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07. Rich Girls with Hannah Becker
104 Plays1 year ago
Is it a coincidence that in the fall/winter of 2003 two shows aired about pairs of wealthy heiress best friends? In our first episode of the two part series on Eat The Rich television, Helen and guest Hannah Becker discuss MTV's Rich Girls, a reality television show starring Ally Hilfiger (daughter of designer Tommy Hilfiger) and Jamie Gleicher (daughter of a different rich guy). The show is perhaps best remembered today for its depiction of the New York City blackout in August '03 — much less impressive upon rewatch sadly — but it's a time capsule show about friendships, early reality programming, and caprese salad. Unlike The Simple Life, which starred fellow heiresses Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, Rich Girls didn't have a format, but what it lacked in structure it made up for in heart.
LINKS
Song of the Week: Dandy Warhols We Used To Be Friends
Income Inequality in the United States 1913-1998 (Quarterly Journal of Economics, Feb 2003)
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
There has to be one of the skinny women who is the fat person in every show with two women.
00:01:02
Speaker
Welcome to Class of 03, the podcast about the year 2003 and all the ways it's shaped our world and our lives today.
Focus on MTV's Rich Girls
00:01:11
Speaker
I'm your host, Helen Grossman, and this is episode seven, Rich Girls.
00:01:17
Speaker
Something bizarre was in the air in 2003 because it was a trend. I'm not going to call it a coincidence that in the fall, there were two shows about pairs of wealthy heiress best friends and all the ridiculous stuff they did together. And we, the viewers were encouraged to gawk at and ridicule them.
00:01:45
Speaker
The first was, of course, The Simple Life, which plucked LA party girls Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton out of Beverly Hills and placed them in the middle of Arkansas. Every day, they were assigned different jobs that they were inevitably fired from. We're going to talk about The Simple Life in the next episode of Class of 03, so hit that subscribe button if you haven't yet, because you're not going to want to miss that one.
00:02:11
Speaker
But the show that we're talking about today, it was an MTV program about Ally Hilfiger, who was the daughter of designer Tommy Hilfiger, and Jamie Gleicher, who was the daughter of a wealthy New York businessman.
00:02:26
Speaker
They were best friends and high school seniors, real legit class of 03 girlies, and decided to broadcast their friendship on the most popular channel amongst their age group. Really kind of a brave thing to do if you think about it for the time. And they showed the world their lives as they went to prom and graduated high school and spent the summer together before they went off into their respective futures.
Female Friendships in 2003 Media
00:02:54
Speaker
Unlike the Simple Life, which had this clear structure and premise around Paris and Nicole being given these assignments and sort of doing ridiculous tasks, the rich girls go shopping, they go to London, they get in fights, they make up, they start college, they do more shopping. There's really a lot of shopping in it.
00:03:17
Speaker
So there are several different parallels and angles that you could take to unpack these two shows, to compare them, to talk about them together. When I first rewatched them, what struck me was how these shows are both at their core stories about female friendship. In 2003, we didn't have a lot of pop culture that portrayed the nuances of teenage friendship. We especially didn't have a lot of pop culture that portrayed the nuances of female friendships.
00:03:48
Speaker
There's the social politics of friend groups, the shifting allegiances, the body image issues, the jealousy, the emergent sexuality, the heightened emotions.
00:04:00
Speaker
Of the few examples that I can think of, female friendships and female dynamics among young women were often represented as dangerous, sexy, or we, the viewers, were forced to compare and pit the women against one another. Take iconic 2003 movie 13.
00:04:21
Speaker
which is about a seventh grader, played by Evan Rachel Wood, named Tracy. And she makes a new friend, Evie, played by Nikki Reed. This is like the story, supposedly, of her life. And Tracy becomes immersed in Evie's world of drugs, sex, and crime. There's also the most iconic friend show of the 2000s, Sex and the City, which is not about teens at all. So we're gonna strike that off the list.
00:04:51
Speaker
Real stories, stories that show the depth and the tears of laughter and tears of frustration, of being a teenager with so many feelings where every single day everything about your friendship is the most important thing in the world, those stories are hard to find. They still are.
00:05:10
Speaker
But in a TV production landscape dominated by male executives and an audience inhabiting the male gaze, not necessarily by choice but by reflex, shows like The Simple Life and Rich Girls were positioned as comedies for us to laugh at the main subjects.
00:05:26
Speaker
Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie were best friends, and it's clear that they could not have done this show without each other. The show just simply could not have sustained without their delicate balance of personality.
00:05:41
Speaker
And the same goes for Rich Girls, a show that Allie and Jamie supposedly pitched themselves to MTV. In both these shows, their inside jokes and bestie vernacular is this electric current between them. One that the audience only catches brief momentary glimpses of in between or in spite of the show's insistence that we laugh at them.
00:06:07
Speaker
The other thing that really struck me about these two shows is what we will refer to in this episode as Eat the Rich Entertainment.
Discussion on Income Inequality Study
00:06:17
Speaker
So, in February 2003, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark article by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, entitled Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998. The paper used tax records spanning the 20th century to map out a U-shaped pattern, a curve, in the total income held by the top 10% of income earners in the 20th century.
00:06:46
Speaker
And this U-shaped curve is attributed to a swing from the early 20th century, which started out with high income inequality, to the mid-century when things sort of leveled out due to FDR's income tax hikes, the Great Depression, World War II. And then the curve swings up again in the 1980s after the Reagan administration's tax cuts.
00:07:10
Speaker
The authors of this article call for progressive taxation, which means that the higher your income, the more taxes you pay. And in this article, they end it with this rather prophetic statement. Quote, the decline of progressive taxation observed since the early 1980s in the U.S. could very well spur a revival of high wealth concentration and top capital incomes during the next few decades.
00:07:40
Speaker
That's right now. The Piketty and Saya's model and paper was highly influential. It served as a basis for other studies on inequality and has been cited thousands of times. And just weeks before the Quarterly Journal of Economics published this paper, a documentary titled Born Rich premiered at Sundance.
Documentary on Wealth Gap
00:08:01
Speaker
The film was created and directed by Jamie Johnson, heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune.
00:08:06
Speaker
And in the documentary, which started as his classic air NYU film school thesis project, in this documentary, Jamie interviews other young heirs, including Ivanka Trump, about their experience growing up wealthy. And this film explored the disconnect between the ultra rich, especially those from old money families, and their inability to speak about their wealth.
00:08:36
Speaker
and how this inability alienates them from society.
00:08:41
Speaker
In the film, Jamie discusses the widening wealth gap and the alienation and disparity between extremely wealthy people and average people in society. So this is setting the scene and the two simultaneous mental tracks that we're on as we discuss the original Nepo babies from Rich Girls and The Simple Life. There's a growing fascination and growing awareness of just how isolated these women are from normies.
00:09:08
Speaker
But there's also an interesting dynamic in which the resentment about this is being placed on young women. Women who mostly just seem like they're creating this reality shows to cash in on their family names and strike out on their own. And while they're doing that, they're having a great time, theoretically, with their best friends. So bear that in mind.
00:09:30
Speaker
For this episode, I spoke with my dear friend Hannah Becker about Rich Girls, which we both rewatched with fresh eyes for the podcast and she brought to our conversation such a thoughtful and incisive analysis of a show that most people would probably not see the critical value of exploring. I really, really loved this conversation and I think you will too.
00:09:52
Speaker
So while the rich girls may be lost to history, as Hannah says in the episode, they aren't lost to us anymore, not to us in the class of 03.
Analyzing Rich Girls Show
00:10:01
Speaker
Here's Rich Girls with Hannah Becker.
00:10:12
Speaker
Hi, I'm Hannah Becker. And in 2003, I was in eighth grade. So today we're going to be talking about the MTV show, Rich Girls, about Allie Hilfiger and Jamie Gleicher to New York City school girls.
00:10:32
Speaker
Not really school girls. Yeah, seniors. They were class of 03. It starts with them essentially graduating high school and then follows them through the summer after they graduate. It starts with them going to prom. It starts with them. You're right. It starts with them going to prom. Iconic, of course, they go to prom. Jamie doesn't lose her virginity. There's trauma, you know, but then it ends with them sort of embarking on their adult life paths or, you know,
00:11:01
Speaker
how the show presents it and then of course the reality was a very different thing. So what was your experience with this show in O3? Did you watch it when it was on? I absolutely watched it as it aired. And I think at that time, like the channel to be watching was MTV. So it was kind of like an always on. So I'm not sure how much
00:11:29
Speaker
I selected it versus like opted in via always watching MTV. Like you got home, you turned on TRL and then like until the end of the day, I feel like it was around. I also have recollections of like watching it either with my mom or like in the same room as my mom, like doing like homework, my mom like making dinner and then this being on maybe. She was sort of like shocked by the
00:11:59
Speaker
the freedom of these youth. Yeah. Just the access that they had, how they were going all over the place. The privilege and the access the privilege gave them, that there were no boundaries. I also grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, so I think city, his lifestyle was a shocking difference. Yeah. Mom, can you drive us to the mall?
00:12:23
Speaker
Right. Right. That's like what most people's sort of upbringing was like if you weren't a rich, an MTV rich girl. Yeah. If you didn't have your own limo, yeah, that you were annoyed that your friends just wouldn't pay you back for despite having in every other episode of the show. Right. Right. To her credit, though, Ali could drive, which I was really impressed by. I mean, she ultimately picks up Jamie and drops her off at college. So, you know, yes.
00:12:50
Speaker
So she can get from the city to Connecticut is what I deduced. And I mean, I think that's pretty brave. Yeah.
00:12:59
Speaker
18-year-old city driver? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, she also clearly has access to planes. Like, she flies to Nantucket. They fly to London. They fly to Seattle. They fly to LA. But yeah. When they introduce the episode where they're going to Nantucket and they say, Ali has a stomach virus, so her mom wants her to fly instead, I just really had a giggle about how they had to introduce a new girlfriend just so somebody could drive Jamie to Nantucket.
00:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Were there episodes or like moments from the show that before you rewatched it for this like that you specifically remembered? I would say that New York City blackout episode indelible in my mind. I just feel like my major impression of this show was like shopping, just a lot of shopping was my recollection. And
00:13:58
Speaker
It's interesting how little actually happens in any single episode. So I'm like not surprised upon rewatching that I don't have deep memories of the show because unlike sort of current reality TV where there's like always a theme or a plot, there's like real long spaces in the show where just like, it's just two girls and they have to figure out what they're doing in a day. And there's no time you've been spent figuring out what they're doing.
00:14:26
Speaker
or seeing that as the viewer. Yeah, it's just like, they're gonna do this thing. And it's 20 minutes and we're done. Yeah, it's just like a real slice of life. But also an abnormal like not a relatable life necessarily. I mean, in the first episode, it's fun. Like the shopping definitely stands out. Because in the first episode, they're like, we stomp around this city like it's our shopping haven. You know, we have to call my uncle sort of Uncle Michael H. And he's gonna show us
00:14:54
Speaker
this vintage store that we can't access without being stylists. And I think it's the first episode where they do a lot of zooming in on receipts being like $1,500. Yeah. $2,500.
00:15:09
Speaker
Yeah, or like when Jamie buys a laptop for college and it's almost $3,000 and in 2003 dollars, $2,600, $3,000 would have been, you know, $5,500 today, which is also crazy. Which leads me to one of my favorite quotes of any episode that I watched, which was when we somehow meet Lucille Ball's granddaughter.
00:15:38
Speaker
And she gets asked, Kelly asks her, so do people ask you like, are you rich? And she goes,
00:15:46
Speaker
Well, let's put it this way. If my grandparents had $20,000 in 1950, what do you think? And that's a whole moment of the episode. Of course, that's in the van en route to Six Flags. Six Flags. Which is also, I mean, you mentioned the blackout episode. It's funny to think of that's the most famous episode of the show in a way that's kind of the most important
00:16:15
Speaker
time capsule that they actually captured. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I guess they realized that like the camera equipment, like they needed power to actually power the production, but they like they really did not. They did not show a lot of the power outage. They built up the drama without ever kind of making us feel it because they like were like
00:16:44
Speaker
Look at them running, like Allie's running around the city having the time of her life and Jamie's having seven different panic attacks, about 25 different things. Including lighting candles, her mom sitting near a window, her mom saying, did you know about the last power outage? Her mom saying, do you think this is because of the Iranians? Her brother talking to her mom. Her maybe aunt being there.
00:17:14
Speaker
Yeah, well, Ali's like, I get to take the bus.
Comparison with Other Reality Shows
00:17:19
Speaker
Ali's like experiencing life of the people. And she's like, we went up to try to get in the Tommy Hilfiger store. And they were like, the power's out. We can't let you in. And she's like, oh, I guess that's a good thing. But also, we know that man inside.
00:17:33
Speaker
Yeah, and then once they get in, in the midst of this blackout, they're just like, it's so nice that no one's in the store and we're just like looking through all the racks of clothing. They're shopping. Yeah, it's another moment to shop. There are a few really notable moments I think when they try to make Jamie and Allie look like exact opposites of one another. I think one of them is the very beginning of the graduation episode where
00:17:58
Speaker
Jamie is commenting on, like, my degree feels like the culmination of my entire academic performance, and that's how I feel today at graduation. We also see she's giving a speech. The one quote they pull from Ali is that she's upset that her still sort of wet hair is frizzy under her cap, and her dad, like, nags her so hard in his speech about, like, the fact that she graduated with honors. Oh, and Ali's wearing uggs, and Jamie's mom is like, you have the best shoes there, and she's wearing, like, little prissy pumps.
00:18:29
Speaker
They're just like, could you believe these two girls could be best friends? Right. And like, what binds them together is their materialistic tendencies. They both have rich dads. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. This is early reality programming. You know, it's on around the same time that The Simple Life is on. It's on, you know, a year after the Osborne's. To me, that feels like the closest comparison.
00:18:58
Speaker
feels like there's not producer-imposed narrative compared to like a lot of what I feel like the reality we're inundated with now is, where everything feels like it's really managed by production or like, and yeah, Bravo is like creating each season's concepts or something like this. It doesn't feel Real Housewife yet, which I think is why it feels like a little void of content, or I think the reason why it feels
00:19:28
Speaker
feels like under produced in some ways compared to things like The Simple Life where I feel like all of it was, which I never watched, but I feel like you couldn't escape because it was constantly like clips of it for next week's episode in commercials was very part of life. And that show felt like so much more produced because they were like placing Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie into situations versus this was just
00:19:54
Speaker
Jamie and Allie and this is this week in their life. I mean, they must have shot this only in like two months. Yeah. It's like definitely the end of the year. So maybe May, May to August is this whole show. Yeah. Yeah. And then it starts airing in October, you know, so that's a really quiet turnaround. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I wonder though,
00:20:18
Speaker
you know, with the lack of structure and the lack of like a conceit of a plot. This week, the girls are going to London and like in London, they're going for this reason, right? Like, which is how we would potentially frame a reality show now or like an episode now is like, there's a purpose and they're achieving that purpose and there's like a reason that they're going and that's, we're gonna achieve something by the end of this episode. They're just like going to London for no reason, really.
00:20:46
Speaker
But like in that space, do you feel like we get more of a truth to like their dynamic of their friendship? I felt so disconnected overall in the show from the idea of them as friends. I think it felt like we're almost the third friend in a friendship group, but it doesn't feel like the show is truly about their friendship as much as it is about
00:21:14
Speaker
being an 18 year old girl with extreme privilege growing up in Manhattan, turning 18 on the cusp of taking off into adult life. Yeah. They supposedly were the ones who like brought this idea to MTV, right? Like they were like, when I read that, I was shocked. Yeah. The point of view that we're getting about them isn't like tenderness towards their friendship. It's like, look at how ridiculous they are in their own unique ways.
00:21:43
Speaker
Well, and so I was trying to figure out a lot of times when we were seeing the two girls, like they, they feel like kind of classically like foils sort of, we have like Allie and she's a little bit like a little bit more childish and playful and a little bit more like fanciful and free. And then Jamie, who is like clearly very anxious has like,
00:22:10
Speaker
basically every type of interpersonal problem that you could drum up in your like 18 year old life, she comes into contact with. And when I said the thing about like Ali wears Uggs and Jamie's in these pumps, I feel like they do a lot to kind of demonstrate contrast between them without ever doing much to bring us back together with them as a pair. But I also feel like we're getting
00:22:39
Speaker
and trying to like set the audience up in relationship to these two girls. I've been trying to kind of figure out why they're seen as dumb so often. Like I don't think either of these two women
Portrayal of Women in 2003 Media
00:22:52
Speaker
are dumb. And that also sort of plays hand in hand with like this simple life thing of was the producer's goal to like dumb down women because there was like a love of dumbing down women through media in general.
00:23:09
Speaker
was their goal to dumb down these women because if we're going to consume the ultra-riches life and not feel like just deep resentment towards them, we have to see them as dumb so that we can feel better than them. They're clearly these two girls who they talk about that Ethiopia thing, which they call basically that Ethiopia project thing so much. They're trying to actively demonstrate that they're not idiots, that they're not discompassionate, that they're rich,
00:23:38
Speaker
What's that tag that they have? It's like just because we're rich doesn't mean we're bad people is like the tag from the advertisements for the show. So like they're doing a lot content wise to try to say that they're not dumb. And yet production wise, these girls who are 18 year old leaving New York City, who like one doesn't have a license,
00:24:00
Speaker
and the other lives in New York City where you basically wouldn't learn to drive anyway, don't know how to pump gas for themselves. I'm like, is it privileged? Sure. But is it also what it's like to be an 18-year-old or something who just got their driver's license? Totally.
00:24:17
Speaker
It's produced as like, look at these demos trying to pump gas. What idiots. They can't figure out a credit card machine. And you're like, how many times have you put your credit card in, taken it back, and it says, like, no, you did it too fast. It's happened to me a million times, and I don't think I'm dumb. Yeah, all the time. Yeah. You're definitely not dumb. And neither, you know, I don't think either of the women are dumb either. I mean, Jamie ends up going to Barnard, right? Like, incredible college, you know.
00:24:45
Speaker
It was Jamie's top pick. It was our top choice, our childhood dream.
00:25:01
Speaker
What do you think the show's point of view is on Ally, on Jamie, and then like on the two of them? You know, you talked about presenting them as foils. Yeah. Like there are a lot of moments in the show where like the music, the editing really is like giving us a sort of perspective on how we're supposed to feel about them, but also individually and who they are.
00:25:29
Speaker
I mean, the one thing that is really stuck with me since my rewatch of a lot of it today is that so much of Jamie's content is about her being stressed. So much of it is about being stressed. I'm also really fascinated by the fact that to me, Jamie is very obviously Jewish and how much that red kind of
00:25:56
Speaker
across the country as being as obvious as it is to me. I mean like partially at one point like mom saying blessings over candles during the blackout like there's some like very overt Judaism and then there's other like different cues um
00:26:11
Speaker
They didn't explain what a putz was until six episodes later, but Michael V is definitely a putz. Absolute putz, a putz head. It was just so funny. I love the idea of her aunt going up to him at her graduation party and being like, I heard you're a putz. Hero, true hero of the show.
00:26:35
Speaker
Yeah, no, also the man who goes up to him on a bench and is like, you seem pretty insecure if you would be so mean to a man who just comes up to you on a bench. Like adults were on Michael V at that graduation party and I was there for it. But yes, Jewish. Jamie Fields is very Jewish to me. They feel like they make her plot line. I like don't know how much the anxiety and the Judaism and the New Yorker feels like
00:27:00
Speaker
stereotypical and how much of it was like, that is all the energy that girl was giving off at the time. And I mean, she's going through like one of the largest life transitions you can go through. And so it's reasonable that that was a stressful period of time. I also had the sensation that Jamie felt like she was really currently like Jennifer Coolidge vibes.
00:27:22
Speaker
she like constantly has a cigarette, she's always wearing leopard print. And she like just is giving off the energy of a woman 20 years older than she is. Absolutely. And it doesn't help that whenever she's on on the screen with her mom, like they look so much alike, like they really are presented more like peers than as
00:27:41
Speaker
And her mom is like around all the time, either for the sake of like, they're actually friends, she wants to be on the TV show, she's trying to be mindful of her daughter on the TV show, who knows what it is. Like, her mom is around a lot. Jamie feels like she's seen as this like person who's like very bound by her responsibilities and Ali seems very free as
00:28:02
Speaker
a girl with all the money in the world, right? Like we've got Jamie going in the last episode to her women's studies class and Ali is organizing for like 600 pairs of jeans. Like they make Ali seem very superficial, even though I think ultimately Ali keeps over and over again trying to describe herself as creative. They let her have like talk about how she's like, I want to explore witchcraft.
00:28:27
Speaker
This might sound scary, but I want to explore witchcraft is something she's kind of a manic pixie dream girl.
Cultural References and Influence
00:28:33
Speaker
She's like enigmatic. She's like very effortless. She's always in like the white tank top and the little denim mini skirt. And Jamie's got on like full makeup. And I think there's a lot of,
00:28:45
Speaker
thinness and fatness that comes into the conversation of how they're portrayed too. Definitely. Which is, I mean, kind of conversation of the times, like everybody who wasn't as skinny as Ali is in the show was a fat person. And that is 2003 for you. Nicole Richie was the fat person. Exactly. There has to be one of the skinny women who is the fat person in every show with two women.
00:29:14
Speaker
And that clearly also impacts these women, because we hear about it afterwards. I noticed a few things about them and in thinking back on 2003 culture that feels like they're kind of really prototypical to a lot of the female characters that feel really ultra iconic from this time period. I think the rich girls are very much lost to history and shall never be reborn, but there's a part of the episode
00:29:45
Speaker
of Fourth of July where they're eating lobster and Jamie says no to butter because calories and God forbid. And then Ally goes like, what are calories anyway? And like, what is butter? And it's just like, there's no way Tina Fey did not watch this and say, is butter a carb or mean girls? Like there's no way that didn't totally. These two are kind of iconically the Blair and Serena of Gossip Girl. Like one is a little bit more organized
00:30:14
Speaker
like notably anxious and like driven, goal-oriented, driven the Blair, that is Jamie. And then Ally is the free-spirited, like somehow lux into everything, effervescently, effortlessly beautiful kind of character. That's for each Ally and the Blair. Yeah, magnetic to everyone around. Everyone wants to be friends with her. Everyone's jealous of each other for being friends with her. Yes. Like she somehow is the drama, despite also not doing maybe anything.
00:30:42
Speaker
I think the insight, especially with something like Gossip Girl, where it takes place in the literal setting that these two girls have also created for us in Rich Girls, I don't think.
00:30:53
Speaker
Gossip Girl really exists if we never get to view that through Rich Girls. There were moments, I guess, watching it where I was truly like, these girlies are friends. Like, there was the one scene where like, Ali's like laughing so hard, she like pees her pants and she's like, and I it made me
00:31:13
Speaker
I felt it right like there were brief moments like that because you don't get a lot of them you get them declaring it you're my best friend she's my best friend like I've never felt you know I've known this girl my whole life this other girl Liz but with Jamie who I've been friends with for a year like it's so deep our friendship is so deep I like feel very positively towards these two girls and rewatching this I think
00:31:37
Speaker
I'm not sure I would have had that perception of them in 2003. I don't think I disliked them in 2003. I just think I was a little bit more deeply critical of them then.
Impact of Editing on Show's Portrayal
00:31:47
Speaker
And now I'm sort of like, who can imagine putting yourself out there like this is like my first
00:31:53
Speaker
question and watching this. But yeah, there's like a buzziness to their friendship. You can tell the tenuousness of them knowing that they're about to go into these different steps of their life. And I think there is something really nostalgic that touches to not my 2003 nostalgia, but just the being that youth and like having these like fleeting, but like so passionate and deeply important moments in your friendship. Yeah, like little periods that burn so hot.
00:32:21
Speaker
like friendships that feel so intense when you're experiencing them. I mean, you can tell, right? Like you can see that the dynamic between them and like the sort of the energy and vitality between them that like they went and pitched this to MTV and you can see like, yeah, these girls are best friends. Like, and maybe it was like the presence of the cameras or the editing or something. It's interesting because they are producers on this show. They clearly didn't have like edit
00:32:51
Speaker
privileges, but they were given producer credit because the editing is not very generous to them or to their friendship. Clearly they're no longer friends. They weren't friends after the show aired. But in shows like The Simple Life, like what makes The Simple Life so fun to watch now is that even though the editing and the and the perspective
00:33:16
Speaker
the show is like look at these dumb girls like trying to work at Sonic like they're so stupid and like you get the camera you know you know showing townspeople who can't believe that Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie are like in their town writing lewd messages on the marquee signs like you can actually glimpse
00:33:39
Speaker
from them, from Nicole and Paris that they're very aware of how they're going to be portrayed. They're very aware of like, I know that you're doing this to make fun of me. I know that we're going to be the butt of the joke here, but because we know that we're actually like subverting it and we're making you the butt of the joke. You know, like there's like a very interesting wink that happens, which is why the show is so fun to watch. And I just feel like
00:34:06
Speaker
this show and it's pure genuine, you know, like in just the fact that these girls were so trusting of the production ultimately is their downfall and the downfall of the show. They thought they were making a video diary, I think. Like to them, they were like, this is like our summer, 2003. Like and it's interesting, though, that you think about the like subversion with Paris and Nicole and the
00:34:36
Speaker
situations they were in. Because my perception, I never watched The Simple Life because it always felt like these rich girls are making poor people feel bad. But I think there is really this interesting ownership over the gaze that is something that these girls on rich girls don't have. And it's really hard to identify who is ultimately the butt of the joke in The Simple Life that makes it uncomfortable as a viewer.
00:35:05
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Listen, I can't recommend The Simple Life anymore. I truly have watched it. I've rewatched it multiple times. The first season, they're in one place. They're on one farm. They're staying with one family. And the family was clearly given the directive of teaching these privileged girlies about morality.
00:35:29
Speaker
and about like morality and about like work ethic and like, OK, you know, like living on the farm and, you know, being part of a family. And we're supposed to feel I think like they're insubordinate, right? Like they're not they're not being good house guests or whatever. But they're it is really interesting because I feel like they really toe the line quite well of like not being disrespectful.
00:35:58
Speaker
to the people of the town and to the people of the home who they're staying in, but also being aware of, like, this is not an okay situation that you're trying to put on
Heiress Trend in Reality TV
00:36:10
Speaker
us. And if you're going to put it on us, then we're going to, like, make the most out of it and be funny with it, you know? We'll be bratty about it, yeah. Exactly, exactly. Is this a genre of TV called, like, punish the rich? Is that, like, what this, like, heiress revolution is about? Like, there is clearly, like,
00:36:28
Speaker
I think rich girls, we call it rich girls, but again, it's like also heiresses. There's like an heiress moment happening in 2003. Yeah. Which is funny to kind of think about our current nepo baby fascination, because they are essentially the same thing, just like heiresses don't inherently try to also create art in a medium of their parents.
00:36:50
Speaker
choosing. Yeah, I mean, I think the Osborns is also like part of this genre as well. I feel like the Osborns were always like freaks though. Totally. They're in the sub genre of freak of freak rich. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The genre of freak rich. Yeah, they just feel like so much more
00:37:08
Speaker
Like, you're looking at a sideshow that happens to be wealthy when you watch the Osborns as a reality show. Is Ozzy going to emerge from a coffin while yelling at his son for spending too much on his credit card? It feels like that's... We just put a Halloween lens on the rich family. What do you think...
00:37:38
Speaker
Like, what do you take away from this show now, right? Like, having watched it when you were in eighth grade, now as an adult, watching it. Like, what is your takeaway from it?
00:37:50
Speaker
being able to watch this back and not feel horribly cringe to be able to watch this back and to not feel like these girls were monsters and to be able to watch this back and have like compassion for the idea that these women put themselves out there at this incredibly vulnerable moment in their lives on the precipice of something that felt monumental to them. So they were like particularly in a tenuous mind space and to have come out with only this and it couldn't honestly, I think it's like a blessing for them that this
00:38:19
Speaker
doesn't exist really basically anywhere except for one YouTube channel online. Like it's I think probably better for them as women to exist now with this being like three articles that you occasionally can find online and a blip in our 2003 and I feel good not feeling scarred by it I think in the rewatch because I think there's a lot of things that have aged even worse.
00:38:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really, that's a really, really good, good point and good takeaway. Yeah. I mean, I feel really, I think because I'm like, where are they now? Like that's where most of the articles are. And it's like, they're no longer friends or like, they stop being friends right after it. Like that just struck me. It struck me as so sad, you know, because they clearly took a leap of faith. They clearly thought they were being independent. They, you know, there was, this was a moment of innovating the form of reality TV and like,
00:39:14
Speaker
that was sort of my takeaway. There are a lot of episodes where I'm just like, this is so boring. This is such boring. There's a whole episode that's just about Jamie's dog getting sick and the 20 minute episode is mostly just shots of the dog.
00:39:31
Speaker
And at the same time, I'm like, OK, well, we actually don't see a lot of shows that are this free wheeling that are like not as structured, unplanned, unplanned, unstructured, uninteresting a lot of the time. Unwritten. Like, I don't feel like a lot of this was the manipulation of the producers. And that is so rarefied from any television, let alone reality television.
00:40:02
Speaker
let alone the reality television that's about to happen right after this. Like I think that is truly unique and part of why it's boring. And I think that's like, both of those are good things to keep in mind. The producers have some value and also they seemingly are very sinister.
00:40:17
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And they both seem like really well-intentioned young women who are on the precipice of discovering themselves. Yeah, they're just sweet little rich girls.
00:40:36
Speaker
What I do feel bad about is that I think that like at this particular moment in time with reality television, people didn't realize and with the intersection of like reality TV and the internet, like people didn't realize the sort of toxicity of like putting yourself out there in this way.
Impact on Participants' Lives
00:40:56
Speaker
And so knowing what we know now about like,
00:40:58
Speaker
you know, I was just reading an interview with Jamie from like five years ago, where she talks about going to Barnard, which of course we know is her dream school number one choice. This starts airing in October of her freshman year, you know, and she was contractually obligated to have the camera crew with her for her first week of school, which is so embarrassing. You know, like, I'm, I'm for the listeners, I'm
00:41:25
Speaker
like folding in onto myself at the idea of having to have that experience. Yeah. So like, I can't even imagine, I think that like for her in this interview, she was just like, I hadn't, I didn't recognize the reality of like what it would be like that, what this product would ultimately be like, how it would be edited, how it would portray us. She was talking about how she put, you know, a whiteboard outside of her, um, her dorm room door.
00:41:52
Speaker
and people would write messages on it that were like, go kill yourself. Like just horrible things. And then on top of that, it's like the show starts airing and not just as she dealing with like being a known entity and a sort of reality TV celebrity on campus. Then on top of that, there's also the internet, right? There's like people making comments on the internet. There's forums, there's chat rooms, there's all that.
00:42:19
Speaker
inescapable. And so Jamie drops out of college after her first term and takes three years off and is in rehab, is in eating disorder treatment in the psychiatric hospital for like a lot of that time. That's that kind of mental health
00:42:42
Speaker
problem is often can be characterized also as rich people problems. Yeah, it's an interesting way it kind of all ties back into this larger theme of their characterizes rich girl, she then ends up with this rich girl problem of having this eating disorder based off of her public image, based off the fact that she was on a TV show called rich girls. It's right of like a snake eating its own tail in this way. Yeah, but it's
00:43:07
Speaker
and you can see it happen to her, right? Like you can see it happen to her and I like don't think the show alone is to be considered at fault for her body image because we see it as a theme in the show throughout from the first episode basically, in part because Michael V, who I hope is having a terrible life right now.
00:43:30
Speaker
The putts. He says a lot of mean things to her. He just repeatedly says a lot of mean things to her that often have to do with her body. So like she's getting this messaging from a lot of places. 2003 is a hard year to be getting messaging about body image from anywhere publicly.
00:43:47
Speaker
And then she puts herself out in a public forum of being on MTV, which is like, you want every teen to see you and have an opinion about you. This is where you do it. Yeah. And her best friend's father is a fashion designer and their juniors teen line is like skirts that are six inches long, you know, like that are very the designers asking, don't you think that teens would be interested in wearing a belt as a skirt? Right, right.
00:44:14
Speaker
Ali has to come in and be like, I think they're too young for that. Yeah, right. I don't think they're ready for that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and Ali has her Ali has her own sort of fallout from the show and her own struggles afterwards. So it's just, you know,
00:44:37
Speaker
not to be overly compassionate to girls who were really, really privileged and had it all, but putting yourself out there in a format that still didn't know what it was. They didn't know what the end result of this was. None of us really knew
00:44:57
Speaker
other than the few reality shows that were on at this time, what is reality TV? It would come, it would define itself over the next five years, but it was still undefined. And so they were sort of the original, maybe not the original, but they were
00:45:19
Speaker
some of the original people who like experienced the sort of full cycle of like the of the reality TV churn. Yeah, exactly. The ecosystem and like the result that it has on your life personally, professionally, etc. I think part of the reason why my takeaway is just being compassionate and feeling like these girls
00:45:47
Speaker
should count themselves fortunate in a lot of ways, not only because of being very rich, is that it's like being involved in the beginning of any platform. I think people who got really involved in social media in the beginning of Instagram or the start of YouTube, we now have seen how much being an influencer, being a content creator in those spaces can really
00:46:16
Speaker
run people's lives into really negative places. And so for people who did it, when they first start out, when you get to be the people who are accepting what is or like conceiving of what is reality TV in the early 2000s or reality TV for millennials. And so for them to be able to say, we did this and we came out and the most is that you can find like four articles about us online and we're both living lives that are seemingly happy and fulfilled. I count them so lucky because
00:46:45
Speaker
I don't think that's the people who were on I Wanna Famous Face or what was the one where they would like go and they would like change you in a week?
Reality TV's Lighter and Harsher Outcomes
00:46:54
Speaker
Is that true life? True life? I wanna be like a skater girl and they would like get somebody who was like a skateboarder to like come and like wake you up every day and like
00:47:04
Speaker
they always told everybody they were too fat is like my takeaway is like, you're too fat, start running, then you can be cute. And still, you're gonna then have to like, perform this skill in front of your whole high school, and they're still gonna hate you. Like that TV show just seemed like there was never a good experience. It was kind of their like, if only to tell you like, keep
00:47:24
Speaker
Like, you can think that the one thing that you hate about yourself, if only you changed that, would make your life fully different. But this TV show is here to tell you, like, never. You will always hate your life. There's so much reality TV of that time that feels far more nefarious that I truly think Ali and Jamie.
00:47:42
Speaker
got out clean. Yeah, right. Like they got a bad edit, but they got a better. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I also think there's something, you know, sweet and kind of tragic about like,
00:47:58
Speaker
Everyone has a best friend that makes them feel, you know, that they feel so deeply connected to. Like, we were talking about it burns fast, burns bright, and you have conversations with those friends where you go like, well, we should make a podcast. Like, we're so funny. Like, we should have a TV show, you know? And they did it, right? Like, they did that. They wanted to be together on TV, you know? Like, they wanted to show their friendship to the world and
00:48:24
Speaker
There were a lot of friendships that were lost to high school or lost to college or lost to my 20s, you know, that when I watched the show, I was like, this reminds me of those, you know, like there's there's a Yeah, just the giddy moments loving being in the presence of like, people you love. That feels like the part where when Ali says she feels adultified, like that's sort of a way in which the show does it to them, too. I think it takes out a lot of the more
Cultural Markers of 2003
00:48:51
Speaker
the more frivolous fun parts of life and their experience as friends and inserts more frivolous that has to do with their vision of what they're trying to say with these girls as rich girls. We wanna focus on the frivolous spending, not the just joy that two girls could have by being besties.
00:49:23
Speaker
Anything else on, on rich girls? I will say like aesthetically, some things I thought were important to note is how many wrist warmers Allie wears. That feels very important to the year 2003. So in keeping up this podcast, the wrist warmer specifically, like the Rasta color wrist warmer is like has a choke hold.
00:49:46
Speaker
Also she's wearing that white belt with either it's pyramid studs or it's black and white checkerboard so much and all of those things are so funny because they're also like very consumer available like they're like the things you would buy at like a hot topic. This show really does a lot to highlight the like
00:50:08
Speaker
moment of the little dog, which is very analogous to Paris Hilton. There's like a lot of rich people with small pets on the go. And I had that as accessory, had as accessory very of the moment. Yes. The when they the flip phones, obviously, I think people will love I loved when they both printed out directions to Nantucket and use the end car GPS, that feels like really an important thing for the youth of today to know.
00:50:38
Speaker
and experience is just like how little you knew how to get anywhere. I really liked that more than one episode Seabiscuit came up just to kind of create again, the climate of the times that Seabiscuit came up more than once. And at one point Jamie asked, does a person play Seabiscuit? I think it's really... It's someone dressed up as a horse.
00:51:03
Speaker
So Newlyweds is an O3 show too, actually. And it's like, it's the chicken of the sea moment. Like every show, it's like, what do they sell at Walmart? Walls? Like that's from The Simple Life. Like there has to be like a couple lines from every show like this, if you're doing an eat the rich or eat the celebrity moment.
00:51:24
Speaker
Exactly. Look at what airheads they are. How could they take such a simple concept and think something so dumb about it? I think to me it's like every show needs a chicken of the sea pull quote. Every show needs a chicken of the sea. I think to this day it still exists. It's just not always about highlighting stupid mistakes. Yeah, exactly. Stupid mistakes that we can then laugh at women for.
00:51:53
Speaker
Um, the presence of yoga, this is like definitely the beginning of yoga. And I feel like yoga as an East coaster, you don't know if you have this sensation as a West coaster, definitely felt like a trickle down from the rich to the general populace. Yeah. Yeah. And the way that it's treated in the show as this very exotic thing that they do. Um, I really loved and I realized
00:52:19
Speaker
again, how funny it is to think about when things kind of had their inception into ubiquity of culture. And it was when they like really kept focusing on the staff making the caprese salad for Fourth of July, like caprese, definitely having a moment in the year 2003, we like just realized. Yeah.
00:52:40
Speaker
You can eat something as simple as a stacked slice of tomato, a big slice of mozzarella, and some basil. Like, again, feels commonplace now, was lala of the time. Yeah, totally. If you hold on one second, I promise you I can go find my 2003
Podcast Conclusion
00:53:01
Speaker
yearbook. I'll tell you what my quote is. Oh my god, please. Oh, here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Hannah Becker.
00:53:14
Speaker
I was pissed. Let me tell you, I was so tired of the tyranny of middle school. Like I've known about fascism for a long time. Oh my God, I love Bratty, 8th grade Hannah. She was really, she was sick of this shit. Oh my God. Well, thank you so much for rewatching Rich Girls. You're so welcome. Thank you for inviting me to experience it.
00:53:33
Speaker
I'm leaving here, now I can have an opinion.
00:53:47
Speaker
Hi again, it's Helen, and it's time for our Song of the Week. In honor of the friendships so cavalierly destroyed by television editors and early internet forums, our song of this week is We Used to Be Friends by the Dandy Warhols. The song was the lead single off the band's fourth album, Welcome to the Monkey House, and was released in April 2003.
00:54:14
Speaker
It opens with the lyrics, a long time ago we used to be friends but I haven't thought of you lately at all. The catchy melody backed by hand claps and fuzzy guitars situated it in that perfectly 2003 space between indie and the OC volume one soundtrack.
00:54:33
Speaker
So listen back to the song, which I will not put in this episode because of copyright reasons, which I just learned about on episode seven, so go me. But listen back to it. There will be a link in the show notes to the video. And think about all your lost friendships to the early 2000s. And hopefully you came away relatively unscathed.
00:54:57
Speaker
Thanks again to Hannah Becker for rewatching so many episodes of Rich Girls for me and for Class of 03. If you have a memory of this show or of the simple life that you want to share, please get in touch classof03pod at gmail.com or at classof03pod on Instagram. I'm Helen Grossman and I write, produce,
00:55:19
Speaker
and the host class of Oakley, our theme music is by P. Schwartz and Evan Jason of Sawtooth, and our show art is by Maddie Herbert of Dean Studio. Thanks to everyone who's been listening. If you like this show, please support it by reading it and reviewing it, and telling your friends and family about it. We'll be back with a simple life with two things in class to discuss.