The recent lathering of attention received by Ithaca College’s Cornell spoof, Ivy, puts the short, sordid history of Ivy League soap operas into perspective. For about a decade and a half, students inside the gates have been making soap opera-style parodies of their wild Ivy lifestyles. After most of the shows died off or went into Vimeo-shaped retirement homes, Ivy churns on and shows that non-Ivy students can not deal better insults but frankly better operate cameras.

The Ivy League soap fad started up with Harvard’s Ivory Tower in 1994 when Chrysler still made the LeBaron and students still watched TV. The show stuck around until about the Y2k scare and probably featured Zack Morris types with plaid shirts tied around their waists. Then word got beyond the Georgian brick walls and Northwestern started a show too, evidently scaring the Ivory Tower crowd back up Rapunzel’s braids. (Insert bad 90s Dave Matthews joke here. Actually, don’t.)

Since the Interweb was still pretty infantile then, it’s probably best to skip ahead to 2006—the golden year of Columbia’s The Gates, the sort of re-arrival of Ivory Tower, and the national media hit The B.C. (We’ll give you three guesses where that one’s from. Hint: It’s not an Ivy.) Basically, each show had one good episode that featured either (a) a lesbian sex scene, (b) Harvard kids, you know, hangin’ out and tryin’ not to act like they go to Harvard, or (c) getting a free trip to Hollywood to meet the real cast of The O.C. (Alright, we didn’t actually watch The B.C.—we just read the Times coverage of their dope junket in LA.)

Read more and watch clips from Ivy Soap purgatory after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to IVY reality index, where we watch Ithaca College’s masterful Cornell mock-soap-opera and dissect it with the obsessive zeal of a seventh grade girl seeing Twilight for the eighth time. This time we enlisted the help of Real Live Cornell Guy (and fraternity brother, to boot!) Michael Morisy ‘07 to help break it down.

But first, an update on last week’s reality index: Remember when we accused the Black Kid With No Name of having a weird pseudo-British, quasi-Australian accent? Turns out the actor is from Zimbabwe, and that’s actually the way he speaks! Apparently the Zimbabwe accent sounds just like an American theater geek faking the Queen’s English. Who knew? Anyway, on to…

IVY Episode 2: In Which The Sissy Liberates Himself After His Girlfriend Goes On A Trampage

Note: If you have trouble with the embeds, go to ICTV’s website and watch there.

Ep 3 and two reality indices (Christmas comes early!) after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

The intrepid lads and lasses of Ithaca College — some sort of liberal arts dealie that coexists with the Ivy Most Likely To Have An Inferiority Complex And/Or Belong To A Sorority — have created a delightful little soap opera entitled IVY. Filmed on Cornell’s campus, IVY “may or may not be based on actual Cornell students. … Okay. Yeah, they’re kind of based on actual Cornell students. Like pretty much.” The resulting parody so inspired, so ingenious, so delightfully spot-on, why, it almost makes you wish you went to a safety school! But seriously: I nearly died choking on my Diet Coke Plus with Vitamins during the opening scene, featuring a back-to-school monologue from Sorostitute #1, Emily:

Sure, the acting can be a little awkward, and the camera work kind of makes me motion-sick, but in the context of college, social discomfort and a lingering scent of vomit only enhance the cinema vérité quality. Emily emerges as the Blair Waldorf of the bunch, the scheming princess with her pussywhipped pre-med boyfriend, Chris. But Chris is having a change of heart! He’s thinking about dropping out of Orgo! Even worse— he might be falling for Natalie, the outcast studio art major with a nose pierce and Jenny Lewis bangs!

After the jump (and mostly because “Gossip Girl” isn’t on this week, which leaves a big hole in the “painfully-soundtracked elitist melodrama” part of our hearts) more video and we knock off Daily Intel’s Gossip Girl reality index.

Read the rest of this entry »