Big Hair. Big Boots. Big D. This is Reality?

Relax for a moment and imagine a place where women's curly locks bounce on their shoulders like perfectly spiraled ribbons atop beautifully wrapped presents. A mother-daughter outing means a trip to the plastic surgeon. On an average date, a high-heeled twentysomething might find herself riding a privately reserved McKinney Avenue trolley while sipping booze and chatting with a man as charming as he is handsome. Beauty is currency. Imagine a place where home decorating means bedecking beds and desks with peacock feathers and crystals, where couches are upholstered in the richest fabrics and rooms adorned by the boldest accessories. The owner of such a home might attend a charity gala, spending thousands for a seat.

Naomi Vaughan

The camera rolls as Donna Moss explains her bold decorating choices for her long-time client's Keller home.

Naomi Vaughan

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But how could one attend such an affair without a designer gown and fresh manicure? Money is no object. Imagine a place where everything is luxuriantly super-sized. Hair styles are voluminous — those bouncy curls, those bouffants. Men who wear cowboy boots and drive enormous pickups are the grandest gentlemen. Women, though well-groomed, are as brazen as their husbands. If single, they're just plain ballsy. Everything is enormous. This fantasy world isn't such a stretch if you glance around certain pockets of Dallas.

It's especially true if you watch cable television, where the city's essence is reduced to its most pungent distillation, like strong floral perfume that pervasively lingers. This year alone, about 10 Dallas-based reality shows made it to air (Most Eligible Dallas, Donna Decorates Dallas, A-List Dallas, Big Rich Texas and Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team, to name a few), many on high-profile networks.

The Dallas Film Commission, part of the city's Office of Economic Development, maintains a list of shows that either filmed or held casting calls here, and since 2005, there have been more than 300 filmings and castings. While some shows are based primarily in the city, the Film Commission also counts those that film an episode within a series — The Biggest Loser, Intervention, Man v. Food. Since Cheaters, the locally produced show in which adulterers are busted on camera began 11 years ago, Dallas has gradually become a hub for unscripted television production, gaining in quantity and stature to the point at which nearly every prominent reality television network has aimed its crosshairs at Texas, specifically Big D and its 'burbs.

Bravo, network king of reality programming, recently finished airing the first season of Most Eligible Dallas, which follows the dating and nightlife of six young socialites as they drink, prance and date their way around the city. Before green-lighting Most Eligible, Bravo snooped around the Dallas area for a reality show for more than a year, says Shari Levine, the network's senior vice president of production. "It's about interesting people who are doing things that you want to watch. ... They're smart. They're fun. They are surprising, and they're entertaining — bottom line," she says. "It's always about characters, but characters really represent where they're from. They represent social networks; they represent communities. We were intrigued by Dallas. ... There's a flavor that permeates all of their choices and their questions that feels different, and that's the Dallas part of it."

While New York and L.A. have been stampeded by reality film crews and New Jersey's moment of fame came, fist-pumped and crashed, Dallas moved on up for the reality treatment. Where the trend is going, it's tough to say. "Three years from now, I don't know that it will be Dallas," Levine says. "It'll be something else. But right now it is Dallas." So grab a Shiner Bock and settle into your Texas-sized easy-chair.

Out of all the potential characters and shows that could be mined from the Dallas area, and there are many, Levine and her fellow Bravo execs chose one show, one cast, six people as the network's biggest reality foray into North Texas.

"I think it's sort of where they are at this point in their lives. A group of people in their late twenties," Levine says. "They were all single. They were all looking for sort of the next thing in their lives. They were looking for love. They were looking for relationships, permanent relationships. They were at a transition point, and it's always interesting to spend time with people who were at transition points. They were an aspirational group. They all knew each other. ... They had a group dynamic, with the perfect sort of backdrop to say, 'Let's put our cameras there and see what happens.'"

Ed Bark, former Dallas Morning News television critic and founder of independent television blog Uncle Barky, isn't impressed. "I can't think of any reality series where the city hasn't been portrayed as this gaudy citadel of rich people, creature comforts and basically vacuous people," Bark says. "I watch it out of morbid fascination," he says of Most Eligible Dallas. "Car-wreck television is kind of what it is. I think all in all the representation of the city is another kick to the groin."

Courtney Kerr, the impeccably dressed, wine-drinking, bubbly Most Eligible cast member, joined the show because it involved a group of friends with whom she was already comfortable. Her sexual tension with her best guy friend, Matt Nordgren, the former college football player who works for his father's energy company, was the show's strongest narrative thread. In fact, it was Nordgren who roped her into the show in the beginning. "He's like, 'Oh my God, you have to meet my best friend Courtney,'" she recalls, speaking energetically as though someone would steal her words if she didn't spit them out quickly enough.