BEIRUT—Even in this flashy town, it’s hard to keep up with the Abdelazizes.
Alice, Nadine, and Farah Abdelaziz—three Lebanese beauties—have shot to fame and controversy in the Arab world as stars of a pan-Arab reality TV series, “The Sisters.” Viewers immediately called it a homegrown version of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” the American show following three Los Angeles celebrity sisters.
Farah Abdelaziz
Forget that Lebanon hasn’t had a president for over a year because of deep political divisions. The Abdelaziz sisters have Lebanon divided along a new fault line, one where people bicker about how the brunette sisters present this cosmopolitan but still partly conservative Middle East nation to the world.
The backdrop of “The Sisters” is Beirut, once called the “Paris of the Middle East” for its French colonial charm and open society. “It’s this image we want to bring back,” says Alice (pronounced the French way: Ah-l-ees), 27 years old, from the hilltop villa where the series was filmed.
Like Los Angeles, people in this country of four million also work on keeping up their appearances.
More Jaguars are sold here per capita than anywhere else in the world. The in-flight tourism video on Middle East Airlines, the national carrier, features an ad for a plastic-surgery clinic, alongside video advertising the country’s sun-and-ski possibilities. Strangers here will comment, unprompted, on one’s weight and hair.
It just hasn’t all been on prime-time television in this way. Till now.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time, but I’ve never seen a reaction like this before,” says Nadine Daoud, a producer of “The Sisters,” on how polarizing the show was across the region.
“Nobody wants to watch you take selfies,” says Lama Hajj, a Lebanese blogger, who thinks “The Sisters” is dull. She called it “where brain cells go to die.”
“We go to a restaurant and the first thing we do is take a selfie, or ask the waiter to take a picture,” says Ms. Daoud. “We put this on TV and there’s an uproar? What are we hiding? We are women who love to dress and love to live.”
Still, in image-conscious Lebanon, the sisters’ antics can be painfully familiar.
In one episode, when Nadine, 23, reels from a breakup, her sisters take her out for a day of fun on the ski slopes. The outing degenerates into an argument over a professional photographer that Alice had stealthily hired, because “everyone likes pictures in the snow.”
“I want to have fun and learn how to ski,” complains little sister Farah, 22, “but how I come out in pictures is very important.” She has earned the nickname “Queen Fafi” from her sisters, mostly because her 20 pairs of shades are seriously off-limits for anyone to borrow.
The Abdelazizes say they hoped to prove that women can care about their looks and be successful professionals at the same time. Alice, a former human-resources executive, is starting a clothing line for their puppy. Farah, guided by a life coach, is training to be a TV presenter.
“We are not showing something we are not, and we represent no one but ourselves,” says Nadine, a professional model.
Other Lebanese women slammed the sisters’ career choices, saying they still represented a sliver of interests for the privileged and fashion-conscious. Lebanon is full of female politicians, lawyers, and bankers whose lives may not be sassy enough for reality TV.
Even as the Abdelazizes racked up critics in Lebanon, their social media following exploded. “Fans in denial,” Alice calls the haters. “They still follow us on Instagram!” she says.
In other parts of the region, like the more conservative Gulf and North Africa, viewers devoured the weekly episodes of the sisters touring some of Lebanon’s most beautiful sights, towering over lush mountain resorts and Phoenician ruins in vinyl heels and crop tops.
Rotana Group, the Arab media conglomerate behind “The Sisters,” is producing a second season with the Abdelazizes. 21st Century Fox owns a stake in Saudi Arabia -based Rotana. 21st Century Fox and Wall Street Journal-owner News Corp were part of the same company until mid-2013.
Executives have even considered moving the show through different Arab countries, with different sisters, though no other place in the Middle East could offer this particular mix of flesh and fashion.
A Rotana show in 2014 traced the lives of five sisters in the conservative Gulf state of Bahrain. That show, many said, offered a more realistic glimpse of Arab family life. One of those sisters juggled motherhood with work. The Bahrain-based show was popular, ratings wise, and groundbreaking at the time. Reality TV in the region hadn’t before taken viewers inside the homes and lives of ordinary people.
But then came the Abdelazizes—with their oversize handbags and perennial pouts. They “started the program camera ready,” said Ms. Daoud.
The similarities with the Kardashians helped attract attention to the show, though the Abdelazizes and their producers reject the parallel.
“The society [in the West] is different. Values are different,” says Walid Zeidan, a production manager for “The Sisters.”
NBCUniversal, which owns E! Entertainment—broadcaster of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”—declined to comment. Kim Kardashian, one of the three star sisters on that show, wasn’t available to comment through a representative. Representatives for the other Kardashian sisters didn’t return requests for comment.
Executives from Rotana Group say their concept is different and never meant to mimic the Kardashians. “It’s the opposite: We want to steer away from importing shows from the West and show what is unique about the Arab world, with all our contradictions,” says Turki Alshabanah, chief of Rotana’s broadcast unit.
Those contradictions are central to the firestorm the Abdelaziz sisters stirred in Lebanon, where people simultaneously called their show over-the-top but also said it wasn’t juicy enough by the standards of American reality TV.
This being the Arab world, there is no on-screen lust, drunken confessions, or real family feuding in “The Sisters.” The Abdelaziz parents don’t appear on the show. Other staple characters in the first season were Stella, a dog the sisters bicker over, and housemaids who deliver the sisters their morning coffee in bed.
The Abdelazizes do, however, flash skin and flaunt their figures in skintight dresses (though, comparing to the Kardashians, Alice says: “We would never wear short-shorts on the show”).
They dispute similarities between the shows for another reason. “Frankly, we cannot be like the Kardashians,” says Alice, panning her blue crop top and black pants. “We are much thinner.”
Write to Nour Malas at nour.malas@wsj.com and Dana Ballout at dana.ballout@wsj.com
