My crowd can beat up your crowd

A miraculous and wondrous gift has been bestowed upon each and every one of us. And, I’m not talking about the start of a new year. Or that pair of Loubs you got for Christmas, you lucky bitch. This gift was given to us straight from the hearts, the very cores if you will, of those benevolent, munificent employees over at MTV. This gift is known none other than “The City.”

Yes, the creator of The Hills (that deep, thought-provoking and often world-truth revealing television program; no, more like love and magic personified for our viewing pleasure) has graced us with a whole other reason to look forward to Monday nights. This, coupled with Gossip Girl, is a lineup that I cannot even fathom. You know when people tell you that if you ever meet God your head will explode from knowing the entire truth of the universe? It’s a little like that.

Last week during the premier, a question was asked that will set the stage and likely guide our heroine, Whitney Port, though the decisions she makes every day as she struggles to adapt to life in New York City. This question, this life-altering, social-status defining, survival-securing question was: Will she roll with the uptown “socials” or the downtown hipsters?

Now, the answer to this question does not, surprisingly enough, just affect Whitney. It also affects Olivia Palermo, self-described “social,” for reasons unknown to anyone else besides her and her attention-craving cousin, Nevan. For those who might not be as aware of the situation (not saying I’m an expert), no one really knows exactly why Olivia is a “social.” There are theories of course and most of them are, one could conjecture, not too far from the actual truth. Olivia went to a party or two, got photographed because she’s not heinous looking, got invited to a few more, got photographed again, and so on. She’s no different than you or I when it comes down to it, except she might be a rival on the bitchiness spectrum.

With that foundation set, there are two moments from the premier that I would love to highlight before tonight’s continuation just so they don’t get lost in the hypnotic abyss of MTV reruns. The first moment involves Whitney walking into Olivia’s apartment building. Olivia, the “uptown social,” Olivia, the wannabe poster-social for “uptown chic,” actually lives in Tribeca. Which is so not uptown. In fact, it’s almost as downtown as one can get. Please see image:

The second involves Olivia gloating about how the Blahniks are “friends of the family” before she and Whitney arrive at “the Manolo event” ONLY TO BE COMPLETELY UNRECOGNIZED BY MANOLO BLAHNIK HIMSELF. You shoot, you miss, you fail to get called out on-air but hey, that’s why I’m here.

If last week’s episode was meant to be standard-setting in any way, may God bless you MTV for raising the bar of not only our TV programming expectations, but of our general mental competence as well.