Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The D’Amelio Show’ Season 2 on Hulu, Where The Sisters Try To Make It In Showbiz

Despite the fact that Dixie and Charli D’Amelio have millions of followers on social media, they’re both struggling to get legit show business careers off the ground. In Hulu‘s The D’Amelio Show, Dixie, Charli, and their parents put that journey, ups and downs, and everything in between, on full display.

THE D’AMELIO SHOW (SEASON 2): STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Dixie D’Amelio, the older of the two D’Amelio sisters, is in full hair and makeup, about to take the stage at The Forum in Los Angeles for the 2021 Jingle Ball concert in front of 20,000 people. Not even two years earlier, Dixie and sister Charli were just a couple of teens with TikTok accounts, and now, Dixie finds herself onstage performing right after BTS. “I’m gonna vom,” Dixie says.

The Gist: Charli D’Amelio was 15 when she started posting clips of herself dancing on TikTok in 2019. In the time since then, she’s become one of the most popular creators on the platform with over 100 million followers. Her sister Dixie is close behind with around 60 million. Charli has said pretty regularly in interviews that she doesn’t understand why people watch her videos, that she’s just a normal, average teenager. That being said, there is something that people love (or love to hate) about the D’Amelios, whose fast rise to fame via social media has been impressive, but to what end? That’s the question that The D’Amelio Show seems to want to answer, and now that the show is in its second season, it’s Dixie, and not Charli, whose star is rising thanks to a successful music career, and Charli’s beginning to have a crisis of confidence.

The young women, who are now 18 (Charli) and 20 (Dixie) have been trying to break out of the social media stranglehold by doing pretty much everything a Gen Z-er knows how to do: being brand ambassadors, trying their hand at singing, and yes, becoming reality stars. The show paints them and their parents, Marc and Heidi, as likeable enough. (Full disclosure, I’m coming at the D’Amelios blind, having never seen one of their TikTok creations, which means I’ve also avoided most of the Internet’s opinions about them. Now that I’m knee-deep in D’Amelio though, I sense that people either root for them because they seem nice and wholesome, or they consider them talentless hacks. The show is framed by Pop-Up Video-style tweets written by their followers that feature plenty of opinions on both sides of that argument.)

Dixie seems well aware of her critics, but also, she’s playing Jingle Ball and has nabbed a recording contract not even two years after bursting out of obscurity, and in the second episode she’s house hunting for her own place – a 5 bedroom in the Hollywood Hills. Screw the critics, this girl’s doing okay for herself. Charli is struggling though: despite her massive success, she’s burnt out and has been doing unfulfilling projects, so she secretly (a.k.a. behind Dixie’s back) has started working on her own music career. The show makes a big deal out of Charli’s secrecy, trying to protect Dixie from this information so she won’t get mad, but these sisters, with their lustrous dark locks and inability to stay mad at one another, have take a cue from the Kardashians and know that sometimes drama only needs to last an episode or two and then things will be smoothed over. But are the D’Amelios the next Kardashians? No, they’re not: despite the glossiness of both family’s Hulu reality shows, the D’Amelios don’t find themselves embroiled in situations with quite as high stakes as Kim and Kompany. That’s probably not a bad thing for their mental health, but it also doesn’t make for fascinating TV.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? This season of The D’Amelio Show features the whole family in Los Angeles as their young adult daughters try to make their way in showbiz. I kept thinking to myself that it reminded me of The Hills, as Lauren, Lo, and Kristin (and Audrina and Whitney) tried to prove themselves as young professionals trying to reinvent their younger personas, only in this case, TikTok stands in for Laguna Beach.

Our Take: Without having much prior context for Charli and Dixie, I didn’t think I’d like them, but it turns out, they’re nice? They’re self-deprecating and self-conscious, which, as an old Gen-X hag, I consider to be the most important traits a person can have. But also, they want to be stars… of some kind. While Dixie knows that music is her thing, Charli seems to feel that, at 18, she needs to have this figured out already and know what her next career move is. Her parents don’t directly put pressure on her, but this is a family that has literally created a corporation called D’Amelio Family Enterprises to capitalize on their daughters’ fame, so even if they’re not explicitly telling Charli to go to work, the implication is that there’s a lot riding on her. She just doesn’t know what to do. (I mean, college?)

I’m not begrudging the family their approach, this is just the way the world is going and they happen to be very savvy at branding. But I can’t help but think that their bubble will burst eventually, since both daughters were thrust so quickly into the spotlight, and with Charli’s ambiguity about her next steps, if she keeps taking on projects she’s not passionate about she’s going to either burn out or make some bad decisions. The D’Amelio Show is an interesting look at what it takes to become a superstar in the age of social media, and it turns out that it’s exhausting. Both the process and the show itself.

Sex and Skin: Dixie’s boyfriend, Noah Beck, a fellow TikTok personality, appears on the show, but the pair don’t share more than a kiss onscreen.

Parting Shot: This season’s premiere is a two-parter. At the end of part one, Dixie takes the stage at the Jingle Ball and turns out a successful performance. During part two, one of the b-stories shows her and Charli attempting to decompress a little with friends and fellow content creators, including Dixie’s boyfriend Noah, as they discuss the struggles of living so publicly, and at the end of part two, Dixie announces that she and Noah are broken up.

Sleeper Star: The tweets. Throughout each episode, images of tweets (are they copied from real tweets, or just fabricated for the show? We’ll never know.) pop up on screen, some depicting support for the D’Amelios, some blasting them for their perceived lack of talent, and many of them wondering about the state of Dixie and Noah’s relationship. Consider them a Greek chorus in 140 characters or less.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Welcome to season two, bitches!” I am so tired of “bitches” as the go-to suffix to make everything seem more cool and exciting. (See also: Every kind of housewife show that features a big trip. “We’re in Miami, bitches!”) It’s like when you hear someone in 2022 say “Not!” in the Wayne’s World sense. I’m surprised we’re still doing it.

Our Call: SKIP IT! I think Charli and Dixie D’Amelio have been successful thus far at translating their viral success into other platforms, and good for them! I don’t begrudge them their success. However, they lack the drama needed to create the truly successful reality series. Their success is a slow build and there are no antagonists (other than their own self-doubts) to create conflict we care about on. the show. I think we can just let them find themselves without having to watch them narrate that process along the way.