VIDEO: A preview of the fifth episode of Flipping Out
Piloting the family vehicle around Park Drive the other day, with the sullen ember of the “CHECK ENGINE” light steadily before my eyes and the heat of the afternoon pressed against the windshield like a maniac’s grin, I remembered all of a sudden my great fear of mediocrity. On the radio they were playing that rather charming song by Mute Math in which the handsome young singer frets hoarsely about the hegemony of “the typical” and laments that he will never be able to “break its spell.” The music filled the car, my heart rang with it. “How long does it take somebody/Before they can be someone?” Yes. YES. How long to bump along in the rut of the unexceptional, with an injured Volvo’s steering wheel in my hands? When will my splendor rise? Heavens above, when will I be real?
Jeff Lewis is real, baby. He’s so real he works in real estate. On a reality show. The star/villain of Bravo’s FLIPPING OUT (Tuesday at 10 pm) is realized, with a kind of bitter photographic clarity, down to the last detail — which would probably be his dramatic distaste for an onion. In last week’s episode, as Jeff sat down for lunch with his three assistants/dogsbodies, his ironic cleaning lady Zoila noticed him staring fixedly at his food. “Are you praying, Jeff?” she asked, and as a matter of fact, he was. Jeff was mute and nearly ecstatic before the idol of his own indignation. Once again, despite his repeated requests to the contrary, there were onions in his salad. “I said no onions!” he yelled. “It’s like somebody’s fucking with me right now! Every day, Jenni, every day! No onions! No onions! Check the box! I don’t know what I have to do!” Earlier, another assistant, Chris, had suffered a vertiginous demotion after he was busted for checking his e-mail. “I’m feeling a little betrayed,” said Jeff. “So what’s going to happen is, effective immediately, you’re going to go back to trash duty. Okay? So if you could please empty the trashcans now. Start with that.” Chris’s face was a potato of disbelief.
Jeff flips houses for a living, buys them, tarts them up, sells them at a profit. He represents the culmination of a certain tendency in reality TV in which the whims and thrusts of the individual are prized above all, and every man is his own private Sun King, extending the empire of his selfhood across a genuflecting world. Over at Bravo, they’ve been working on this for some time, but neither the unlovable Jackie Warner from Work Out, barking at people in her gym, nor the bonkers hairdresser Jonathan from Blow Out ever quite achieved Jeff’s level of ruthless solipsism and control-freakery.
The only thing not-quite-real about Jeff is his face, which looks as if it’s had a bit of work done: there are taut glints of perfection around the eyes, and the lips are a surgically augmented smudge (I like to think that Jeff would disdain collagen in favor of the injected fat of his own thighs.) In the frequent close-ups of this face, it’s as if another man were staring through it like a window.
As a speculator/flipper, turning money into more money through the cosmetic overhaul of too-large houses, Jeff is also an avatar of economic unrest. Real as he is, he traffics in illusion, in the “staging” of properties for market-bedazzled buyers: ghostly quantities of capital float around him, coming and going, and he candidly speaks of his instinct for growth as “an addiction.” This year his business is down by 20 percent; his creditors are pressing. Still, he prowls the gauzier suburbs, looking for those flippable places. He hardnoses his Latino subcontractors, haggling over their prices dollar by dollar (“These people need to appreciate the fact that they have jobs!”), and then engages a professional masseuse for his pets. When Jeff goes down, one senses, he’s taking the whole damn housing bubble with him.
Now then: if you happened to be among the regular readership of my on-hiatus column “The Week in Reality,” you will know already that a show about celebrities riding bulls represents the consummation of my fondest hopes as a viewer. So I am delighted to be able to report that Ty Murray’s CELEBRITY BULL RIDING CHALLENGE (CMT; Friday at 10 pm) is every bit as good as it sounds. Four episodes in and the celebs are dropping like flies. Leif Garrett refused to get out of bed on the third day of training; Stephen Baldwin broke his shoulder; Francesco Quinn suffered fractured ribs when a bull’s front hooves came down full force on his chest. But Vanilla Ice and ex-Survivor Jonny Fairplay are still in the running for an exhibition night of celebrity bull riding in Nashville, as is Nitro, the American Gladiator.
