Seven things I thought after finally watching part of a Brooklyn 11223 episode

By on April 25, 2012  Arts & Entertainment, Featured story
Apr 252012
 

Joey Lynn Tekulve, apparent antagonist in Oxygen's Brooklyn 11223. Photo: EJ Camp/Oxygen Media

1) I watched 20 minutes of an hour-long episode. I was just as uninterested as I thought I would be. I was far more captivated by the Chicago Blackhawks getting soundly beat in their playoff elimination game.

2) As you’re probably aware, Brooklyn 11223 revolves around two feuding women and their competing groups of friends. I think, as part of my emotional investment in the series, I was supposed to pick sides. And so I have: Joey Lynn stuck me as the ever-so-slightly less self-absorbed and manipulative wreck than Christine.

3) Of course, the whole concept is contrived and manufactured. It’s widely accepted that Joey Lynn and Christine are playing caricatures of themselves. Not like Jon And Kate Plus Eight – we weren’t supposed to take sides, but we did anyway when it turned out that both Jon and Kate were genuinely unlikable people.

4) As a non-viewer of reality TV, the only reason I watched any of this show was because of the Bay Ridge/Gravesend connection. And since most of the 20 minutes I watched took place at a bar in Manhattan, I can’t even comment on that.

5) Lest this influence my opinion or yours of the kind of person you are likely to meet in Bay Ridge, let it be known that I’ve never met anyone that obnoxious here. I largely attribute this to the fact that I associate mainly with grown-ups.

6) I’m still offended more by the rally against Brooklyn 11223 than I am by the existence of a vapid TV show that nominally takes place in Brooklyn, and I blame the politicians for that. The call from Diane Savino and Carlo Scissura to boycott businesses that allowed Oxygen’s camera crews on their premises was particularly distasteful. The women who stood at the front of that rally came to talk about the positive contributions they and their peers have made in Bay Ridge, not to turn against other members of their business community. It was flat-out wrong for Savino and Scissura to involve them in that. Vincent Gentile did not make any boycott call himself, but as the event organizer, he should have been more mindful and thoughtful about the messaging.

7) One really good thing that has come out of the organized reaction is some attention paid to individuals in the neighborhood. Paula Katinas of the Bay Ridge Eagle has a nice weekly series called The Real Women Of Bay Ridge. You can find it online at bayridgelife.com, and see profiles of librarian Rita Meade, Community Board district manager Josephine Beckmann, and others.

  • http://www.bayridgeodyssey.com/ Joe Teutonico

    Yeah, I can’t believe I was able to sit through an entire episode of this. To be fair, most of it was spent complaining about how the show sucks.

    The only positive thought on the show – and probably the only one I can stomach enough to say out loud – is that the guy characters didn’t seem as annoying – maybe because they have (real, non strip club) jobs and seemed to be able to back up their swagger with more than bad acting?

    And yeah, the show’s producers couldn’t have asked for a better promotional event than that rally. While I agreed with some of the sentiments expressed there, and can definitely empathize with the participants’ distaste for the woefully unbalanced portrayals of Italians in the media, it is the absolute height of stupidity to punish business owners for naively hosting some knuckleheads with video cameras filming a TV show they might or might not have been accurately told about, especially after the fact. A real civic leader should be trying to bring more residents into the fold, instead of just pointing fingers and throwing them under the bus.