From the New York Times...
July 16, 2007
Television Review | 'Victoria Beckham: Coming to America'
New Girl in Town Gets Settled With Hubby
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
There must be a reason NBC chose to lavish an hour of prime time tonight on “Victoria Beckham: Coming to America.”
But conspiracy theorists will be hard put to connect the dots. It’s not clear what links Philip F. Anschutz, the billionaire who agreed to pay David Beckham $27.5 million over five years to play for his soccer team, the Los Angeles Galaxy, to General Electric, the conglomerate that owns NBC. At first Google-glance, there appears to be little overlap between the corporations. If anything, their film divisions are competitors.
It could be a plot by the Trilateral Commission and Opus Dei, though some paranoids may prefer to point a finger at the Church of Scientology because the Beckhams, Victoria and David, are new best friends and neighbors of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. That’s just plain silly. Mr. Cruise has been on chilly terms with NBC ever since he excoriated psychiatry and Brooke Shields’s postpartum depression on that network’s “Today” program.
Unless, of course, the Beckham special is Mr. Cruise’s well-plotted revenge on the network.
There has to be something going on behind the scenes because there is no other way to explain so much time and videotape spent on the moving arrangements of Mr. Beckham’s wife. Mrs. Beckham, the once and future Spice Girl nicknamed Posh, is somewhat famous for being sort of famous, and is photographed a lot in Britain, a nation so open to media hypnosis that a Web site devoted to the ripening of a 44-pound wheel of cheddar has received more than a million Internet hits. (As of today Wedginald is on Day 206.)
And watching “Victoria Beckham: Coming to America” is a little like that site, cheddarvision.tv — although the cheddar probably has an ounce or two on Mrs. Beckham, who is also famous for being thin but with very large breasts.
“Seriously, do they look that big, do they really?” she asks, shaking her décolletage during a coffee-shop confrontation with the gossip blogger known as Perez Hilton. “They’re not that big in the flesh,” she explains. The blogger agrees and says he would really prefer a nude picture of Mrs. Beckham’s husband.
Mr. Beckham’s move to Los Angeles has been promoted by AEG, Mr. Anschutz’s company, with even more than the usual meteor shower of publicity that surrounds a movie opening. The arrival is more like a giant P.R. asteroid hurtling toward Earth.
The special, originally envisioned as a reality series in the style of “The Anna Nicole Show” or “The Simple Life” or even “Hey Paula,” is just one block in a vast promotional pyramid scheme: While Mr. Beckham whips up his profile in the United States with television interviews, soccer-field appearances, endorsements and Galaxy jersey sales, Mrs. Beckham pumps up her end of their business partnership with her jeans label and line of designer sunglasses and perfume and, of course, the television special.
Almost all celebrities sell a glimpse of their private lives to promote their latest movie or project. The Beckhams market their marriage as the core of their brand, which explains the couple’s racy conjugal spread in the August issue of W magazine. And yet, for all her erotic poses, skimpy outfits and well-oiled limbs, Mrs. Beckham is oddly unsensual on television; she somehow takes the sin out of synergy.
She does appear to be pleasant and not without a sense of humor. But that isn’t quite enough to carry viewers through an hour of house hunting, sunbathing and applying for a driver’s license, all executed with “Zoolander” pouts and poses. These kinds of reality shows rely on a fish-out-of-water conceit, but in Beverly Hills Mrs. Beckham is a fish-in-Évian, one rich, blond, spray-tanned wife-of among many. She has tea with a group of golden-haired, Botoxed and bosomy matrons and fits right in: “Footballers Wives” meets “The Real Housewives of Orange County.”
The special does serve another purpose besides propping up Mr. Anschutz’s soccer investment, however. It tests the American market’s seemingly insatiable demand for rich, idiotic It girls, from Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan to Britney Spears and Nicole Richie. Mrs. Beckham comes to the genre armed with an entourage of stylists, huge sunglasses and her own version of Ms. Hilton’s trademark expression, “That’s hot.” Posh deems posh things “major.” But she totters, in the requisite leopard-print high heels — through well-trod territory.
If she can retain viewers past the first commercial break, then the results will be conclusive: Either there is a vast, media-controlling conspiracy afoot, or there is no such thing as celebrity ditz-fatigue.
