Review: Bravo's 'Princesses Long Island' Aim to Marry Up

Calling all bachelors: If you’re a “Wall Street, lawyer, doctor kind of guy,” or “a man in a suit,” or “somebody who has money,” or just an “ambitious, successful gentleman,” then have I got a girl for you! Take your pick of one of the six Long Island princesses featured on Bravo’s aptly titled reality show, Princesses Long Island. These cute, Jewish ladies, all living at home with their overbearing parents, are hoping to get hitched to dudes with cash. As 30-year-old Ashlee puts it: “I’m looking for amenities.”

The marriage plot is a storytelling device at least as old as Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, authors who also skewer their rich and silly female characters. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” goes the famous opening line of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In the first scene of Princesses Long Island, 28-year-old Chanel’s father, Sam, echoes the sentiment. “You need a man to take care of you,” he says to his daughter, who’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown because her younger sister is getting married first. “L’chaim!” the rest of the family chimes in. That Chanel might instead get a job never comes up.