Season two of My Life as Liz premiered this Tuesday night on MTV and if you didn’t see the first season of this uniquely produced show, I highly recommend you catch up fast. My Life as Liz can be a confusing show concept to grasp. Its reality-style shooting and editing leads many viewers to believe in the validity of its content, but to the discerning eye, the line between reality and scripted television begins to blur.
While one can argue about how “real” most reality TV is nowadays, it’s fairly certain that this show is far more fictionalized than its docu-style counterparts. While the characters are certainly real people, they play hyperbolic versions of themselves (a la Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm) and typically participate in staged conversations set up by the MTV producers who stand by just out of sight of the camera lens. Liz adds in narration style inner-monologues which help progress the storyline at hand.
MTV found Liz in 2008 while scouting for new schools for a second season of their hit The Paper. When producers came across Liz, it seems their dream for a new reality star was realized. After filming began (during her 2008-09 school year) it was decided to change the style of the show from a more traditional reality program to the version that’s in production now. The best way to put it: it’s Liz’s version of reality.
The world that’s portrayed is an exaggerated reality of life in Burleson, Texas for young Liz, a budding hipster. The style is seamless, making it hard to tell the difference between some “real” moments and the staged ones. This left many who viewed the first season confused as to where the line was between MTV and the real Liz.
The season two premiere was more of the same. Yes, Liz has now moved off to New York City for art school, leaving her faithful geek-friends, the “nerd-herd,” behind in Texas. (Spoiler Alert) Strangely enough, it’s revealed in this episode that Taylor Terry, previously a member of the hated popular “plastic” group of girls, is now not only an ally, but a friend to the nerd-herd. Interestingly, there are few if any of her new friends shown from school, focusing solely on her complete isolation in a big city.
In other Liz-news, she struggles with the deteriorating relationship with her long distance boyfriend, Bryson, making her even more homesick than she was before. She meets Lewis, who is definitely Bryson 2.0 (more hipster, more adorable and bonus – local to NYC) and is, at the very least, intrigued. I can definitely say I’m looking forward to more episodes with him.
Perhaps more so in this episode than in previous ones, the believability is lost in almost every scene. Either it all seems too convenient or too staged. I think the style is very unique and certainly worth watching, but it can be confusing and distracting at times. It’s hard to focus on both story and production when the production is such a curious element on its own.
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Not one mention of why we care about Liz. What makes Liz worth watching? Why is there a show about Liz? The most descriptive sentence in this whole post was, “[t]he world that’s portrayed is an exaggerated reality of life in Burleson, Texas for young Liz, a budding hipster. “