“Nobody tells you how hard it is to break into show business,” says Tiara Hernandez. “Or to do a reality show.”
She’s figuring it out, though, because she’s one quarter of a sister act that’s doing both.
That group is the Lylas — acronym for “Love Ya Like a Sister” — and their reality show, appropriately called “The Lylas,” debuts Friday night at 9 on We.
There are four Lylas: Tiara, Tahiti and Presley plus Jaime, who was born a cousin, but became a sister when she was adopted into the Hernandez family.
They also have two brothers, one of whom Tiara says sometimes gives them advice on showbiz.
“We pretty much ignore it,” she says. “Because he’s our brother and that’s what sisters do.”
She then laughs at this point, because this particular brother isn’t just some random guy with an opinion.
He’s Peter Hernandez, better known as Bruno Mars.
So yeah, he knows a little something about breaking into the music biz.
In fact, the whole family knows something about it, because the Hernandez parents were musicians and entertainers themselves. Their father, also named Peter, hails from Brooklyn and is half-Jewish and half-Puerto Rican. Their mother, Bernadette, was born in the Philippines.
They met in a show. Bernadette was a hula dancer, Peter was a percussionist. They settled in Hawaii to raise a family, which they did without leaving showbiz behind. It’s no big stretch to figure who Presley is named after.
They formed a family group called the Love Notes in which all the kids performed. Little Bruno — nicknamed for the wrestler Bruno Sammartino — did an Elvis impression that was the talk of the islands.
Like Bruno, the girls were drawn to show business. But Jaime and Tahiti both had a couple of children, and Tiara worked for a while as a preschool teacher. So it wasn't until two years ago, Tiara says, that they decided to make a serious run at a music career.
They were already on that path, she says, when they were approached about filming that quest for a reality TV show.
The We channel is promoting the Lylas as the next round of Kardashians, which may not sound like a compliment to everyone — but Tiara finds it divine.
“I think it’s great there’d be a reference to the Kardashians,” she says. “We’re fans of their show, of course, and it would be so flattering to be compared to them.
“They perfected this kind of reality show. They’ve just got it down. They make it look like it’s so easy when it’s really so hard.”
Tiara says she’s reminded of the difficulty every time she looks at the footage from their first few shooting days.
“I was so nervous,” she says. “We were walking to the beach and I was like, okay, calm down, one foot in front of the other.
“I look at it now and I’m walking like I have something between my legs. I was so self-conscious.”
Fortunately, she says, that abates: “After a while, you let it go and you’re just yourself.”
You also let some of your prearranged guidelines fall away.
“You start with these rules,” she says. “Like, okay, this is off-limits. We won’t talk about this in front of the camera. And of course we do.
“It all comes out. It has to. It’s reality TV. There are no secrets.
“Now, when we’re not shooting, but just talking, we’ll sometimes say it’s too bad the cameras aren’t here, because they’re missing some really good stuff.”
One thing the camera doesn’t miss in the first episode is the Lylas’ vocal harmonies, an angelic blend that proves they have something legitimate to sell.
“We all sang for most of our lives, but we sang separately,” says Tiara. “Singing with a group is a whole different thing. You have to be aware of what the sister next to you is singing, how loud you are, what key you’re in.”
In that first episode, the Lylas repeatedly point out that they’re starting at the bottom of the showbiz ladder, just like every other aspiring group.
“Sure, we’re Bruno Mars’ sisters, but in some ways that just makes it more challenging,” says Tiara. “We aren’t just getting compared to other female singers, we’re getting compared to him.
“But that’s okay. Either way, we have to prove we’re good enough on our own.”
Mars won’t appear on the first season, says Tiara, but that’s mostly a scheduling issue.
“His second album had just dropped when we were starting to film,” she says. “So he was crazy busy promoting it. We love him. We’re never going to run away from being his sisters.”
While “The Lylas” starts off focusing on the group’s career ambitions, personal drama quickly complicates the picture.
The first and most devastating blow was the sudden death June 1 of their mother.
The group was so close to their mother, Tiara says, that when they first got together they called themselves the Bernadettes.
So her death became a watershed.
“It’s the kind of thing that can drive you apart or bring you together,” says Tiara. “It brought us together.”
How together?
“I wake up in the morning and I have like 50 text messages from my sisters,” says Tiara. “We text each other all morning saying, ‘See you in the studio’ and when we leave the studio we start texting again. ‘I’m going home now.’ ‘I’m going out to dinner now.’ ‘I’m taking a shower now.’
“It’s exhausting sometimes. But that's how close we all are.”
As the season rolls along, says Tiara, viewers “will get to know each of us individually. And you’ll see everything. When you’re in a group with people from other places, sometimes you hold back. When they’re your sisters, you never do. It all just comes out.”
As for where it all will go, Tiara says she doesn’t know.
“We haven’t made it yet,” she says. “But we’re moving forward. We’re moving toward where we want to go. As long as we have that feeling, I think we’ll stay with it.”
dhinckley@nydailynews.com
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