BRYNNE EDELSTEN is no stranger to the limelight. The 29-year-old former fitness instructor wife of entrepreneur Geoffrey Edelsten loves it, pure and simple. But as the curtains go up on her new reality TV series, Brynne: My Bedazzled Life, she comes across more like a deer in headlights.
And with that, the producers may have unlocked the key to making My Bedazzled Life work where others like it, including Being Lara Bingle and The Shire, have failed.
The camera loves Edelsten, almost as much as she loves the camera. At heart, she says, she's "a simple wide-eyed girl from Phoenix, Arizona."
Where The Shire and Being Lara Bingle stumbled because they felt manufactured, or their subjects tried to manipulate their environment to better sell themselves, My Bedazzled Life takes a simpler, more honest approach.
Edelsten lets it all hang out: her insecurities, her frustrations, her failures. It's mortifying at times, but Edelsten, innocently bumbling from one situation to the next, evokes sympathy from the audience.
The show's master stroke is to deposit its star in ever more absurd situations, tilting the audience's sympathy in her favour.
The difference between Lara Bingle, angst-ridden, and with one eye on the camera, and Noeline Donaher, lacking self-awareness, is that only one of them can break out of the artificial world of a TV show and touch the audience.
Oblivious to her surroundings, Edelsten does just that. The trappings of her universe, the endless wardrobe and acres of boob quickly become wallpaper and what you see are the tears, and the genuinely touching plea: "I want a baby so bad."
Out of that we begin to see the larger mosaic of an awkward girl who uses noise and colour to compensate for her insecurities.
"We're the only ones not talking about it," she challenges her husband, Geoffrey, on the subject of a baby, before turning on the now unwelcome intruder in the room: the TV camera. "Can you stop, can you just turn that off for a minute."
Like opening Pandora's box, there's no chance of that.
Brynne: My Bedazzled Life airs Thursday, 7.30pm on Seven.