“Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club” and Reality TV Schadenfreude
By Lisa Peterson
Last December, MTV announced it had plucked Lindsay Lohan from the depths of tabloid infamy and recruited her to star in the network’s newest reality show, Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club. Considering her record of bizarre behavior in recent years — adopting an ambiguously foreign accent, broadcasting an attempt to abduct children on Instagram Live, publicly sharing her admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin — Lohan, at 32, seemed an unlikely choice to lead a new project, even an unscripted one. Still, MTV Executive Nina Diaz told Variety her people didn’t hesitate to reach out to the former Mean Girls star when they learned of her Grecian business venture; they recognized an opportunity in capturing Lohan’s life abroad for TV audiences. “We were excited, and Lindsay was excited, and it was like, let’s go,” Diaz said.
As someone who recalls the fallout from Lohan’s 2014 performance on OWN’s Lindsay docuseries in painful detail, I winced at news of yet another network lining up to capitalize on her humiliation. How many run-ins with reality TV cameras does one seriously troubled, former child star owe a curious public? (Zero.) Fortunately, Lohan took precautions to avoid repeating old mistakes with MTV, this time securing an executive producer title for herself, sizeable creative input, and a limited look into her personal life. Maybe her second foray into the reality TV medium would yield different results.
After watching the first several episodes of the debut season unfold, I’ve come to see Beach Club as yet another round of the same exploitative treatment Lohan received from OWN five years ago, dressed up with a slightly kinder marketing plan. Lohan may believe MTV wants to work with her because it sees her as an inspirational figure — “She knows what it’s like to navigate through a lot of ups and downs,” Diaz told Variety — but the network’s aim in creating Beach Club seems singular: increasing ratings. Of course, MTV will let Lohan present any version of herself she wants, as long as she agrees to put her name in the title and record it on video.
The most successful reality shows are often ones that fully embrace the medium’s easy to digest, gloriously formulaic structure. On this front, Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club and its straightforward premise fully delivers. Viewers follow along as Lohan, having launched a nightclub in Athens back in 2016, opens a day club in Mykonos. In need of staff to wait on important cabana clients, she works with business partner and professional sourpuss Panos Spentzos to recruit “the best of the best” from America’s premier party spots. The nine conventionally attractive bartenders and waiters the pair decides to hire — dubbed “VIP hosts” and “brand ambassadors” — move into a sprawling Mykonos villa and, as is customary in the reality TV genre, immediately get to work manufacturing major hysteria out of the most minor of interpersonal conflicts. As managers, Spentzos and Lohan feign frustration with whatever adolescent drama unravels for the first 20 or so minutes of each episode — “I didn’t bring the VIP Hosts here to babysit them,” Lohan quips repeatedly — until eventually intervening with a dramatic monologue about professionalism. After the misbehaving employee of the week vows to properly represent the “Lohan brand” again, the cycle repeats itself in the next episode.
The sense that MTV has set Lohan up to appear borderline delusional sets in as soon as opening credits roll in the first episode. The hook from her 2008 track titled “Bossy” (“I’m just a little bossy!”) plays at a high pitch over a montage of the star sitting on a high-backed chair in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Wearing a flowing evening gown and large, bejeweled snake earrings, she gives the camera her best smize. To be fair, she looks great. But if there was a modicum of hope for Lohan to use Beach Club to ingratiate herself with the public again, it could have been through appearing grounded and, well, self-aware. Beach Club eviscerates that hope within its first thirty seconds and then keeps on going.
Lohan no doubt bought into Beach Club on an understanding that she was free to portray herself however she wished. Trading in her image as a wild, irresponsible tabloid favorite for that of a full-blown boss, she doles out faux-empowering quotes aplenty — “When you want to present something, and you want to be something, then you’ve got to just, like, work for it” — and surrounds herself with fawning employees willing to flatter her business acumen at every turn. “I’m just here to learn from Lindsay and the Lohan brand,” Kyle says, as though he isn’t also here to, you know, be on TV. Lohan tells cameras repeatedly that she’s “sensitive,” alternating between disciplining her employees — “When people become emotional, I become Putin” — and coddling them. (She quickly un-fires VIP Host May when she learns this employee shares a tattoo in common with her sister, following the logic that “little things happen in life.”) With its constant heralding of the “Lohan Brand” and severe lack of self-awareness, Beach Club often feels a little bit like tuning into state-sponsored TV from Lohan-land.
For their part, MTV appears happy to let the “Mean Girls” star play out this reimagining of herself as an aspirational business figure, despite/because of how deeply unconvincing it is. “I think people will really be pleasantly surprised and thrilled to see that she’s found another great success for herself,” Diaz told Variety. Lohan may believe this show is her opportunity to “flip the cameras” as she often claims, but it’s hard to imagine MTV sees Beach Club as anything other than an easy grab for ratings.
In 2014, Lohan spoke bluntly about the acting opportunities she hoped would come from starring in OWN’s Lindsay: “I know this is my last chance to do what I love to do,” she said of her latest comeback attempt, at the age of 27. Ten years out from her last box office hit (the explosively popular Mean Girls) and still finishing up court-mandated community service hours from her most recent arrest, Lohan aimed to prove she wasn’t the chaos-causing party girl the industry believed her to be. “I have to be willing to do something. And do whatever it takes to get that back,” she told producers of her former Hollywood status.
In this instance, doing “whatever it takes” meant granting OWN cameras nearly unfettered access into her day-to-day, inviting the public to tune in as her already tumultuous life continued unraveling. Her confidence in a positive outcome from this show was, of course, a disastrous miscalculation. Over the course of eight episodes, audiences watched the once-beloved Parent Trap star skip scheduled photo shoots, berate her dedicated assistant for trivial slip-ups, ditch meetings with the few remaining producers still willing to take her calls, and even manage to infuriate Oprah Winfrey herself.
In the end, Lindsay only received average ratings, with Variety’s Brian Lowry writing that it said more about the state of OWN than its star. What kind of operation was desperate enough to subject a shakily-sober, already troubled young woman to this kind of scrutiny?
But on Lindsay, OWN wasn’t the only party that appeared to profit from Lohan’s headline-grabbing behavior. Her parents found ethically questionable ways to squeeze opportunity from their child’s hardships, too. Midway through the season, Dina Lohan told OWN cameras she was preparing to sell a book detailing her daughter’s early child star days (ironically titled My Journey). Cringe-worthy appearances from her father, Michael Lohan, also reeked of opportunism. During a tense, on-camera dinner, Mr. Lohan seemed to try squeezing the name of his daughter’s then-football player boyfriend out of her in what seemed like an obvious grab for tabloid headlines. A few moments later, he described his daughter’s life as “what can happen” when a mother keeps a child away from her father after a divorce.
In the series finale, the Lindsay camera crew went out into the streets and asked random people on the sidewalk whether their opinion of the actor had changed over the course of the season. One woman shook her head and responded that Lohan would do well to “dye her hair black and move somewhere else for a while.” Another answered, “I think the more you watch her, the more you realize a little [bit] how pathetic she is.”
Who was really revealed to be pathetic throughout the course of her first reality TV stint? A young, vulnerable adult doing what she thought was required of her in order to get back the career she’d lost? Or her network of both personal and professional connections willing to trade in a recovering addict’s struggles and slip-ups for a fee?
In November of 2017, MTV’s parent company Viacom announced a major strategy shift. With the channel’s ratings consistently dropping every year since 2011, new CEO Bob Bakish opted to take drastic steps to reverse course, halting production of scripted series and returning the channel back to its former staples: music videos and reality TV.
That programming pivot has served the company well so far. As of 2019, MTV now holds the number one spot in the coveted 18–34 year-old demographic, with Beach Club landing among the top five new cable shows in that same category. Though a second season has yet to be officially announced, Viacom’s most recent earnings report (released in early February) featured a photo of Lohan posing seductively on a Mykonos beach prominently at the top. Whether or not Beach Club ends up materializing a comeback for Lohan, MTV clearly sees a profitable future with its new star.
OWN reaped its own benefits from Lindsay, too, even if they weren’t as seismic as the network had originally hoped. According to The Hollywood Reporter, OWN’s foray into reality television helped age down the audience. Curiosity about the provocative star undoubtedly helped OWN capture the pop-culture conversation in a way it had struggled to do before, too. Even today, a snippet of an especially cringeworthy argument between Lohan and her personal assistant from Lindsay is one of the OWN YouTube channel’s most highly viewed clips of all time.
As for Lohan’s post-Lindsay career, the substantial roles she hoped would come after the show ended never materialized, unless we’re counting “Scary Movie 5.” Aside from the occasional guest spot and her forthcoming werewolf vehicle (yes, really) Among the Shadows, her industry exile has mostly continued — until, of course, MTV came along in 2018 with a pitch for Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club.
The appeal for networks in creating Lindsay Lohan-driven reality TV is obvious: audiences crave both the nostalgia factor of reuniting with a once-beloved movie star from childhood and the opportunity to witness her continued downfall play out in real time. It’s a cost-effective win with a PR pitch that basically writes itself: LINDSAY LOHAN’S EMPLOYEES REVEAL WHAT IT’S REALLY LIKE TO WORK FOR A “MEAN GIRL”– SEE THE CLIP!
But for Lohan herself, there appears to be little to gain from continued participation in the reality TV medium — and, of course, MTV knows that. Their readiness to convey the show to her as a path to redemption seems duplicitous. People stopped rooting for Lohan in a genuine way a long time ago. If they hadn’t, she’d likely be on a Hollywood set alongside her former peers right now, instead of reprimanding strange kids on a beach in Mykonos.
Though MTV may flatter Lohan with creative control and a fancy title, the idea that any network wants to “empower” Lohan to share her narrative via reality TV seems close to outright deception. Reality TV contracts aren’t going to help Lohan repair her image; they merely exist to prey on what’s left of it. Lohan probably learned years ago that granting camera crews full access into her personal life is a huge mistake. Hopefully with Beach Club, she learns to stop letting them in at all.
