It’s morning in Los Angeles, and the TikTok superstar Charli D’Amelio is still in bed. A television producer knocks on her bedroom door and enters to find Charli burrowed under the covers, an army of pastel-colored plush toys standing sentry around her. Though she has barely cracked open her eyes, she does not seem perturbed to find herself thus awoken by a camera crew. As she comes to, she is already clutching her iPhone—the implement with which she has incessantly documented herself on social media for the past couple years. We see a smattering of endless notifications, both loving and hateful, which appear not just on her phone but on our screen as well, crowding the frame: “Charli is such an amazing and kind person”; “Can somebody explain how she is Tik Tok famous?”; “Your over hyped.” In this oppressive context, the intrusion of reality-TV cameramen into one’s bedroom seems almost quaint.
Charli, the center of “The D’Amelio Show,” on Hulu, was only three years old when “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” premièred, on E!, in 2007. Things were simpler back then. The E! series took as its subject a family that was, initially, only fame-adjacent. (Kim Kardashian was Paris Hilton’s onetime assistant; Robert, her late father, was O. J. Simpson’s close friend.) But, with every passing season, the Kardashians became bigger and bigger celebrities in their own right. They had used a TV show to get famous, and then expanded their empire by employing a variety of social-media platforms, on which they allowed fans to get additional glimpses of their lives. On those same platforms, they hawked a slew of Kardashian-branded products, from makeup to underwear to socks to denim. In the past couple years, it had become increasingly clear that the family no longer needed a TV series to fuel their celebrity; if anything, the show was holding them back, preserving them in millennial amber. The series finale, which aired this past June, after a twenty-season run, ended with the family burying old merch in a time capsule: Kim’s first fragrance; Kylie Jenner’s first lip kits; a set of keys to Dash, the Kardashian sisters’ now defunct clothing boutique.
This is the rich history that “The D’Amelio Show” has inherited. The eight-part Hulu series, which premièred a few months after the end of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” has seemingly positioned itself as a successor to that reality giant, although the show is tailored to a Gen Z audience. (Charli is seventeen, which makes her seven years younger than Kylie Jenner, the youngest sibling in the Kardashian clan; still, you can find both of them on TikTok.) The D’Amelios offer a new iteration of the showbiz-family model: they achieved celebrity on social media first, only then adding reality television to their growing portfolio of branded projects, which include a podcast, a book, a clothing line with Hollister, and a makeup line with Morphe 2. The show’s central subject is the family members’ choppy adjustment to their newfound fame. Charli is currently the most popular creator on TikTok, with more than a hundred and twenty-four million followers. Her sister Dixie—nineteen years old on the show, now newly twenty—trails her with a still enormous fifty-four million. Even the sisters’ parents, Heidi and Marc, have twenty million followers between them. And yet the D’Amelios insist on perching, somewhat precariously, on the border between exceptionality and ordinariness. “I don’t consider myself famous. I’m just a person that a lot of people follow for some reason,” Charli says, in one of the interstitial interviews that the show includes. (If for the Kardashians such interviews served to move the plot forward and create intrigue—with family members frequently using them as an opportunity to shit-talk one another—the D’Amelios employ them rather more wholesomely.) “I think it was right place, right time,” Charli continues. “I think it was a vibe, maybe, that I give off.”
This positioning is savvy. The D’Amelios hail from Norwalk, Connecticut—Marc is in the sportswear business and Heidi was a personal trainer—and have only recently moved to Los Angeles, at their daughters’ urging. (“I kept getting these work opportunities that I couldn’t do,” Charli explains.) A big part of the family’s brand is their relatability, which can feel simultaneously genuine and curated. Charli’s appeal, especially, lies in her suburban-sweetheart charisma. On TikTok, she mostly lip-syncs to hip-hop and pop hits while performing quick, loose-limbed dances—dexterous but not impossible to follow with a bit of practice. (Back in Connecticut, she had trained as a competitive dancer.) With her long brunette hair, pert nose, and lithe frame, her dazzling smile and serious brown eyes, she is pretty but not intimidating, a BFF rather than a frenemy. Dixie, who has used TikTok to launch her music career, has a more tortured cast. Her hair is black to her sister’s brown, suggesting, in the teen cultural idiom, a wink toward the goth; in the clothing line that the sisters develop together, Dixie’s pieces, she explains, are the “darker colors,” compared to Charli’s “pinky pastels.” On TikTok, there are some videos of Dixie singing a cappella, along with a few snippets of soon-to-be-released songs, but her feed, much like her sister’s, is also dotted with sponcon for lip gloss and whitening toothpaste and vegan burgers. As I watched the Hulu show, it occurred to me that Charli and Dixie are what Adorno and Horkheimer have called “ideal types of the new dependent average,” their fame both seemingly within reach—stars, they’re just like us!—and yet impossibly far away. “Everyone uses it. My grandma has social media. I post as every other teen-ager in the world!” Charlie tells the camera. But most other teen-agers aren’t TikTok multimillionaires.
The show does its share to promote this teen-dream fiction. In one episode, Dixie plans a romantic date for herself and her boyfriend, the TikTok creator Noah Beck, a gentle, square-jawed dreamboat who seems plucked straight from the pages of Lisa Simpson’s Non-Threatening Boys Magazine. (“If you think of a perfect boyfriend in a movie, it’s him,” Dixie gushes, though she seems a little bored.) In what feels like a staged montage, the two youths arrive at the beach, where they play like puppies in the surf and cuddle in a linen tent complete with a cheese plate that was surely arranged by a production assistant. In another episode, Heidi, explaining that she wants her daughters to hang out with their friends and feel normal, invites the crème de la crème of TikTok’s young stars for a catered hibachi dinner. For millions of the app’s young users, these creators make up their own Marvel Cinematic Universe-style world of intrigue, and “The D’Amelio Show” purports to take us behind the scenes: How does Charli act in the presence of her “bad boy” ex, Chase (Lil Huddy) Hudson, who arrives at the D’Amelio home wearing dark sunglasses and inexplicably carrying a silver cane? Does she really get along with her bratty fellow-creator Madi? What rude thing did Dixie say to Noah when they first met? Etc., etc. And yet the conversations lack juice, and the engagement is halting and stilted. Even Marc seems disappointed by the lack of drama. “Everybody’s really well-mannered,” he says, at the dinner. “It’s from fear,” Quen Blackwell, another TikTok creator at the gathering, says. (With her deep voice and ironic manner, Blackwell, who is featured on several episodes, emerges as perhaps the coolest, most distinct personality on the show.) “It’s this third person that’s not existed to any other generation,” she goes on. “Like, that”—she points at the camera, laughing. “It’s in your head all the time.” Lil Huddy agrees: “A lot of it comes from posting on social media. People let us know how dumb we look. . . . Their judgment gives us our own third-person judgment.”
“The D’Amelio Show” doesn’t scratch the same itch that “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” did, largely because it is much more sanitary and restrained, and therefore less gripping. (Though “Kardashians,” much like “D’Amelio,” featured teens along its run, young Kendall and Kylie Jenner were brattier and more fractious than Charli and Dixie ever allow themselves to be.) What the show does manage, perhaps surprisingly, is to serve as a pretty good P.S.A. for the toll that social media’s panopticon-like effects take on its participants. Both Charli and Dixie profess that they’d rather not leave the house anymore, presumably because of the public scrutiny they face. “I’ve had a constant anxiety attack for the past four years,” Charli says. “It’s very exhausting to do this and always wonder what’s going to happen next. If I’m gonna wake up and everyone’s gonna not like me again.” Dixie has suffered from one psychosomatic complaint after another—“back pain, migraines, all due to anxiety,” she says matter-of-factly. In one difficult-to-watch moment, she collapses in tears after reading the many negative comments posted on a vlog that she shot for Vogue, as her parents try helplessly to comfort her. “I just feel like I can’t escape the hate,” she says later. In another scene, while Charli is getting ready for the Teen Choice Awards, where she has been nominated for the year’s Favorite Female Social Star, she experiences a panic attack, fearing that if she doesn’t win it will be embarrassing, and that if she does people will say she didn’t deserve to. Later, emerging from behind her locked door and making it onto the red carpet with Dixie, her smile is stretched a bit too wide. “This is super fun!” she says brightly. When she wins the award, she gets “slimed” with green goo, per Nickelodeon tradition, and her frozen figure onstage appears not unlike Stephen King’s pig’s-blood-doused prom queen in “Carrie.” Being subjected to an audience’s constant attention, even willingly, has shades of horror to it.
D’Amelio Mère and Père seem bewildered and, unsurprisingly, not fully equipped to deal with the avalanche of attention, money, and fame that has transformed their family’s life. “All we’re trying to do is have some fun and make sure this social-media stuff doesn’t destroy our lives,” Marc says hopefully. But is it already too late? Toward the end of the season, Charli reveals that she has lost her appetite for dancing. She will conceivably continue to dance on TikTok—it’s basically her job—but, as a hobby, she is no longer able to enjoy it. It seems that the stakes have become too high. “Dance used to be the most fun thing in my life, and now I don’t like it,” she says. “Social media has robbed me of that.” In the meanwhile, she thinks that she might be interested in “the business side of things.” “No matter what happens with social media, I can always go into marketing,” she says, “because I know how it works. I know the back ends of everything.”
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