Tinsley Mortimer and Devorah Rose Teach Us How Reality TV Is Supposed to Work
Tinsley Mortimer and Devorah Rose had a fake fight Monday night at a Guest of a Guest party in front of every New York social blogger and reporter and a camera crew. Welcome to the new process for feuding.
Mortimer's reality show wraps taping this week, but it wouldn't be right for the show not to have a climatic battle and the chosen antagonist is Devorah Rose, editor of alleged magazine Social Life. Apparently Rose was going around telling people Tinsley's man is a poor! The Tinz couldn't stand for that and went over to defend poor Prince Casimir Wittgenstein-Sayn's honor as the richiest rich who wipes his ass with Fabergé eggs. Her on-camera entourage (including Paul Johnson Calderone) all went over to scream at Rose. If the photos are this good we can't wait to see the CW promos!
By all accounts (except the inevitable Page Six item about the brou-ha-hoax, where CW honcho Justin Rosenblatt says of the program, "It's entirely unexpected and in the moment. The storylines all arose organically."), the whole thing looked staged, with many at the party ignoring the action completely. Before, it used to be enough to fuel these social fueds by floating a few items in the gossip columns and reaping the benefits. These days the hottest accessory in town is a camera crew—just look what it did for the Real Housewives of New York—and this altercation is really the most brilliant form of manipulating one.
It starts at a party full of media types, most of whom stood by acting blasé as supposed fight took place in front of the camera. Nevertheless, they are expected to blog and tweet and write about the action, even though no one believes that it happened. This not only gets publicity for the personalities involved, but also their respective reality projects. The fight will continue to play out over months, while being massaged and edited by television executives. By the time we see the finished product (in Tinsley's case, the show comes out in January), it has been chewed, swallowed, digested, and pooped back out so what we end up with is a beautiful sparkly diamond turd of a reality television moment. We'll be so blinded by the dramatic luster that we won't even care that it was effectively staged, we'll all just be covering our gaping mouths at that bitchy thing The Tinz said about The Dev's outfit.
This isn't Rose's only fake drama buffet as of late. Last week at the launch for bikini line diNeila she got into it with socialite Jules Kirby, when the latter showed up to the party unannounced. Guess what there was a camera crew there too! Welcome to step one of the brand new process.
Well, we wonder if the editor Social Life and face of diNeila bikinis is signing her real name to all those reality show release forms. Which is Deborah Denise Trachtenberg. Yesterday when the crew was following her to the airport, they wouldn't let her on board because she was trying to get past security using pseudonym Devorah Rose and they weren't having it. What, you expect a fake editor who engages in fake fights to not have a fake name?