Monday, 10 March 2014
(CNN) -- After all the
arrests, court appearances, trips to jail and rehab stays, Lindsay Lohan has turned to reality TV.
On Sunday
night, the 27-year-old made her latest comeback attempt in the OWN network's
"Lindsay," a docu-series that came across in its first episode as
part "E! True Hollywood Story" and part "Intervention,"
with a dash of "Hoarders." (Lohan, apparently, gets rid of nothing.)
The
premise is to follow Lohan around as she tries to piece her personal and
professional life back together after six years of documented turmoil. And so
last summer, less than a week after she completed a 90-day stay at a Malibu rehab
facility -- a place that actually aired commercials during the show -- Lohan
sat down with OWN's Oprah Winfrey for an interview and began filming.
The trailer indicated that there would be no glossing over
Lohan's flaws and missteps, as crew members and OWN staff openly commented on
the ways Lohan was making production difficult. But in its first hour, viewers
didn't get any of that.
Instead,
the show tracked the former child star as she messily packed up and moved from
Los Angeles to New York, tried to find her own place, saw her younger sister
walk in a fashion show and squeezed in an impromptu shopping trip. Her jewelery
needed to be organized, and then she needed to change hotel rooms.
Other
than a brilliant "Fetch" T-shirt being flashed at one point, that was
about as exciting as it got.
Yet in
the midst of all that minutiae, the core of "Lindsay" is the star's
focus on sobriety. Lohan's numerous low points are tallied throughout the
episode, and she's frequently accompanied by a sober coach. If nothing else,
OWN's "Lindsay" wants to be the portrait of a young artist in
recovery.
Does it
succeed? Maybe for fans of Lohan's (and she does still have them, as
"Lindsay" proved by chatting up strangers on the street about the
actress) or the compassionately voyeuristic.
"I
know there r much more important things going on in the world,"media personality Jacque Reid tweeted Sunday, "but I
am very curious to see if Lindsay can save herself."
In the
beginning of the episode, Lohan at least seemed to be on her way there, saying
during a one-on-one confessional that "there's nothing left in having a
drink for me."
"There's
no situation that I haven't been exposed to," she went on. "So maybe
trying the other way for me, which is living with integrity and living in
control of my own self, that's the life I want now."
But when
faced with paparazzi, the stress of moving or a lingerie photo shoot that
doesn't go as planned, the actress appeared on the brink of breaking down. For The Daily Beast's Kevin Fallon, those moments are what makes
"Lindsay" worth watching.
"What
'Lindsay' succeeds most at is, for the first time in years, convincing us that
Lindsay Lohan isn't a name in an Us Weekly headline or a joke in a late-night
monologue or a character in a drama so wild it can't possibly be real
life," Fallon writes. "She's a human. She's a very fragile, volatile,
slightly selfish human. But she's one who's working really hard to find peace
in the eye of the very large, very tumultuous storm that surrounds her and is
causing those dangerous traits."
As for
everyone else, there's little draw outside of the opportunity to sharpen one's
snarky barbs.
"A
small part of me died when I found out this is more than a one episode
show," tweeted The Hollywood Reporter's TV critic Tim Goodman,
while Entertainment Weekly's Erin Strecker tried to rustle up a
silver lining.
"Encouraging
sign #1," Strecker said. "She finally got a driver."
Actress
Chloe Grace Moretz, meanwhile, couldn't even joke about what she was watching
on Sunday: "this is just genuinely sad," she posted on Twitter. "I feel bad."
Lohan had
to know when she signed up for "Lindsay" that she was leaving herself
wide open to this wide-ranging barrage of reactions, especially to comments
like the one she made about a past jail stint. "The judge at the time that
I had kept overruling me getting released even though they were
overcrowded," Lohan recalled of time spent in solitary confinement.
"She kept making me stay there. What they were doing was punishing me
instead of trying to help me."
But, even
with the possibility of this docu-series experiment going awry, it seems
"Lindsay" is worth the risk for the former child star.
"I'm
trying to figure out how to be sane and live," she said during Sunday's
episode. "(I was) in this bubble where everything was done for me, and
now, I'm figuring everything out for myself."
7 things
from Lohan's sit down with Oprah Winfrey in August
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