Welcome home, Dear (Dr.?) de Montebello

Met Director Will Become Professor at N.Y.U. Institute

I should have bet money on this.

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Dirty Sexy Money...

... is exactly the reason why the hallowed Institute where I study allowed the filming, last April, of Fall 2007's most hyped-up new television series. For the purposes of the shoot the foyer of our Duke Mansion, which briefly became the home of the fictional and absurdly wealthy Darlings, was festooned with $20,000 worth of flower arrangements, while ours and several other Upper-East side Manhattan blocks were cordoned off. An all-star cast jostled for space with somewhat dazed art historians. I, for one, found myself literally bumping into Donald Sutherland as I exited a seminar on Representations of the Medieval Body, c.1100-1400 (my professor likes dates). It was one of those only-in-New-York type collisions that one of my fellow bloggers might describe as "glorious".

So our mansion, one of the last and greatest remnants of Fifth Avenue's gilded age, is to be the marble-clad backdrop for the intrigues and misadventures of New York's richest TV family, the Darlings. The show begins with the mysterious death of the clan's much-loved lawyer, who helped smooth over the many scandals and skeletons hiding beneath of such lives of extreme privilege. The family Patriarch then enlists the full-time help of the lawyer's son, the altruistic Nick George, who is torn between his vow to never be a part of the sordid, moneyed world his father knew and an enticing offer of a ten million dollar salary, to be used for charitable causes, of course. Hilarity and big-budget poignancy ensue, though after the pilot episode was endorsed by the network it was decided that it would be more economical, and doubtless more convenient, for a replica of the Duke Mansion to be built in an LA studio. How poignant to think of that parallel world being played out by actors, a world that will be far more real to millions of people than the cloistered life of an endeavouring art historian.

In any case I thought this would be an appropriate story with which to restart my blogging career (though the limelight I think I once enjoyed is now to be split four ways), as most of you I'm sure have already seen the adverts for the new show, with their catchy tag line: "When you're filthy rich, you have to get a little dirty". Those who haven't can check out the show's slightly overproduced website.

Dirty Sexy Money premiers on ABC at 10 PM, September 26, 2007.

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