#86: The soulless men of reality TV, ICE, and literature

Death By Consumption

1/20/26 - 1/26/26

Okay, there’s no good way to say this, when half the country is buried under a foot of snow, but: I am in the Bahamas right now. I’m sorry! So, you’ll have to forgive me for a shorter than usual email, because the beach is calling my name. Sorry sorry sorry, I understand the feelings of hatred you are having. But first, I’m here to talk about something more important: I finally revealed the existence of this newsletter to my therapist. He looked shocked that I had never mentioned it to him over the past year, and he had a surprising amount of follow up questions (in fact, he had more questions about this than he has when I tell him about actual emotional experiences in my life!). Questions like, “Do people pay?” and, “You can find it online?” Questions that made me worry he was immediately going to google it after I left, which is of course exactly what I would do if I were a therapist. So, Dan, are you reading this??? I can’t wait until our next session is all about analyzing my feelings about The Testament of Ann Lee or whatever.

This week: it’s a weird one, since what I’ve mostly been consuming is rum punches and sunlight, but I found time to get mad about an article in The Guardian about The Traitors UK; I decided the Vanderpump Rules reboot might actually be good; I desperately tried to find some hope in the ICE occupation of Minneapolis; and I enjoyed a prizewinning book that I know at least a few of you hated, and I am ready to fight about it.

“It’s open warfare in the castle! How The Traitors lost its soul” by Alexi Duggins — in The Guardian

I’ve written before about how The Traitors UK is top-tier reality TV, so of course the curmudgeons at The Guardian have decided it’s bad for society. Grow up! This article about the show was an instant-click ragebait the second I saw the subhead, which reads: “It used to be a breath of fresh air – TV’s most relatable reality show. Now it features shouting matches and bad-tempered confrontations, and the biggest loser is the viewer.” Oh no! Shouting matches and confrontations? On reality TV?? Who could have let this happen????

I don’t know who this Alexi Duggins writer is, but let’s just take a look at the kind of person who needed to write a whole pearl-clutching article about a reality TV show that dared to show people arguing:

Okayyyyyyy well, it all makes sense now. One look at Alexi Duggins and I knew his whole deal. This guy is the awful new boyfriend of your friend, who you desperately try to not sit next to at a dinner party. This guy shames you for liking pop music, and only reads books reviewed in The Economist. This guy pronounces “Timothée Chalamet” with a French accent. When everyone else is passing a joint at the party, this guy takes out his tobacco pipe and hopes you’ll comment on it. This guy probably swims in an Oxford button-down.

But, you know what? It’s actually a little cute watching Britain freak out over how “mean” this season of The Traitors was. (People betraying each other? On a reality TV show? One that’s literally called The Traitors? The horror! The Queen, God rest her soul, must be rolling over!) Seeing this article was a little like falling into a time warp, because here in the godless and cursed United States, we stopped having this argument in, like, 2003. Truly, the average British person would not have survived the Stanford Prison Experiment that was America’s Next Top Model, or the lawless fight to the death that was Rock of Love with Bret Michaels. Americans have been in the reality TV trenches for decades now, and pretty much the only thing that could genuinely horrify jaded US audiences anymore would be airing live executions — and even that would depend on who was getting executed. (I can think of a few I’d tune in for!)

So what I’m saying is, England: you need to cling to your naivety as long as you can. You make some incredible reality TV over there, and that’s largely due to how committed people still are to the bit. The cast of The Traitors UK seemed to genuinely believe people were getting literally murdered in the castle, which led to incredible drama as people sobbed and screamed as people were eliminated. Over here in America, reality TV has become simply the easiest pathway to getting enough followers so that you can pull a crypto scam — I’ve said it before, but the only American Dream left anymore is to follow Hawk Tuah girl’s career path (go viral, start a podcast, steal millions from your followers, enter Witness Protection). And the more we’ve become a nation of wannabe grifters, the worse our reality TV has gotten. It no longer matters whether you’re a Real Housewife throwing a glass of wine, a contestant starving on Survivor, or a mail-order bride on 90 Day Fiancee — the real game on all these shows is always ultimately the same. It’s scams and grift all the way down.

So I can mock dear old Alexi Duggins for his embarrassingly bad take, but he is, in a convoluted way, doing England a public service. For reality TV to survive, we need people who are still horrified at the idea of backstabbing on a game show all about backstabbing. Dorks like Alexi are the whimpering cogs that have kept the outrage machine of reality TV going strong for over 30 years now — and honestly, if The Traitors producers are smart, they’ve already reached out to Alexi to cast him on the next season.

Vanderpump Rules, season 12 episode 6 — on Peacock

After the spectacular, world-shaking implosion of “Scandoval” destroyed any sense of reality on Vanderpump Rules, producers made the risky and controversial choice to fire everyone and recast with an entirely new, younger cast for season 12. I really did not want to watch the reboot, and I certainly didn’t want to like it, but, 6 episodes in I think it’s time to admit they might be cooking with something here.

The magic of Vanderpump Rules’ success was the fact that the original cast was intimately entwined, had genuinely worked together for years at Lisa Vanderpump’s steampunk-meets-carnival-themed Hollywood nightmare restaurants, and, most importantly, were absolutely desperate for fame. The true star of Vanderpump Rules, in fact, was always that desperation, the hunger that drove these people to repeatedly destroy their own lives in a quest for more and more followers. To continue my thoughts from earlier, VPR is the endgame of all American reality TV — a television show about people who need to be on TV at all costs. As a viewer, we understand that the show is a performance and that the cast members aren’t acting authentically, but their performances are built on an authentic layer of desperation and emptiness, so, somehow, the performances become a form of actual reality. Vanderpump Rules is postmodernism, reality TV commenting on reality TV itself. What I’m saying is: Lisa Vanderpump is our Rene Magritte. Ceci n‘est pas reality TV. (Clearly, these people have warped me, too.)

Thankfully, this new cast appears to be just as desperate as the old cast, with the perfect amount of self-awareness (none). The women are shameless and boy-crazy, and happily invite producers and camera crews along as they warble into a microphone in a rented recording studio as they attempt to launch their hopeless singing careers. But so far, the real stars are the men, which is how Vanderpump should be — VPR is a franchise built on the backs of piggish, immature men who do nothing but torment women, and the new guys seem to be expert manipulators, primed to psychologically torture these girls for, ideally, seasons to come.

There’s Shayne, an extremely attractive former addict, whose parents introduced him to hard drugs as a child, and who has been shot four times (honestly, the show had already won me over at the idea of a Vanderpump cast member with bullet holes in him). There’s Marcus, a manchild who, when scolded for behaving badly at work by Lisa Vanderpump, burst into tears and revealed his father had died, before quickly taking advantage of Lisa’s pity to ask her to let him DJ at the restaurant.

But the true stars in my eyes are Chris and Jason, two hunky idiots with painted-on eyebrows, who are unfortunately already known to fans as the Incest Twins. Yes, the new Vanderpump Rules cast has had incest drama in its first 6 episodes, and this is how I know it will be successful. Chris and Jason are cousins who live together and, horrifyingly, make OnlyFans content together. I don’t know if they, like, do it do it (I‘m too scared to look, but hopefully someone can conduct an independent investigation and fill me in), but even the idea of filming porn with your cousin…………. well, these are the kinds of horrific, humiliating situations that made Vanderpump Rules big enough for even Obama to make fun of them, once upon a time. The jury’s still out on whether the new cast will be successful, but they‘ve clearly got the raw ingredients, the perfect mixture of delusion and desperation, so here’s hoping they can continue their descent into Hell, for our entertainment.

“There is no such thing as other people’s children” by Erik Hane — at Welcome To Hell World

What’s happening in Minneapolis is intolerable and horrifying, of course, and it’s hard to find anything hopeful in it, when children are being snatched off the street and used as bait, and mothers and nurses are getting murdered by government thugs. So this essay, in the newsletter Welcome To Hell World, was at least somewhat heartening, with its focus on how the community has come together in Minneapolis, in a way that shows all of us what’s to be done when the thugs come for our neighbors:

Here is something simple and beautiful: the vast majority of the residents of this city agree. In the days since ICE murdered Renee Good, something new has happened. Everyone is activated. Ordinary people—as in, people who don’t normally think that much about politics or where they fit on an ideological spectrum—have looked up and said, “No, what ICE is doing in my city is unacceptable, and I am going to be part of the opposition.” Networks for supplies, groceries, shelter, rides, medical care, and neighborhood patrols have burst forth on the sheer strength of everyone participating. This is part of all of our daily routines now, just as much as our jobs and our personal lives. Groups that started with whole neighborhoods in mind soon became so full that they’ve splintered into ten-block chunks, then five-block chunks, then specific locations within those areas. There is nowhere ICE can go in this city where they won’t soon be met by a dozen locals ready to record and impede their actions, and the whistles we’re all wearing mean that many other people will soon be at that location too.

Fuck ICE, obviously, but also fuck every politician who puts even a single dollar in these thugs’ pockets, or who acts like “better training” will fix it, or who settles for anything less than the total dismantling of ICE — which is, of course, an organization that’s younger than the concept reality TV. We were fine before ICE existed, and we will be much better off after ICE is gone. These soulless men and women are masked, but they’ve exposed the rot at the heart of our country, and none of us should settle until ICE no longer exists, and the many, many people who enabled these horrors have been punished for their crimes against humanity. We have to believe that they will lose this fight, because they will.

Flesh, by David Szalay (2025) — hardcover

Flesh has to be one of the most controversial books of last year — it won the Booker Prize, but everyone in my life I know who has read it hated it (including a handful of you reading this right now, I know for a fact!). So I’m here to say that I liked it, and I’m ready to fight you about it.

The book tells the story of one Hungarian man’s life, told through radically spare prose, with a limited view into the interiority of our protagonist. István, at first glance, appears to be a passive participant in his own life — he mostly says, “Okay,” and lights cigarettes. “It’s like he’s waiting for something else to find him. Or not even that. He isn’t really thinking about the future at all,” Szalay writes, and that’s exactly the point. Somehow, by the end of the novel, I genuinely felt like I had gotten to know István, this mostly silent, lonely man. He’s incredibly frustrating, but this is what straight men are like. Have you ever tried to talk to a straight man, or to access his inner feelings? I don’t recommend it!

I think a lot of the frustration people have with the book is that they’re frustrated with István, which tells me he was a successfully drawn character. You’re annoyed with István, you want to shake him to speak up, to tell you what he’s feeling, which means you’re reacting to him as if he’s a real person. He’s not just a character in a book, he’s a real guy you just want to stop being so fucking thick. By the end of the book, I felt like I had, somehow, gotten close to István, despite the sheer amount of blank space on the pages, the one-word sentences and the endless okays. It felt like a magic trick, the creation of interiority via the seeming absence of it. So I understand why so many of you hated this book, but, I’m sorry, I’m on István’s side.