#84: Three shows about traitors, an annoying book about a traitor, and Delta betrays me
Death By Consumption
1/6/26 - 1/12/26
I spent most of the week in Aspen for my dear friend Meghan's wedding, and then I came back to the city and promptly chopped off the tip of a finger while making Gwyneth Paltrow's veggie chili (not the first nor the last time I'll make a blood sacrifice for Gwyneth!). Now I have to wear a ridiculous bandage over my entire hand for at least the next week, so typing is very annoying. In fact, pretty much everything I love to do is annoying now: typing, cooking, showering, giving supportive thumbs-ups. At least I'll have a cool divot in my thumb for the rest of my life!
This week: I watched 6 episodes of 2 different versions of The Traitors like a true psycho, I reveled in the return of the backstabbing assholes of Industry, I read a DEEPLY annoying divorce book written by a very annoying woman we've already covered in this newsletter, and I had a troubling experience that made me fearful of the entire airline industry.
The Traitors US, season 4 episodes 1-3 — on Peacock
The Traitors remains one of the dumbest games ever conceived, and yet one of the most entertaining shows. Turns out all you need to do is put some of the most charismatic and insane people in a castle together, let them wildly accuse each other of lying all day long, and you can make some great entertainment! This TV shit seems so easy, I don't know why Bari Weiss is having so much trouble figuring out how to do it.
The magic of this silly show remains its absurdist casting — getting the chance to see Lisa Rinna laughing at a joke told by someone I loved on Survivor 20 years ago, while Travis Kelce's mom shovels food into her mouth in the background. And, as always, the cast this year is a great mix of big-personality psychos (Housewife Dorinda Medley, Drag Race's Monet X Change, Michael Rappaport UGH) and smaller-personality weirdos (Tara Lipinski??) with the occasional very normal person thrown in (I don't know why Top Chef's Kristin Kish is even here, but I do find her presence soothing so I'll allow it).
SPOILERS AHEAD: But this season seems to have been a bad one to go on as a "gamer" (the stupid name given to players from reality game shows like Survivor and Big Brother, even though you could argue that being a Real Housewife is basically playing Survivor 24/7...), who are getting jumped early, to pay for the crimes of former Traitors Boston Rob, Danielle Reyes, Parvati, and Carolyn. The early boots this season have already hurt me deeply, especially my beloved Rob Cesternino, who returned to television 22 years after last appearing on Survivor: All Stars in 2003, and proved in short order that he hasn't lost a trick despite decades of retirement. Watching him figure out what the Traitors were doing in real time was thrilling and rewarding, as a long-time Rob C. stan who still believed in his abilities, but even more rewarding was watching the rest of his cast — most notably and hilariously Real Housewife Candiace — fall in love with him.
And despite the resulting murders, the casting of the Traitors this season was brilliant, putting hotheads Lisa Rinna and Candiace in the turret with Love Island's disarmingly strange and handsome Rob Rausch. These three have an oddly undeniable chemistry (see Rob's "Girl..." to Candiace), and it already seems like the only people that can stop them in the game are themselves. Which I won't put it past these three to do! After all, this is Lisa fucking Rinna, as she calls herself, who we've seen self-implode many a time before. And Candiace is mostly infamous for getting her head slammed into a table by another Housewife, and for calling a breastfeeding castmate a "filthy milkmaid," and, when accused of body shaming her, immediately replying: "You walking into a room, you body shame yourself!" What I'm saying is, with this group of people, it's only a matter of time before someone literally dies in this castle. Let's hope it's Michael Rappaport.
The Traitors UK, season 4 episodes 4-6 — streamed illegally
As fun as The Traitors US is, The Traitors UK is the superior show in every way, and this newest season (which, like the earlier UK seasons, will probably be added to Peacock in, like, 6 months — literally WHY do these companies make it so hard to see the things they make?!) is off to an incredible start, thanks largely to one woman: Fiona. The star of this season is a 62-year-old, teeny tiny woman named Fiona, with the voice of Mrs. Doubtfire and the heart of an arsonist. She's like a fairytale villain, a sweet-voiced demon who will throw anyone under the bus without warning, and seems to just want to watch the castle burn down.
While Fiona is the star, the rest of the cast, as always, is impeccable, with their odd collection of accents and hairstyles and jobs (a "sweets shop assistant"?). Even though they're all playing for, like, $20,000, everyone cares so deeply about this show, backstabbing and panicking and sobbing at every turn. I don't know what it is about the UK, but their reality show newbies seem to be much more in it than ours, way less camera-aware and more authentic, in a way that just seems impossible to cast in the US anymore. Is it because the UK is largely made up of either out-of-touch elites or out-of-touch shepherds and farmers, whereas the only job anyone wants in the US is to basically follow Hawk Tuah girl's career path? I don't know, but it's the only theory I've got!
Industry, season 4 premiere — on HBOMax
My favorite show that makes me feel like an idiot is back! I'm so glad to be reunited with these sexy little sociopaths, even if I still don't know exactly what a short sell is or, frankly, even what a mutual fund is. Though this tweet did actually help clear things up a tiny bit:
The premiere was fun and bewildering, and at no point did I have any idea what was going on. Is this what it's like to watch TV when you're elderly? I just let the emotions and images wash over me while catching, at most, half the jokes, and yet I had a fantastic time! The premiere was shot in such a beautiful way I couldn't help but say out loud, "Wait, this is Barry Lyndon," only for the end shot to actually be a direct Barry Lyndon reference. In a Stranger Things world, it's so nice to have a show that cares so deeply about its quality, even and especially for a show that's 90% people doing drugs and saying offensive things at each other. I missed all these assholes!
If You Love It, Let It Kill You, by Hannah Pittard (2025) — library ebook
Every Q1, I try to read everything in the Tournament of Books before it kicks off in March. I typically get through about 90% of the books, most of which are books I'd never even heard of, let alone would have thought to read. While I appreciate the opportunity to expand my reading horizons, in recent years it feels like the quality of books chosen has... dropped. I suspect If You Love It, Let It Kill You made it into the tournament largely due to the drama surrounding it, rather than its quality alone, which I can't blame them for, as a drama-appreciating person. But this book is one of the most annoying books I've read in a while, and we need to talk about it.
First, let's recap the drama: author Hannah Pittard's ex-husband, who is also a writer, had an affair with her married best friend, who is also a writer married to a writer. This all-writer square of cheating was chronicled in New York Magazine back in 2024, which I consumed way back in the 13th week of Death by Consumption, when I had this to say about Hannah Pittard:
For example, according to Hannah, in her 20s she would “go to Bloomingdale’s in Chicago, gather up an array of expensive clothes she couldn’t afford, then lock herself in the well-lit safety of a dressing room, undress, and go to sleep for hours surrounded by the outfits she would almost never buy before waking and trying them on, playacting the personalities she imagined she one day might have.” NO SHE WOULD NOT!!!!!!! THAT IS NOT A REAL THING SOMEONE WOULD DO. SLEEP FOR HOURS IN A PILE OF CLOTHES AT BLOOMINGDALE’S???? COME ON. This is the most obvious case I've ever seen of a person trying to force whimsy into their public persona and reading it made me absolutely spiral.
Later, Hannah claims that once a year, “almost always on my birthday,” she goes to the ER for a bad back. That is also extremely fake!!! You do not go to the fucking ER on your birthday every year for a bad back, Hannah, stop trying to make yourself into an indie movie character!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And now, Hannah has written a book about the whole thing, an on-the-nose piece of "autofiction" that explicitly makes fun of itself for doing what it's doing, trying and failing to have its cake and eat it too, which I found so incredibly irritating from beginning to end. And that was before I realized this was the very same woman who had annoyed me already a year and a half ago!
What grates on me most (more than the many obnoxious plot choices, the most egregious being a sassy talking cat for no reason other than forced quirkiness) is the writing style, which can only be described as "if Miranda July or Patricia Lockwood had brain damage while working at Buzzfeed." A character is described as having "the sixth sense of a platypus," a phrase that made me cringe with its desperate need to force profundity via ~~~randomness~~~. Even worse was the way the narrator (who isn't Hannah, but is Hana, obnoxiously) describes herself: "I'm like an early morning weather report: mostly relieved, but with a chance of scattered wistfulness and bouts of anodyne jealousy." GIRL, WHAT ARE YOU SAYING? THIS IS NOT HOW METAPHORS WORK.
Twice now, I have been pushed into rage while reading the forced whimsy and self-mythologizing of Hannah Pittard. While I love when women are annoying (I watch all the Real Housewives, never forget), I don't know if I need to read 300 pages of it. Let's hope this is the last I hear about this dreadful, dreadful divorce. Leave us out of it!
The Catch, by Yrsa Daley-Ward (2025) — library ebook
Another Tournament of Books book, also about a writer. (In fact, this is the fourth Tournament of Books book I've read this year in which the main character is a writer — have all authors run out of ideas?) This was significantly better than If You Love It, Let It Kill You (another annoyance from Hannah Pittard, having to repeatedly type out that obnoxious title while a chunk of my finger is missing), though I found it deliberately opaque in a way that frustrated me. But still, it's about something more interesting than a divorce between two assholes, dealing with the loss of a mother and how it impacted her daughters. It's an ethereal, strange, weirdly page-turning book, and I only felt down by the ending a little bit, which I guess is all we can hope for.
A pinot grigio — at the Delta lounge, in Denver
On the trip back from Aspen, we boarded our plane in Denver, where everything was running smoothly and right on time (a rarity in The Real World's Sean Duffy's America). And that's when the problems started: we immediately noticed it was at least 95 degrees on the plane, if not more. I have never experienced heat on a plane like this, not even when flying from a literal desert. Lest you think I’m exaggerating, the shirt of the man in front of me was completely soaked through within 10 minutes. As we sat there for over 30 minutes, I was strongly considering dumping my bottle of overpriced Hudson News SmartWater over my head. Then, my phone buzzed with a horrific update: our flight, the flight I was actively boarded on, with the plane door already closed, was now delayed 2 hours. Horrified murmurs spread throughout the cabin as people got the updates on their phones, moments before the flight attendant came on to announce that yes, we were delayed 2 hours, and to tell us why: there wasn't a pilot.
“The pilot didn’t show up, so we’ll have to deplane you," she said, before adding, "This is extremely embarrassing."
We all grabbed our shit and shuffled off the plane, grumbling and genuinely furious but also a litttttle bit giddy, with that holy and righteous anger you get from being treated like shit by an airline — yay, an excuse to be justifiably PISSED at a corporation!
Justin and I practically sprinted to the tiny and rather gross Denver airport Delta lounge, where space was limited and we were NOT about to wait in line. Inside, we enjoyed a single glass of free wine while anxiously monitoring my flight tracking app, which kept updating the departure times, seemingly at a whim (at one point it said our plane had already left). Confusion and chaos was in the air. Another man from our flight sat near us, watching TikTok videos on speakerphone — videos starring various bloated white men and women with bad makeup, screaming at the camera about "cancel culture," as if it was still 2021. I tried not to judge him, assuming this was how he self-soothes.
When we reboarded, the plane was just as hot (they couldn't have opened the doors?) and everyone was even more miserable. “We’re back!” I playfully announced to the flight attendant as I got on board, flying high on pinot grigio and trying to lighten the discomfort, but the flight attendant didn’t even force a smile — she simply lowered her head in silent shame, like a palace servant nervous to offend a lord. (She may have just been fighting off heat stroke; her face was deeply flushed.)
Finally settled back in our seats, they announced what had happened, and we discovered we had been in the classic situation that Nathan Fielder had tried so valiently to solve in season 2 of The Rehearsal. You see, when the crew landed in Denver from New York, the pilot got off the plane and, they assumed, went to grab some quick food, and then he just... never came back. It turns out he never spoke to anyone, not even his copilot, so they all assumed he was flying back to the city with the rest of them. And for some reason now, the flight attendant was telling all of these details, which felt almost inappropriate to be hearing. Like, thank you for giving us the gossip, but also shouldn't you not be telling us this? Also: what do you mean, the pilot didn't speak to his copilot at all?
At first I was mollified by this explanation — again, I’ve seen The Rehearsal, so I know a little about these silent pilots we're all stuck with — but upon reflection it made no sense at all. Sure, the pilot not talking to anyone explains why the crew didn’t know he wasn’t their pilot back home, but why didn’t Delta’s own system have a pilot scheduled??? Our flight was only delayed once we were all already boarded and they closed the airplane door, only to discover no one sitting in the pilot's seat! Are you telling me there's no actual, computerized scheduling system to make sure every plane has a pilot sitting in its cockpit at takeoff? Are Delta's flight schedules written in crayon on some break room calendar, like it's Dunkin' Donuts? Is all scheduling done via word-of-mouth, just pilots being like, "Sure, I can fly this back to NY if you want"? Is anyone reading this a pilot, and if so can I ask you some stuff??? I have a lot of questions and I'm, frankly, terrified!
Our relief at the new pilot’s appearance — the plane burst into applause when he boarded, as if we were in the presence Sully himself — was momentary, as he quickly took to the mic to announce that he’d “need some time up here to figure out the peculiarities of this aircraft." I shared some panicky eye contact with a woman in the row next to me. We seemed to have found ourselves on a plane crewed by the world's biggest oversharers, a team of flight attendants and pilots determined to tell us their every thought, no matter how worrying. Anyway, we clearly survived the flight, and all I've got to show for it is a host of brand new fears of flying that I didn't even know were possible! Good luck out there.