supposed to capture the dynamic of a newly famous family and their reality. Instead the show plays like a dark documentary about the lives of these two girls and all the ways they are suffering under the weight of their fame. In any world, a good documentarian would look for the darkness behind this family. What are the bad parts? Where is the story? I don’t think anyone realized how bad it truly was for these girls and that it would be impossible to hide the darkness or make their lives seem breezy and fun.
Anyone with any exposure to the Internet would know that these girls are subjected to endless hate comments. No amount of self esteem workshops could prepare a teenage girl for a million people telling her to kill herself every day. It was of course going to be a necessary part of the show, how do you cope? Needed to be asked at some point. The answer turned out to be we don't. From the beginning we see the hate comments these girls get, superimposed on the screen. Unrelated to their posts, we see that they get hate for everything they do. The show will depict the girls participating in some inane activity and show us things people have said about them for just existing. It is unrelenting.
These girls are obviously unwell and it is made worse by the unending scrutiny they are placed under. Both Charli and Dixie are open about their mental health struggles both on the show and prior to it. Charli about her eating disorder and Dixie with her anxiety and depression. What differs is how the parents choose to handle it and treat their children. This is the one area where Dixie is given the attention she needs but I would say it is to her detriment. Dixie is treated with the delicacy usually reserved for people reentering society. For all intents and purposes, Dixie seems like a functioning human being who needs some help when it comes to her mental health. Dixie gets help but the way Marc and Heidi talk to her about reveals their discomfort with Dixie’s struggle. She is treated like an outcast, like a problem no one knows how to deal with. Everyone is worried about Dixie but no one knows how to care for her. No one will suggest the obvious: step away from social media.
Everything Dixie does is met with complaints about simply being famous because her sister is. From my own observations, Charli is met with half hate, half unending support, which can be its own burden to bear, from her for the most part organic audience. Dixie’s audience is all people who were fans of Charli first and Dixie does not receive this same treatment. She does not garner the same unbridled adoration as her sister. She lives in Charli’s shadow and it seems always will. No one will let her forget this. I’m not a doctor or a paid social media strategist but I think time off might be good for Dixie. From a business perspective, if they let Dixie have an air of mystery about her she might be able to get a different kind of audience. If she were to step away from the constant social media surveillance, she might feel a little better. Her career would have a chance away from Charli and her mental health would probably vastly improve.
Charli, on the other hand is a little bit adrift when it comes to mental health. In the show, she will say she is not doing well but she is not given the same treatment and help that Dixie receives. The family cannot confront that reality of both of their daughters being in that position. Charli is strong where Dixie is fragile. Marc and Heidi feel sorry for her but they can not and will not coddle her the way they coddle Dixie. Maybe because any mental health professional would tell Charli to step back in some capacity. Even if we’re not considering the other hate comments, simply all of the constant scrutiny of her body cannot be good for her eating disorder. Charli says this but we never hear of any solution from anyone in charge. Marc and Heidi again are absent.
These girls are surrounded by adults claiming to help them and guide them but who lack the necessary knowledge to relieve some of their well founded anxiety. At one point, When Dixie and Charli are going over their clothing line, there’s a yin yang design on a pair of jeans and Dixie asks if a yin yang is ok. The team around them, made up of creative directors, designers and their parents, is confused by the question. They think Dixie means in copyright terms which they assure her is fine. Charli steps in and says that she means culturally, can these two white girls in good faith put a yin yang on their jeans. The team says they’ll look into it. Dixie is unsatisfied with this answer and says that the girls will do their own research as well.
These girls have been cancelled several times over for reasons both legitimate and not. They’re careful and doing their best to make sure they can avoid controversy in the future. This seems impossible based on the people they’ve surrounded themselves with. They’re young but not so impossibly young that their concerns could not be addressed by someone else with authority. They’re not the first people to have internet fame. We have been here before and someone could guide them and help them and look out for them in the way they’re asking for. There are people older than them who live with the consequences of the yourfaveisproblematic internet culture. There are people with degrees who could impress the parents and the rest of the social media team with their qualifications and also help meet the needs of the girls.
We love to act like the internet is some great mystery and with each generation we become farther and farther away from understanding what goes on there. Under this false assumption the plight of the D’amelio family seems impossible to fix. The parents are too old to understand and the children are too young to translate. The struggle is incommunicable and therefore unfixable. Enter Quen Blackwell. In the third episode, Quen is introduced as Dixie’s friend and confidant. Quen had gained fame on Vine and turned that into a social media career. She is open about her mental health struggles but seems to be powering through. From what the cameras show me, she is exactly what Dixie needs. She is smart and has been here before. She has found a way to cope, at least more publicly than either Dixie or Charli. She is the missing link that everyone is pretending doesn’t exist.
Whenever the friends are gathered together Quen shines, both in the canned producer segments and in the more naturalistic scenes of the kids hanging out. Charli, Dixie, and Quen all see fame as a double edged sword and can speak on the bad parts. The other girls try to keep up but it’s evident they don’t understand what these girls are talking about. They see no downside, and if they do, they’re certainly not articulating it. They’re obviously jealous of Charli’s success. If Charli is the prom queen, these are the girls who split the vote for second place. We asked the question then and we ask the question now, why does she hang out with them? It is clear because this is the best Charli could find. Charli wants normalcy. She wants friends her age who interested in the things she’s interested in. The problem is that what Charli approaches with a pure heart, others pursue willing to fuck over anyone in their path.
With each episode it all starts to become too much. By episode 7, it becomes nearly impossible to stomach with no end in sight. At one point Charli does take a step back. She decides she needs to focus on dance and not social media. She sends the reality show cameras away and she doesn’t post. She spends the week presumably working with her choreographer and dancing to her heart's content. Then the cameras come back Charli has come to a conclusion about her life. She realizes that she doesn’t love to dance the way she used to. Committing to dance over social media wasn’t the solution she wanted it to be. She welcomes the return of the cameras, probably because she has no other option. She leaves us with the realization that she does not have dance anymore and doesn’t know what to do without it or where to go from here.
I believe that every young person goes through what Charli is going through at the end of the show. It happens at different times for all of us but at some point each of us must flounder. We must realize that things are no longer going according to plan. Or now it’s time for a new plan. Most of us have a hard season and work things out privately. Charli D’amelio is floundering publicly. We have to, or get to, watch her try to figure out what to do now.
In the old days we would want someone like Charli to be infallible. We would want a teflon exterior and to never see her sweat. Then we would want to tear her down until she broke. We would want to push her towards some kind of sabbatical so we could welcome her back with open arms, claiming to have been fans the whole time. That’s the cycle of celebrity we’re used to but now we live in the age of radical vulnerability, We want to see her sweat. We want to be a part of the breakdown. Her mental health struggles are our mental health struggles. We are making the barrier between the famous and non famous thinner and thinner. Which means Charli never gets her respite. We get Charli 24/7 and want her heartbreak and anxiety for consumption. We think we’re empathizing but that constant show means she never gets to have a break from us. The parasocial relationship eats away at her because we think we’re all her best friends. Her audience doesn’t understand that even if we were best friends, best friends have to go home at the end of the day.
Charli is struggling with something much bigger than herself now. She is no longer a young girl but a symbol. In the micro and most understandable version of this multifaceted problem, She is her family’s breadwinner. Every moment is accounted for. Every problem can be solved by adding another person to the payroll. A payroll that Charli, and to some extent Dixie, fund. If Charli were to walk away from this life, she leaves her family in the lurch.
In the macro, Charli is being forced to represent TikTok as a whole. She is gen z and represents all they care about. She’s some form of It Girl. As they say on It Girl Theory, my favorite podcast and my guiding light in this world, an it girl is often before her time and out of her time. She is a harbinger of doom and the fallow times to come. Charli D’amelio is very much of her time but forward thinking. She is being guided by people who are so stuck in their time. They know only the old ways. Charli thinks the way the internet thinks and this thought process is integral to her success. She has not been packaged by executives to appeal to young people, or at least she wasn’t when she started. She is a young person who appeals to young people. The guidance she has by the older generations is flawed and rooted in the past. Like the It Girls before her, she is being pulled in multiple different directions by the powers that be. She is too new and too shiny and needs to be contained. She needs to follow the old ways because the new ways are too scary. It is a difficult and dangerous situation for her to be in and I honestly wish her the best.
If Charlie is the it girl of TikTok where does that leave Dixie. Half of the brand deals are as much about Dixie as they are Charlie. You can’t sell Charlie as the perfect sister without the other sister there to sell the image. Dixie then becomes one of the new kinds of tragic figures in the age of nepotism. The less famous sister who must still compete but can’t complain, even if her complaints are limited to the family unit. The other famous example is Bella Hadid. I don’t know if these girls have more substance below the surface but it definitely hurts to watch them. They’re the only people I feel sorry for who are beautiful and rich and thin. The girls who have to be there. No one can say they don’t want them because they make their more famous sisters look better by comparison. I love them as cultural figures as it gives us a better understanding of the concept of an X factor. What is the difference between these two other than the year they were born? If we only like Charlie because she’s rich and thin and pretty, what do we make of Dixie who had the exact same circumstances?
When the cameras came into the house, I don’t think anyone knew what was being created. We could not have foreseen that this would become almost a guidebook of the new feminine archetypes social media gives us. A diary of all the ways one can be troubled and famous before they enter their bad girl eras. Every reality show is dark, whether it knows it or not. Turning the cameras on anyone with the direction, “be yourself” has always had disastrous effects. Our lives were not meant to be recorded for an audience 24/7 and yet here we are. The D’amelio show was always going to reveal a darkness about the family. No family is without darkness. We all have our secrets and fucked up dynamics and these are exacerbated by fame and wealth but I was not expecting the show to embrace the darkness. The text of the show is “look how fucked up this is” I do not see the sheen that the Kardashians or the Real Housewives get. There is no element of their life that is painted as aspirational. The girls live in a glass house, both literally and figuratively. We can see into every aspect of their lives. The professional camera crew came to show us more and didn’t like what they saw.