A reality check with ‘Real O.C.’

When Fox debuted “The O.C.,” its wildly popular teen soap about beautiful rich kids in Orange County, critics found it so banal and shallow that the guy from the Washington Post yearned for “the cold comforts of a sleazy-minded reality show.”

Who says nobody listens to critics?

Tonight at 10:30, MTV will answer that poor man’s desperate plea with “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County,” proving, one, that wishes do come true, doggone it; two, that Fox isn’t the only place where a beautiful rich kid can act banal and shallow; and, three, that the cradle of Disneyland, Nixon and the South Coast Plaza is officially the new 90210.

TV is a heat-seeker, and right now the heat is in Orange County, or more accurately, the idea of places like it, places supposedly filled with rich, shallow men, surgically buffed women and smooth talkers who’ve made an art of fooling enough of the people enough of the time. It’s a step up for the county, which no one used to call “the O.C.” before TV came along with a cool nickname. For most Americans, Orange County was, until recently, forever in amber as that cultural backwater south of L.A. that was home to all those John Birchers. Now, almost overnight, it’s a glam nouveau riche icon -- like Miami in the cocaine ‘80s, or Dallas when big oil reigned.

This season, viewers are getting Orange County in three flavors, of which two -- funny and soapy -- are experiencing marked success. Fox’s “Arrested Development,” the sitcom about a family of down-on-their-luck Newport Beach real estate hustlers, just won a bunch of Emmys. Legions of fans await “The O.C.,” which picks up Nov. 4 from its highly rated first season. (When we last left the dewy-cheeked cast, one teen was getting loaded on the balcony of her McMansion, another was running away from home on his sailboat and a third was going to -- God help him -- Chino to do right by his knocked-up ex-girlfriend.)

Both shows, however, have succeeded less by playing up the glamour than by taking a cheerfully snotty view of Orange County as a place where money has been confused with class. So now comes MTV’s “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County” to set the record straight. Or at least that’s what the title suggests.

This, of course, is never going to happen on reality TV, which doesn’t know the difference between money and class, either. Reality TV is about exploiting the shallowest, most banal desires of a market that can’t get enough dirt on the people it envies -- rich people, pretty people, people who get to live in California on the beach.

This show was a no-brainer for MTV -- with a couple of glitches, one being that Laguna Beach is about as far from the “real” Orange County as is San Francisco. Laguna Beach isn’t even like the fake “O.C.,” which is set next door in glitzier, more politically conservative Newport Beach, or “Arrested Development,” much of which takes place in a model home and a frozen banana stand on flag-waving Balboa Island.

Laguna Beach has made a perverse tradition of welcoming artists and homosexuals and Democrats and other types that made the rest of the conservative county squeamish. It is infested with galleries and little bistros. The houses don’t match. There are sidewalk bongo players. Diane Keaton has a place there. It significantly lacks the contractor-class trappings that define so much of the rest of the county -- the great, polished tracts of suburban mansions, the fleets of Escalades in the driveways, the wide fairways where a guy can slap on a Hawaiian shirt, whip out a cigar and tee off with his NASCAR buddies.

But MTV is about as interested in the “real” Orange County as it is in the real Dallas. It wasn’t shooting a PBS documentary, and the town’s complexities were easily dealt with -- the producers just went straight to the high school, where they found plenty of uncomplicated teenagers who eagerly filled out fat application packets for the chance to be on MTV.

This naturally led to another glitch, because Laguna Beach also has attracted a lot of affluent, educated parents who freaked at the thought of some reality show exploiting their children. When adults found out that the town’s public school had quietly given MTV permission to shoot on campus, they revolted, and the reason is clear from the opening scenes of “Laguna Beach.”

In a town riddled with the spawn of old hippies, in a school whose sports teams were, until recently, known as “The Artists,” MTV has featured a “tight-knit power clique” of kids who look and act like something straight outta, well, some banal, shallow TV show. The boys tool around in new SUVs and backslap each other like real estate salesmen. The girls, on the patio of an ocean-view home, plan a private cocktail party in a $700-a-night hotel suite. Their theme, they decide, should be “A Black & White Affair,” since they’ve already done a bash with the theme of “Trophy Wife.”

Not that viewers are going to be in any way disappointed. So many tanned blond girls in expensive sunglasses move in and out of the scenery that you have to watch the pilot twice to separate Kristin, the sex symbol, from the self-described “nice girl,” L.C.

The kids bid goodbye to each other with the thrilling sign-off, “Skinny dipping sesh! Later!” The people look great, the houses look cool, nobody is being deployed to Fallouja. There’s a little drama -- the pilot centers on a love triangle between Kristin and L.C. and a surf shop clerk named Stephen. People even periodically confront each other in that trashy way that has become a staple of reality TV.

And should you be diverted by the fact that not much actually happens, there are handy reminders of why you’re watching, as in a scene where L.C., the daughter of a local architect, takes Stephen to see her family’s phat new pad overlooking the Pacific.

“Dude,” Stephen intones, sounding suspiciously like a nice boy whose producers have told him to act like a beach kid in Orange County. “This is so gnarly. It reminds me of the houses on ‘The O.C.’ ”

Thank you, Stephen, but the fact is, this cast is simultaneously too savvy and too self-conscious for reality television. They know how it works, but lack the low self-esteem required to make real spectacles of themselves. It’s not even clear that they’re showing “selves,” exactly. Though there’s something genuinely sketchy about the commodification of real-life children, “Laguna Beach: The Real O.C.” eventually acquires the tedious feel of watching preschoolers play dress-up.

Adolescents with cool beach pads are still adolescents, and if you take away the soundtrack of pop songs about perfection and California, what you’re left with are kids doing what kids do, namely trying on identities.

It’s the identities they choose -- and the way MTV chooses to air them -- that are the most truthful aspects of this “O.C.” The Hawaiian shirts and neat haircuts, the carefully chosen cocktail dresses, the tooling around in SUVs and golf carts, the talk of whom to “hook up” with versus whom to marry -- these are the identities of cautious convention, of people conditioned not to feel too free or think too deeply.

MTV took a beach town built on iconoclasm and it cropped everything but the banal and shallow from the picture. Why? Because that’s where the heat is in this era’s reality.