Tinsley Mortimer's High Society Is Hideous

Socialite's CW reality show caters to the lowest common denominator
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 11, 2010 12:28 PM CST
Tinsley Mortimer's High Society Is Hideous
Socialite Tinsley Mortimer arrives at the Roberto Cavalli Halloween party to benefit Children in Crisis and The Happy Hearts Fund at Cipriani's 42nd street, Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2007 in New York.   (AP Photo/Peter Kramer)

Tinsley Mortimer is yet another socialite with an awful reality show, but she came by her newfound reality star status by way of “some of the world’s finest institutions of learning.” She did, in fact, “at one point have some breeding,” writes Troy Patterson in Slate, which she's parlayed into great success as...a fame whore. Mortimer’s vehicle, High Society, debuted on the CW last night—and it “plays like a hideously deformed Edith Wharton story,” Patterson concludes.

Viewers should expect something along the lines of scenes that feature "her sobbing elaborately over the dissolution of her 17-year relationship, wearing a really great scarf." The “production values are cheap, perhaps deliberately, in the hope of creating a louche atmosphere,” and the series is contrived, as all reality shows are—but this one is “so shoddily contrived that one imagines the producers harboring an insultingly low estimation of the audience's intelligence. But then any viewer who sticks with this program through two commercial breaks is proving their estimate correct.”
(More Tinsley Mortimer stories.)

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