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Reality TV

Reality TV

The boys of All the Right Movies, left to right: Nick Lazzarini, Travis Wall, Teddy Forance and Kyle Robinson.

The Four Hottie Dancers of Oxygen’s All the Right Moves Teach Reporters How to ‘Diva Snap’ and Discuss the Show’s Imminent Drama

“This is not the audition for Sixteen and Pregnant, girls! Pull in your bellies,” Nick Lazzarini, winner of the first ever So You Think You Can Dance, shouted over blasting music to a room full of reporters and dance enthusiasts. The Observer was attending (and participating in) a promotional workshop at Broadway Dance Center last night taught by Emmy-nominated choreographer Travis Wall and the rest of the cast of Oxygen’s new reality series All the Right Moves. The show, which premieres tonight on Oxygen, follows Mr. Wall, Mr. Lazzarini, Teddy Forance and Kyle Robinson as they set out to start their own dance company, Shaping Sound.

The one-hour workshop was a real display of the four stars’ quite different personalities. Mr. Robinson flirted away with the ladies, dancing and lifting several blushing gals. Mr. Lazzarini, the comedian of the bunch, popped a few of his legendary “diva snaps” and gave The Observer some tips on how to effectively shake our booty, telling us to imagine “there is a beehive in your butt. You gotta shake the bees out of your tush.”

The show follows the “dancing boy-band,” as they are often called, as they move out to California to start working on Shaping Sound and live together in what Mr. Lazzarini referred to as a “frat house.” “We are notorious for moving all the furniture out make up phrases, dances and do crazy things,” he said. Read More

Reality TV

The Real Housewives of New York City: Sonja Morgan, Heather Thomson, Ramona Singer, Carole Radziwill. Not pictured: Aviva Drescher, LuAnn de Lesseups, Daniel J. Boorstin. (Mireya Acierto/PatrickMcMullan.com)

A Matter of Perspective: The Real Housewives of New York City Premiere a la Rashomon

What allows reality TV to exist so plentifully, and to be so successfully engineered, is perhaps our human tendency to experience the same event different ways. Liquoring up scared, fame-hungry young people gets you most of the way there, but it’s the producer-prodded endless parsing of what historian Daniel J. Boorstin termed “pseudo-events” that fill the hours and hours of cable programming we so happily consume: fights over who is a drunk, fights over who said who is a drunk, fights over what actually happened when everyone was drunk, and so on. (Mr. Boorstin also gave us a handy phrasing for the contemporary definition of a celebrity: “a person who is known for his well-knownness.”)

To test these theories, on Monday, The Observer embraced a full evening’s schedule of pseudo-events featuring celebrities and took a Rashomonic approach to the premiere of the fifth season of the wildly, bafflingly successful reality show, The Real Housewives of New York City. We sent three correspondents with varying degrees of RHONY knowledge to three premiere parties hosted by Housewives, and asked them to write honestly of their experiences.

What we learned: Despite perhaps being unwelcome, ex-Housewife Jill Zarin made the rounds. A couple of the Housewives will really miss their extra-large Diet Cokes (thanks a lot, Mayor Bloomberg). If you hang around with a Housewife long enough, you might run into someone actually famous (Liza Minnelli!?). And the show, when viewed with the celebrity cast members present, is even more uncomfortably hyperreal.

Thus we present: the Occasional Viewer’s Story, the Fanboy’s Story, and the Party Crasher’s Story. Read More