Executive Producers: Belisa Balaban and Ted Skillman
Airs: Thursdays at 10pm on Bravo
‘Welcome to the Parker,’ Bravo’s newest glimpse into Californian extravagance, overstays its unwelcome pretty quickly. Its hour-long format, much like the fastidious guests of The Parker, is quite ambitious for the hotel’s hapless employees, who fail at representing The Parker’s supposed five-star status and at creating compelling reality TV. Unfortunately, The Parker’s employees lack both grace and personality. It’s hard to believe employees at a hotel with the inflated reputation of The Parker can be this gauche. It’s even harder to believe their potentially amusing mishaps can be this unentertaining.
Samir, The Parker’s manager and oddly the most watchable of The Parker’s staff, is the tragic king whose unhappy subjects and useless court become impossible obstacles in reaching his goal of successfully running a luxury hotel. Samir makes for a terribly bland leader, but watching his unsuccessful attempts to unite his staff is vaguely amusing. His guests in the pilot episode – a rowdily immature group of ping pong players who gather at The Parker for a tournament and a whiny food critic, Leslie McElroy, whose unrevealing musings about The Parker point to the obvious – are certainly a hand full for Samir, though their annoying behaviors feel suspiciously scripted.
Aspiring to exude a behind-the-scenes authenticity, ‘Parker’ focuses too much on its obnoxious guests, mistakenly shifting point of views irregularly from that of a guest’s to that of an employee’s. From any point of view, though, ‘Welcome to the Parker’ doesn’t even work as the giant commercial for the hotel its creators intended it to be.
