Loading ...Don’t Call Us the Lebanese Kardashians: Abdelaziz Sisters Stir Up the Arab World
BEIRUT—Even in this flashy town, it’s hard to keep up with the Abdelazizes.
Alice, Nadine, and Farah Abdelaziz—three Lebanese beauties—have shot to fame and controversy in the Arab world as stars of a pan-Arab reality TV series, “The Sisters.” Viewers immediately called it a homegrown version of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” the American show following three Los Angeles celebrity sisters.
Farah Abdelaziz
Forget that Lebanon hasn’t had a president for over a year because of deep political divisions. The Abdelaziz sisters have Lebanon divided along a new fault line, one where people bicker about how the brunette sisters present this cosmopolitan but still partly conservative Middle East nation to the world.
The backdrop of “The Sisters” is Beirut, once called the “Paris of the Middle East” for its French colonial charm and open society. “It’s this image we want to bring back,” says Alice (pronounced the French way: Ah-l-ees), 27 years old, from the hilltop villa where the series was filmed.
Like Los Angeles, people in this country of four million also work on keeping up their appearances.
More Jaguars are sold here per capita than anywhere else in the world. The in-flight tourism video on Middle East Airlines, the national carrier, features an ad for a plastic-surgery clinic, alongside video advertising the country’s sun-and-ski possibilities. Strangers here will comment, unprompted, on one’s weight and hair.
It just hasn’t all been on prime-time television in this way. Till now.
On the Set of “The Sisters” in Lebanon
A television reality series about three siblings in Lebanon has attracted viewers—and comparisons to the American show “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.”
“I’ve been doing this for a long time, but I’ve never seen a reaction like this before,” says Nadine Daoud, a producer of “The Sisters,” on how polarizing the show was across the region.
“Nobody wants to watch you take selfies,” says Lama Hajj, a Lebanese blogger, who thinks “The Sisters” is dull. She called it “where brain cells go to die.”
“We go to a restaurant and the first thing we do is take a selfie, or ask the waiter to take a picture,” says Ms. Daoud. “We put this on TV and there’s an uproar? What are we hiding? We are women who love to dress and love to live.”
Still, in image-conscious Lebanon, the sisters’ antics can be painfully familiar.
In one episode, when Nadine, 23, reels from a breakup, her sisters take her out for a day of fun on the ski slopes. The outing degenerates into an argument over a professional photographer that Alice had stealthily hired, because “everyone likes pictures in the snow.”
“I want to have fun and learn how to ski,” complains little sister Farah, 22, “but how I come out in pictures is very important.” She has earned the nickname “Queen Fafi” from her sisters, mostly because her 20 pairs of shades are seriously off-limits for anyone to borrow.
Source: www.wsj.com