Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Lindsay Lohan in a promotional image for Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club.
Lindsay Lohan in a promotional image for Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club. Photograph: Sebastian Kim
Lindsay Lohan in a promotional image for Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club. Photograph: Sebastian Kim

Lindsay Lohan's Beach Club: the reality show we really didn't need

This article is more than 5 years old

The troubled actor has invited MTV to film her lively Mykonos business but given her misadventure to this point, is there anything left for us to see?

Lindsay Lohan doesn’t need a reality show, because her entire life already fulfills that purpose. Her music career was an uncomfortable exercise in oversharing. Her acting work isn’t nearly as interesting as the behind the scenes articles written about her acting work. Her social media output is at least partially made up of genuinely troubling videos where she adopts a Middle Eastern accent and forcibly attempts to remove refugee children from their parents.

And yet here we are. Lindsay Lohan’s actual reality show, Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club, starts on MTV this week. It follows the day-to-day machinations of Lohan’s new job running what might honestly be the very worst place on the entire face of God’s green Earth.

The story is this: a few years ago, Lindsay Lohan was on holiday in Mykonos with an abusive boyfriend. Lohan’s reaction to one instance of assault was to say, “One day I’ll own this beach”. And now she does, operating the Lohan Beach House cabana and club from the very same stretch of seafront.

It is a typically Lohan origin story, one where she yet again manages to snatch a modicum of victory from seemingly undeniable defeat. And yet it is slightly let down by the fact that Lohan Beach House looks legitimately hellish. It is a place that courts the world’s most obnoxious percentile of wealthy, do-nothing trash, and does its best to attend to their whims. You or I would instantly lose the will within a second of arriving there. We would hear the words “bottle service” and start eating sand just to end the misery. And yet people arrive there in their droves, hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman they love from the second worst Herbie film.

So if you’re a fan of essentially just watching some people rent sun loungers to idiots, this is the show for you. The bad news is that, if you’re hoping to see what Lindsay Lohan is really like in person, it isn’t. Because Lindsay Lohan is barely in Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club. People on the show talk about her constantly, and she sometimes pops up in talking head segments, but that’s about the extent of it.

Instead, the bulk of the show follows a gang of American “ambassadors” shipped over to Greece, either because they want to be part of the Lohan brand or because their ashamed parents just wanted them out of the country. They are all dreadful, each of them drawling a whale-song gurgle of valley girl vowels where anyone else would use actual words. One of them – I want to say his name is Chad – proudly calls himself a “waitress slayer” because he sleeps with everyone he works with until they quit. And he’s one of the better ones.

Lohan recruits these dimwits – hilariously, given her endless “you’ve got to be the best of the best” hard-nosed businesswoman spiel, she does this by flipping a coin – and then essentially passes them off to her business partner Panos. Panos is the brains behind the operation, as evidenced by the scene where he notices that one of the recruits has blue hair, then remembers that the club’s DJ also has blue hair, and then decides that this is probably too much blue hair.

Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club. Photograph: Sebastian Kim

The first episode revolves around a guest from Dubai, who is awful but rich. She tries to fondle the waitress slayer, and he lets her because it means that she’ll spend more on booze, and at the end Panos congratulates him for not resisting her advances. All the episodes might be like that. I don’t know. There honestly isn’t enough money in the world to make me watch them.

A second season of Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club seems unlikely. Lohan Beach House suddenly closed in September. The signage has been ripped from the walls and literal tumbleweed now rolls through the place. It might reopen next summer, but rumours abound that the enterprise is now done for good. If that’s the case, then let’s at least console ourselves with the fact that it looked horrible and formed the basis of an awful series.

Meanwhile, Lindsay Lohan just tweeted a Parent Trap GIF at the Pope so don’t worry about her. She isn’t going anywhere.

  • Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club starts on MTV on 8 January

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed