“They’re normal kids and that doesn’t change with a following,” says Heidi D’Amelio, the mother of TikTok famous Charli D’Amelio, in the first episode of their new reality tv-show:The D’Amelio Show.
Imagine waking up every morning to millions of notifications from various social media platforms. You begin scrolling through the comments and a majority of them are positive, but then the more you scroll the more the negativity creeps up on you. This is the life of sixteen year old TikTok star Charli D’Amelio, and her family.
The D’Amelio Show is a reality television show production that came out on September 3, 2021. I knew immediately after having various TikToks of scenes from the show pop up on my for-you-page, that I needed to watch the show for myself. The show starts off with a camera crew and her mother–– Heidi–– knocking on her bedroom door, asking if they could come in. The camera crew pans over to Charli who is laying in her bed and slowly waking up. She then immediately begins picking up her phone to check her social media pages: most importantly, her TikTok. On the screen, the viewer is able to see examples of actual comments that Charli would get on her TikTok videos. Some of them expressed their love for her and how much they adore her, and then immediately after looking at comments that say, “You’re overhyped” or “Can you explain how she got TikTok famous?”
Being in the spotlight is never an easy task, especially when you’re not asking for it to begin with. Charli D’Amelio never asked for fame, but fame found her. It all started in 2019 when she was only fifteen years old. She had lived in Connecticut and had always loved dancing, and would train almost all week. Charli started off by posting fun dancing videos of her and her friends on her TikTok account, but did not expect anything of it. “Being a dancer my entire life, it wasn’t like I decided I’m gonna do dancing on TikTok. It was like, that’s easy for me. That’s fun,” said Charli D’Amelio in the first episode. She expressed how she started this not wanting to get likes at all. She posted as every other teenager did her age, and one day went viral. Charli explains how much she was in disbelief and thought it was “just a fluke,” yet it was anything but that. She rapidly gained a large following on many of her social media platforms, but becoming an internet celebrity is sometimes not as glamorous as some might think. With this came a lot of opportunities for the whole family, especially the D’Amelio sisters: Charli and her older sister Dixie D’Amelio. This included uprooting their lives in Connecticut to come to the sunny state of California, where most social media influencers reside.
This show not only displays the personal lives of the D’Amelio family, but emphasizes the mental health struggles of the D’Amelio sisters. This show talks about the social anxiety that plagues Charli every time she leaves her house, along with the hate that Dixie faces every time she posts something new on social media. It really shows the everyday struggles that these young girls go through on a daily basis–– struggles that no one of their age should have to face that early in life. In the very first episode, Dixie is seen crying hysterically on her bed to her parents. She talks about how she went to the gym and posted about it and got a bunch of hate. People were calling her musty and gross. She sobbed about how she can’t do anything without the public harassing her, and how she gets made fun of for everyday things that everyone does. The D’Amelio Show is a Hulu production that you don’t want to miss.