VINTAGE: “Wives With Beehives” attempt to live the ’50s lifestyle. (TLC)
If greedy, mindless, blood-sucking modern “Real Housewives” who are famous for no reason aren’t enough to make you pray for an earlier era, maybe you should tune in to see greedy, mindless, blood-sucking, modern housewives who pretend to be from another era.
I’m talking about a reality trial run “special” called “Wives With Beehives,” which is so lame it may make you wish you’d never been born, or better yet, that these idiots had never been born. Not in this era nor the 1950s.
TLC has come up with the bright idea of a “special,” which is clearly a test-run pilot for what they think is a clever idea: Find a bunch of self-promoting women who live the “vintage lifestyle” and make a reality show out of it.
That means that these women dress in 1950s clothing, sometimes use 1950s appliances and dedicate themselves to having 1950s-style marriages. Or what they mistakenly perceive to be 1950s marriages.
They believe that everyone was happily and faithfully married in the ’50s and that husbands were king, and wives were glamour-pusses who puttered around the kitchen in spike heels and sheath dresses all day.
To this end, TLC found a bunch of vintage-lifestyle wives in California and then had them do the same things that “Real Housewives” do except they do it in ridiculous clothing, stupid hairstyles and white gloves.
The set-up and delivery are all too familiar: Have the ladies throw a party so they can fight.
However, instead of being jealous of one another’s hideous McMansions and Lamborghinis, these women are jealous of one another’s 1950s tract houses and 1957 Buicks.
The stars of this dog are Dollie, Amber, Leslie and Shelly —ranging in age from 24 to 43. They fit in perfectly in California because it’s the only place where people look like idiots for a living. It’s usually for filming purposes though, which now that I think of it, these dames have just managed to do.
The ladies all maintain that in the 1950s image was everything. To that end Leslie, 43, says “Everything was done with such opulence!” Good thing she’s married to a plumber. Who else can afford such opulence nowadays? Or even back then?
The new girl in the Beehive group is 24-year old Dollie, who is the blond rival of Shelby. Dollie is a nightmare of jealousy and bitterness while living the perfect contentment of the 1950’s.
When Amber throws Shelby a birthday party, Dollie seethes and is so angry she won’t pin up a pinata. Right.
Apparently these idiots have based their entire world on 1950s Douglas Sirk movies or on the homage to Douglas Sirk movies, “Far From Heaven,” with Julianne Moore. I guess they forgot that inevitably in those movies while the wife was trying on clothes, her husband was about to come out of the closet.
This vintage show is old hat.