When Peaco*ck announced that a cache of old Bravo shows would be landing on the streaming service this week, I thought it might be particularly fun, in a queasily nostalgic way, to revisit NYC Prep. That show, a 2009 one-season oddity meant to be a real-life Gossip Girl, was a fascination of mine back in my relative youth. I was in my mid-20s when it premiered, far enough away from teenagehood to find it all exotically silly, but maybe close enough that the kids on the series were still vaguely of my generational cohort. It was fun anthropology, inane and awkward and strangely poignant.
At least, that’s how I remembered it, and how I covered it for work back then. Thus I eagerly dove back in this week, excited to reconnect with these rich city youths: haughty P.C., his quietly besotted bestie Jessie, littlest playboy Sebastian, his public school paramour Taylor, nerdy Camille, timid and lovelorn Kelli. What details of their televised lives had I forgotten? Was P.C.’s trip to Mexico actually as subtextually fraught as I once thought? Pressing play felt like stepping into a novelty time machine, an Epcot ride that I hoped would whisk me off to the salad days of the late aughts for a few hours.
Instead, I immediately felt depressed. How wrong it all is! At the time of the show’s airing, we were only a few years into Facebook, not yet steeped in the miseries of Twitter and Instagram and TikTok. The show teeters on the edge of our current era, in which teenagers are forever broadcasting their lives, inviting the world in. From that present-day perspective, NYC Prep is bone chilling. I sat in front of the TV this week wanting to yell, “Don’t go in there!” as if I was watching a horror movie.
But we should have known back then, too. Whether or not NYC Prep foreshadowed the advent of public adolescence, it was plenty bad in its own terms. Some people said as much at the time; I certainly remember a slew of internet comments wondering, with no small amount of disdain, why any of us were watching the show. A reality series about rich teens making fools of themselves was not a new concept—there was Laguna Beach, there was Rich Girls. But those were safely on MTV, land of the young. NYC Prep’s placement on Bravo put it directly in the eyeline of grownups, people already then trained to tear the Real Housewives apart every week.
The show was probably neither popular nor enduring enough to earn its stars too much vitriol. (And, again, there were no Instagram accounts to troll or otherwise harass.) But there were still material negative effects. Camille switched schools for murky reasons. There were reports of P.C.’s family being upset about his involvement. And of course there are the no doubt myriad private embarrassments that we’ll never know about. Whether or not any of the cast members look back at the show fondly, it was a dumb, boggling risk for a TV network and a coterie of parents (and audience members) to let them take.
And what was it for, really? The show is stilted and dull. The languid ramble of Laguna Beach was a fine setting for untrained teens to make television. But NYC Prep forces everyone into a Housewives template—there are a million fake dinners and events cluttering their schedules, all meant to establish the idea that they are bustling little adults. It’s all so patently false, and the kids are bad at the act. We were no doubt aware of the artifice back then, but our tolerance for such things was perhaps higher than it is all these ragged years later. Watching this cast of children play Restaurant and Party is exhausting and sad, an interminable high school theater production of a text far beyond their scope.
The romance is the ickiest aspect, forced love triangles and bad kisses that, especially on poor Taylor’s part, seem like a coerced ordeal. She’s the one I worry about most, the youngest and least rich and standing in the brightest spotlight. Perhaps tellingly, Us Weekly’s “where are they now” piece from a few years ago has no updates about her.
Maybe it’s a mistake to bring the show back up at all. NYC Prep should probably have stayed dead, a lost artifact of a simpler and maybe slightly less stupid age. (Or, stupid in a different way.) I thought that I might feel a swell of “were we ever so young” wistfulness watching the show, but it instead stirred something revulsed and existentially unsettled. I instantly regretted my participation in any of it. And there’s the grim realization that we in no way learned any lessons from NYC Prep. There wasn’t any effective mass hand wringing about observing the lives of teenagers; we just shrugged and handed them ever more apps.
At least, I suppose, everything nowadays is less codified and formal than it is on NYC Prep, less packaged for grownup consumption. A TikTok video floating anonymously in a vast ocean of other videos is realer and maybe more harmless than a staged camera-crew outing to a Japanese restaurant in Gramercy. That’s where, of course, Sebastian sets eyes on Taylor in the first episode: the gang sitting in an ugly banquette, stammering out their exposition, more than a little uncomfortable, tragically naïve to all that’s coming. If only we could pass through the screen and say sorry.
