(Michael Brown would be killed in Ferguson, Missouri, months later.) Confederate statues were still years away from removal-Calhoun’s statue in Charleston only recently tumbled after a city vote. When Southern Charm debuted in March of 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement hadn’t yet entered mainstream discourse. On Southern Charm, they lift it up and film it. Old, white Southern wealth is always ugly under the rug, but the people who benefit from it usually have the sense to pay someone to clean that up. One removed scene featured Ravenel’s father, Arthur Ravenel, dissing a $5 bill because it has Abraham Lincoln’s face on it. Bravo removed scenes and episodes of Southern Charm after backlash over their casually oblivious tours of family plantations. It’s also an accurate window into the racism of the South. They go fox hunting and skeet shooting, play polo, and say things like, “When in doubt, get the bourbon out,” or, “A white tablecloth means we shouldn’t talk about such things.” But they also shoot fireballs, shotgun beers, and call each other “beta bitch.” They day-drink for sport, eating crab in seersucker and Lilly Pulitzer. Men with names like Whitney and Shep host elegant dinner parties with women with names like Landon and Cameran. Yet this show is also an accurate window into affluent Southern life. In one scene, Altschul-who floats about in caftans swilling martinis-haughtily observes that Kathryn Calhoun Dennis is a shameless strumpet who “doesn’t have a proper education,” only to turn around and pronounce the l’s in guillotine. That means she enforces social graces with advice to the men and women on how to act (proper), dress (modestly-nothing “shored up to the Mason-Dixon Line”), when to marry (immediately), and how to save face after a social scandal (smile, nod, then pretend you heard the doorbell ring). But it’s clear that for the show’s purposes, she is a stand-in for the Old South. His icy mother, Patricia Altschul, rounds out the rich bonafides.Īltschul’s money comes from her three marriages, at least one to a wealthy New York finance type. Virginia-born Whitney Sudler-Smith, a filmmaker (and executive producer who also conceived Southern Charm), just started a midlife-crisis rock band (called Renob, which is boner backwards-classy). California transplant Ashley Jacobs is so cartoonishly vile that you’re sure she’s there just to prove outsiders are rarely worth the trouble. The show also features various Yankees and interlopers whose presence exposes the moneyed hierarchy, such as Craig Conover, a Delaware transplant and sewing enthusiast who is accused, with his pastel popped collars, of Southern cosplay. Calhoun) who temporarily lost custody of her two children due to drug use, and has a hankering for public screaming matches. He impregnated his girlfriend, young socialite Kathryn Calhoun Dennis (a direct descendant of seventh vice president John C. All the pinkies-out posturing in the world can’t hide the fact that these people don’t act right-at least, not the way descendants of the landed gentry should.ĭisgraced former South Carolina state treasurer and cast member Thomas Ravenel-there’s a bridge named after his father-was busted for selling cocaine in 2005, and faced assault and battery charges before leaving the show in 2018. (Season seven launched October 29.) From infidelity to racist gaffes to assault charges and a lot of drunken tantrums, the show has, at times, felt like a spinoff of Cops set on a plantation. The cast, who come from Chahhlston’s best and oldest families (as they constantly remind us), have struggled mightily the past six seasons to live up to those good names. On Bravo’s Southern Charm, the money’s still plentiful-it’s the lovely manners that have seen better days. Then all they’re left with is their lovely manners.” It’s only the trappings of aristocracy that I find worthwhile-the fine furniture, the paintings, the silver-the very things they have to sell when the money runs out. “All those generations of importance and grandeur to live up to. “Blue bloods are so inbred and weak,” Williams says. There’s a passage in the opening of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt’s 1994 treatise on Southern manners undone, where Savannah antiques dealer Jim Williams delivers a withering critique of Southern aristocracy.
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