[There was a video here]

Lindsay Lohan was chainsmoking and braless for much of last night's premeire of her OWN reality show, Lindsay. So that's kinda fun. The show documented her move from Los Angeles to New York and, as she told Jimmy Fallon last week, her life's resulting chaos.

It wasn't until more than halfway through when the "real" "drama" kicked in—Lindsay cried while preparing for a lingerie promo she'd appeared to be in because she felt that her role in it had changed with her increased availability. Or something. Basically, Lindsay felt like she was getting jerked around and so she chewed out the director. And then she did the same to a real estate agent whom she felt "lackadaisical" and lacking in urgency when it came to securing her a permanent residence.

And then she yelled at people a few more times in the trailer for the rest of the season of her show.

Time will tell if Lindsay is quality, quality trash, or neither, but the first episode seemed to present an uncommonly complicated portrayal of its star. If it weren't completely candid, it was brilliantly constructed to appear so. Lindsay's capacity for sympathy ranges from scene to scene. She's sometimes bratty, but that's often when she feels like people are taking advantage of her (and as a former child star whose parents have fucked her over repeatedly in the harsh light of public, you see why she'd be extra touchy about getting taken advantage of). But she also seems to demand so much of some people in her life that you wonder if she's not taking advantage of them, and if what she's fighting for is merely the upper hand. After she backed out of the lingerie shoot, Lindsay said it was "like a filler thing" and that, "I was just doing it to do it and I shouldn't have done that, because I compromised myself and my sobriety and my sanity." That's fair but also kind of disrespectful of one of the few jobs she had offered to her at the time of shooting.

"I know that this is my last shot at doing what I love to do," she said at the beginning of the show, matter-of-factly aware that reality TV is where some careers go to die. That's a brutal self-evaluation.

Paparazzi play a big role in the show—they irritate, they complicate, they make Lindsay feel virtually immobile at times. Below, she explains how they're preventing her from attending an AA meeting. They might be some irony to derive from that, given her relationship to fame, if she weren't a former child star who had a lot of attention foisted on her and no tools for comprehending whether that's what she actually wanted at the time. Lindsay seems like she can be a jerk, and her self-sabotaging can be infuriating for anyone rooting for her, but this prisoner-in-her-own-life stuff struck me as just plain depressing.

[There was a video here]