‘Hey Paula’ your career is over!

Have you ever wondered what Dax Flame would be like if he was a woman? Well wonder no more, because Bravo answered that question tonight with the premiere of Hey Paula, a new reality series that chronicles the daily life of Paula Abdul.

The show, which aires Thursdays at 10/9c, showcases Abdul as she pretends to be a gracious, sweet, and clever star who treats her staff with respect like some kind of princess and seals large-scale business deals at important meetings. At least that’s probably what Paula thinks it’s about.

In reality, this show might be more harmful to a career than Being Bobby Brown and Britney and Kevin: Chaotic combined.

In the first episode, Abdul attends the Grammy Awards and prays that her black and white Valentino gown will finally get her off the worst dressed list. Immediately after the awards, she heads off to QVC to check out her new jewelry line, but not before she berates her assistants for apparently bringing the wrong sweatpants and tennis shoes for her to wear on the plane.

Her mood changes like the wind. One minute, she’s cheery and putting $200K borrowed necklaces on her dog as it runs around the house, the next minute she’s throwing a tantrum like a five-year-old because her assistants brought the black tennis shoes and not the white ones.

At QVC, things only get worse. Abdul describes her passion for designing jewelry and explains that her creations really reflect who she is. Unfortunately, the samples she is presented at the meeting don’t match the ones in her head and she throws yet another fit. The horrified QVC employees try to calm her down and explain that the designs are in fact the same. You have to sympathize with these people because they’re tying to work out a business deal with a woman that probably can’t even tie her own shoes.

Next, Abdul accepts an award, throwing her pre-written speech aside and opting to improvise. Not a good choice. She rambles incoherently like a homeless person in an alley, all the while thinking she’s making perfect sense. It’s very clear that no one around her has any idea what the hell she’s talking about, but doesn’t have the heart to tell her that.

After this, Adbul goes to work on a new perfume, visiting a laboratory and testing out different scents. She even dawns a lab coat a la Tara Reid in Alone in the Dark and says she looks “like a mad scientist.” At one point, she crawls around a bit on the floor trying to pick up a sample stick and giggles like a cartoon character as she rubs the scent on her skin.

In the car ride back to her hotel, she twitches like Air Force Amy and continues her incoherent rambling as her staff sits quietly and tries to decided how to react.

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Then, the ultimate Paula Abdul interview begins. By now, I trust that most people have seen the infamous interviews she did with local morning news shows where she behaved so erratically that it sparked a flood of media speculation about her drug or alcohol problems. Even her publicist remarks that she stopped paying attention to the questions and, “Her answers are getting more and more erratic.” He even lamented that the whole incident would cause a lot of bad press just before a montage of the various pop culture commentators remarking how she looks like a total drunk/drug addict.

Abdul and her staff try to brush off the incident like it was just the result of lack of sleep, but it’s painfully clear that something’s definitely up.

I found the whole show shocking and uncomfortable. I felt embarrassed for her while I was watching it. It’s rare that you see a celebrity so epically humiliate him/herself and it was almost too much to handle. With stars like Anna Nicole Smith or Bobby Brown, it seemed they were in on the joke. With Abdul, you doubt she’s even coherent enough to understand that she’s on TV.

Her corny jokes seem like they were scripted by a bad award show writer and she repeats them over and over, laughing hysterically to herself as everyone else around her sits stone-faced. She has all the awkwardness of Dax Flame with none of the forgivable innocence.

Paula’s assistants and publicist try their best to excuse her behavior, but the damage is already done. The entire show seems like a PR move that has horribly backfired. This doesn’t make me like her more, it only makes me feel sorry for everyone who has to be around her. The entire thing plays out like a warped version of The Anna Nicole Show, with Abdul staggering around, muttering in her slurred and incoherent speech, and with a once-beautiful face that now seems slightly askew, perhaps altered by botched plastic surgery.

I can only imagine how Hey Paula will affect her career. With her life so heavily regulated by others, you wonder why anyone would let her do this.