“The D’Amelio Show,” which premiered on Hulu Sept. 3, follows the lives of Charli and Dixie D’Amelio — the young influencer siblings who skyrocketed to fame on TikTok. The show explores the behind-the-scenes lives of the girls and is completely and utterly boring.
Full disclosure — this review is only for the first episode of the show. The plan was to watch all the episodes, but so little happens in the first episode — and in the rest of the episodes according to the summaries — so I decided that I am not missing anything by skipping the rest of the season.
The show opens with the story of Charli’s rapid rise to fame and explains how she went from a Connecticut teenager who posts dancing videos online to someone fielding calls from Jennifer Lopez and amassing over 100 million followers on TikTok. Dixie and Charli introduce themselves in their confessionals and admit they are astonished by their level of fame.
Over and over, the sisters emphasize how they can not believe that they transformed from obscurity to super-influencers practically overnight. This is a sentiment that I kept returning to while watching the show. They are nice girls, almost funny at times, but truly they are just regular people, reminiscent of the girls you went to middle school with. So why did they get a show?
One facet of this show is Charli and Dixie’s different passions — dancing and singing, respectively. Charli is known as the most famous dancer on TikTok, and while there is no doubt that she’s talented, the show does nothing to paint her in a particularly flattering light. A whole segment is dedicated to her practicing a spin over and over again — and falling every time. Despite the high production value of these scenes, the 15-second TikToks Charli posts of her dancing to Doja Cat are actually far more entertaining. The time dedicated to showing Charli dancing with an instructor could have been better used taking the audience through Charli’s thought process when making a dance — breaking down how she comes up with dances, showing her moves and following the evolution of how she sparks and follows dance trends on the platform.
The show also explores Dixie’s music career — something that has brought Dixie inordinate amounts of hate online. In one scene, Dixie meets a vocal coach and goes through a singing lesson. Again, like Charli, she is not a bad singer — but she’s not extraordinary. On the other hand, her singing instructor shines and actually sings over her at some points, making the best of his screen time. Thus, these scenes centering on the dancing and singing career of the sisters’ highlight the overall problem with this program. The D’Amelio sisters are fine — good even — but nothing to write home about.
The standout moment of the first episode comes at the very end. Dixie breaks down in front of her parents, having been the target of a barrage of online hate. She cries about having every moment of her life being watched and criticized, being called “musty” or having her worth reduced to “Charli’s sister.” It is a sincere moment that highlights just how young and vulnerable the sisters are, but it also emphasizes how insane it is that these completely normal girls are famous enough to experience this level of hate and then showcase it on their own reality television show.
It is hard to critique this show without critiquing Charli and Dixie themselves — the whole show is centered on them and their lives. The problem is the two simply do not have big personalities, so they can’t carry an entire reality show. Reality television is supposed to be obscene, salacious and juicy — ironically, an escape from reality — so it makes no sense to give the very average D’Amelio family the same platform that rocketed the Kardashians to fame. Khloe Kardashian got arrested and went to jail all in 30 minutes, while one episode of “The D’Amelio Show” is entirely focused on the sisters eating out at a Hibachi restaurant.
In a time where reality TV will literally throw two naked people on a deserted island and force them to survive AND fall in love — see “Naked and Afraid of Love” — “The D’Amelio Show'' simply offers no true entertainment value.
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