Politics & Government

Bad Girls' Club Filming Sparks Debate

Oxygen Network show comes to North Shore and local opinions fly.

If you happened to be driving by the corner of Egandale Road and Vine Avenue in Highland Park in recent days, you could spy some bad girls, seven of them to be exact.

That is the location where season 12 of the Oxygen Network reality television show is currently filming, according to VEMO. Patch stopped by, saw none of the seven but plans to return.

While Deerfield refines it commercial filming ordinance for presentation to the Village Board of Trustees, the arrival of the seven women has started a debate about whether the show should be allowed to film in Highland Park.

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The show will be filming nearby for three months. Should anyone want to take on a project of that magnitude in Deerfield, they would need specific approval regardless of the details of the ordinance which will go before the Board in the next few months, according to Andrew Lichterman, assistant to Village Manager Kent Street.

The show focuses on the altercations and physical confrontations of seven highly aggressive, quarrelsome, and unruly women, according to Chicago Tribune community contributor Peter Lubin. Lubin opines the women make their own rules and explains how swearing could be heard throughout a Sherman Oaks neighborhood in the show’s sixth season.

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“Bad Girls Club” also has a defender in former Patch and current Highland Park News columnist Sally Higginson. “Like many before them, the Oxygen network has tapped into the primal formula for success: take an upscale neighborhood, mix in a bit of downtown activity and let the cameras roll,” Higginson writes in her current column.

Lubin takes to heart what the people in Sherman Oaks dealt with, according to his Tribune column. A petition drive was started there to ban all future filming. “The local officials must be asleep at the wheel,” he writes about Highland Park.

Higginson defends the filming as part of a Highland Park tradition dating to movies like “Risky Business” with Tom Cruise. “Face it. Shelton’s wasn’t shuttered because of its prominence in a film featuring an adolescent Tom Cruise dancing in his jockeys, hooking up on the EL, or hosting the party of a lifetime while his parents were out of town, she writes. “We should continue to welcome the outliers, even if they are only in our midst for an episode, a season, a series.”

If you are looking for a film crew engaging in something a little less controversial, you can see if Jimmy Johns is still making a commercial at Ravine Drive and Linden Avenue. They are doing two in Highland Park.


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