It turns out that for a show which features her name in the title, there's not actually a lot of Lindsay Lohan to be found in Lindsay Lohan's Beach Club. She's there all right, now and again, popping up in her straw-covered hut like a seaside Yoda, spouting self-help nonsense in a strange Eurotrash/comedy Middle Eastern accent.
She appears in a variety of glam outfits in interview inserts repeating meaningless buzzwords about “ambassadors of the Lohan Brand” over and over. What is the Lohan Brand? Who knows, not the director anyway, who continuously cuts to a shot of a barmaid wearing actual Lohan branded shorts every time it’s uttered.
Her newest venture, an exclusive beach club located in Mykonos, is just Nikki Beach, Marbella with more picturesque surroundings and minus the cast of TOWIE morphing into barbecue prawns before your eyes.
Lohan's Beach Club is apparently an attempt for her to "realign" herself and make Greece her base. Who could blame her for fleeing America with its memories of being trailed by TMZ, scolded by Oprah and becoming a punchline for pop culture obsessives. The problem is, as with everything Lohan does these days, there is a certain amount of chaos and an air of desperation clinging to it.
Her ill-fated 2014 reality show saw the erstwhile actor struggling to keep sober and stay relevant and this MTV effort is another chance for the troubled star to prove to the public she has changed. Although, with the disturbing footage that surfaced last year of her trying to take some refugee children from their parents who she alleged were involved in child trafficking (which resulted in her being physically assaulted) she seems intent on self-sabotage.
Not that it matters to the nitwits who populate the show. The premise being that Lohan has invited 10 nightclub staff from across America to come to Mykonos, work at her beach club as “ambassadors” and compete for a permanent position there. Sadly, there are no trays of Ferrero Rocher passed around. Being an ambassador is more about pressurising sunburned, drunken tourists into parting with outrageous amounts of cash to have a firework stuck on their bottle of champagne and delivered by some scantily clad individual.
Inarticulate ramblings
This group of preening lunkheads live together in a villa, with most of the series being a montage of their feats of idiocy and general inarticulate ramblings. They speak of their love of Lohan, of wanting to make her proud and their desire to emulate her, which feels slightly disingenuous as she’s living her life like a ruined tsarina or a war criminal setting up shop in seedy surroundings.
Unlike most reality shows, there is no proper set-up. The competitors are introduced to us in chunks, with flash-forwards from upcoming episodes, supposedly used to illustrate their personalities. In later episodes these same scenes are employed as sepia-toned flashbacks, we never see these moments in sequence.
There is no order to Lindsay Lohan's Beach Club, it slurs along in a drunken haze without any shape or format, the only clue that the show is over is when the credits slide along the bottom of the screen during another continuity nightmare. It gives the show a strange jumbled quality, as if the director is trying to be the Christopher Nolan of reality telly, leaving you with that disconcerting feeling that you might have blacked out sometime during the second episode – if only.
Ultimately, if this endeavour fails (which seems highly likely) it won't make any difference to Lohan's reputation. The unpredictable and tragic is now her stock-in-trade. No one knows where this will all lead her next, maybe a turn putting her fish gutting to good work on Celebrity MasterChef or maybe arguing with clean-freak B&B owners about their dust ruffle on Four in a Bed.
Whatever happens, the mysterious, undefinable Lohan brand will most definitely remain intact.
