They’re Finally Setting Celebs on Fire for Our Entertainment

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The greatest television series of our time.

A requiem for Rinna.

My favorite performance of the year.

The most deserved f-bomb ever.

The sexiest sex talk.

Do Yourself a Favor and Watch Special Forces

It is laughably early to be making proclamations like this, but I feel confident enough to say it anyway: Special Forces is the greatest piece of entertainment we will receive in 2023, if not for the rest of the decade and beyond.

Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test is a reality series that debuted on Fox this week. (You can watch the premiere on Hulu, and future episodes air on Wednesdays.) Forget the Emmy Awards. This gem of a television show transcends such traditional honors. Get the Nobel committee on the horn. Can someone give me Joe Biden’s cell? A Presidential Medal of Freedom is in order. Do they give Pulitzer Prizes for casting reality series? We are in the midst of brilliance, folks, and attention must be paid.

There is something both inevitable and inspired about Special Forces. The pitch is so obvious, and yet so preposterous. “We need another big reality show. Any ideas?” “I don’t know. I guess we could get a bunch of celebrities and then…set them on fire? Would that work?”

Attempting to kill former child stars and Olympians on reality TV was always where the genre was going to go, wasn’t it? I’m just shocked that we actually got there.

The premise of Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test seems like something that has to have already existed on reality TV, yet somehow is a new show. Fox gathered the most random assortment of celebrities, brought them to the middle of the desert in Jordan, and subjected them to a series of grueling, terrifying stunts meant to mimic training exercises used to select elite military personnel.

When you spend roughly 53 hours of your week watching reality television, you do eventually become hip to the fact that a lot of what you are seeing is orchestrated by producers and perhaps even recreated for cameras. But there’s no question that what you’re watching throughout most of Special Forces is real. These celebrities thought they were about to die.

This show is so goofy, yet so serious at the same time. I cackled at how dumb it was. I also cried. That essentially sums up my precarious emotional and mental state as we enter this new year, but also is a legitimate summation of the quality of this horrible, beautiful, repulsive, and transcendent show.

A solid 40 percent of Special Forces happens in slow motion. That is a wonderful thing. In the premiere, the cast of celebrities is asked to dangle off the side of a helicopter, lean backwards, and then fall out of the sky into the ocean headfirst, with no control over their body or how they enter the water.

In slow motion, we watch as Mel B of the Spice Girls breathes herself into a calm state and then literally falls out of a helicopter backwards and crashes into the water. The girl who played Lucy Camden on 7th Heaven (Beverley Mitchell) winces as she throws caution to the actual wind and leans out of a flying chopper. Jamie Lynn Spears studiously listens to the commander’s instructions, lets out a deep sigh of faith, and then over-rotates as she plunges into the sea, fully doing a belly flop. “Buffoon!” the commander, who, I kid you not, goes by the name of “Foxy” shouts. “You clown!”

Everything in that preceding paragraph is an assemblage of words that should not exist. Yet this is a real thing that I watched with my own two eyes.

I wish I had the eloquence or wherewithal to articulate the magnificence of the casting for the series. Celebrity-cast reality TV shows are its own subset of the genre. From Celebrity Apprentice to Big Brother, it’s nothing particularly new or revolutionary. Actors, musicians, athletes, and politicians who are starved for attention—whether it’s because they’re has-beens or they think that appearing on reality TV could elevate them to a new tier of fame—subject themselves to certain humiliation. We, as viewers, get to delight in some sort of karmic balancing of the scales: seeing the rich and famous be demeaned and treated like shit.

Listen, it’s not noble or something I’m proud of. But I’m not going to act like Donald Trump yelling at Marilu Henner isn’t good TV. (Hell, put Joan Rivers in the mix and it’s excellent TV.)

The casting of these shows is an artform. It’s a delicate house of cards built on people who were maybe very successful at one point, but you haven’t thought about in a decade or two; athletes with aggressive publicists who want them to be seen as “fun;” people who won gold medals at the Olympics and now have nothing going on; tabloid fixtures who want to be seen as “more” than just their controversies; and Real Housewives. Dancing With the Stars has always been gifted at this. Special Forces just raised the bar.

The show includes former New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza and Olympian Gus Kenworthy. Gymnast Nastia Liukin is competing on the same show as former Jon & Kate Plus 8 reality star/villain Kate Gosselin. Real Housewives of Atlanta’s Kenya Moore and celebrity psychologist Dr. Drew Pinsky are jogging through the desert alongside Food Network chef Tyler Florence, R&B singer Montell Jordan, and former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci. At one point, Mel B and NBA star Dwight Howard are filmed taking a shit next to each other. Truly, what fresh hell is this? (It is heaven.)

The heavily scripted dialogue used by the military coaches is laughably corny. (“If you should die, that’s nature’s way of saying you failed” is repeated multiple times throughout the episode.) But it does its job of making you realize how intense this all is.

In the premiere, the celebrities really do that backwards swan dive out of a moving helicopter. They are forced to run several miles in 100-degree desert heat. They go through an obstacle course so difficult that several of them collapse after completing it. One person is sent home after injuring her neck. Another suffers heat exhaustion. A third flat-out leaves because he’s so concerned for his safety when told that he would have to cross a canyon using only two thin ropes to balance on.

When Kate Goselin has a full-blown panic attack before the helicopter stunt, it could, on other shows, be an opportunity to laugh at her. But what they’re doing on Special Forces is actually scary. You feel so bad for her.

After Jamie Lynn Spears belly flops and is called a buffoon, she throws up when she gets back to land and starts weeping. “This reminds me of rescuing my daughter,” she says, referring to an incident in which her little girl nearly drowned in a pond. Kenya Moore starts crying in the background. Beverley Mitchell is consoling her. You start getting teary-eyed. “What the fuck am I watching?” you might think. The answer is Special Forces, the greatest series of our time.

I can’t remember the last time I was so captivated by a reality show. It has all the trappings of everything terrible and unwatchable about the genre. Yet there’s something intangibly riveting about it. It’s all so random, yet the stakes really do feel legitimate. There’s a viral clip that’s gone around of a future episode in which Gus Kenworthy is set on fire. I can’t think of a greater metaphor for our relationship to celebrity culture right now, and I can’t wait to watch.

We’re Owning It

I’m trying to figure out how to characterize how big of a deal the news about Lisa Rinna is to people who don’t care.

Rinna leaving The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills feels like when Steve Carell left The Office, and the show continued on anyway. That’s actually not momentous enough. What if Barack Obama called it quits halfway through his term? What if, halfway through church, God appeared and said, “Nah, I’m over it”? What if you were listening to Renaissance, and at a random point in a song, Beyoncé just stopped singing?

This is the gravity that Rinna’s departure from RHOBH has for reality TV fans.

You know that you’re a survivor of trauma when, after People.com announced that Rinna was exiting the show, you felt sad. That was my initial reaction: heartbreak. I’m torn about it.

As a loyal viewer of RHOBH, I am fully aware that Rinna has been a nightmare for the last two seasons. Her treatment of Denise Richards amidst rumors of Richards’ affair was inexplicable. Her bodyguarding of Erika Jayne against all reason and logic has been confounding. Sometimes, it’s really gratifying to watch a soap opera veteran act the hell out of her scenes on a reality show. Other times, it’s exasperating.

I may be the last remaining Lisa Rinna stan, as I learned while sitting in the audience of BravoCon and hearing thousands of people boo her when she arrived on stage. I remember when she joined the show and really rejuvenated it. I’m in denial that she has since become its biggest problem.

Generally speaking, I hate when Bravo parts ways with veteran cast members. I naively think that, if given one more chance, a Housewife could learn a lesson and redeem themselves after a bad season or two, which Rinna certainly has had.

I also think that shows suffer when they lose a longtime star. Yes, Vicki Gunvalson and Tamra Judge needed a timeout, but Real Housewives of Orange County suffered so greatly after they were gone that Bravo is now bringing Judge back. The network seems to be finding any excuse to bring Cynthia Bailey back into the fold, and Real Housewives of Atlanta already rehired Sheree Whitfield. And is there any fan of Housewives who, while acknowledging that her behavior in her last season was not great, thinks that Real Housewives of New York was better after it didn’t include Dorinda Medley? That season was such a disaster that it ended the show.

I’m the idiot you hear about that really does think of these people as my own friends. So I find it jarring when, for so many years, I see my pals hanging out with a person on TV, and then all of a sudden that person is not there. Friendships shouldn’t be dictated by TV contracts.

I think Rinna has gifted us with iconic moments in television, from being a pivotal part of the dinner altercation in Amsterdam to her perfectly delivered purr of “you’re so angry…” to Richards.

One of my biggest gripes about the Housewives franchise is when it’s so clear that the women aren’t friends and would never hang out in real life. RHOBH is the one iteration of the show where that isn’t the case; as we see on Instagram, these women have genuine relationships and hang out. It’s not great when fans of a show call that friendship an “alliance,” which is what’s happened with Rinna and her co-stars that are referred to as the “Fox Force 5.” But it’s nice to know that what you’re watching on screen is believable.

My apologies to everyone who, at 6:20 pm ET on Thursday, had their eardrums blown out by my shriek of surprise after learning oft Rinna’s departure. I really believed that the only things certain in life were death, taxes, and Lisa Rinna stirring up shit on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I’m so curious where the show goes from here, without Rinna “owning it.”

It’s the Hong Chau Moment

As a disclaimer, I am a huge proponent of seeing films in theaters. There’s no replicating the added, almost indescribable energy that exists when you see a movie with other people, sharing their reactions. That said, one of my favorite films of 2022 is now available to stream at home, and I hope you watch it.

I saw The Menu, which was released on HBO Max this week, in a packed cinema, and the audience was riotous. I don’t know how it will play on a TV screen while you’re scrolling through Instagram and folding laundry, but I am fairly certain about one thing: You’re going to love Hong Chau’s performance.

The movie is a hybrid horror/comedy that is a comeuppance for privileged assholes. Chau, who plays the hostess/manager of a restaurant where all of the film’s wildness happens, is the conduit for that comeuppance. She is so funny. She is chilling. She delivers some of my favorite line readings of the year.

Chau is in the supporting actress race this Oscar season for her performance in The Whale. She is spectacular in that movie, which, while I loathe it, I can appreciate how breathtaking her and Brendan Fraser’s performances are. (But, my God, do I hate that movie.) That said, I wish it were her role in The Menu that garnered attention instead. It is the epitome of a perfect scene-stealing supporting performance. Go watch it now, and plan to order a cheeseburger for after. You’ll thank me later.

Andy Cohen’s First F-Bomb

People have different rituals that they use for self-care. Some take baths. Some light candles. Some see therapists. I put on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen.

The talk show is the perfect combination of chaos and ridiculousness for me, a person whose life is chaotic and ridiculous. It’s cathartic to watch each night, as Cohen plays silly games with a bizarre combination of Real Housewives and esteemed Hollywood players—typically the exact spectrum of my interests.

So as a loyal viewer of WWHL, I was shocked to learn that Cohen had never broke and said the word “fuck” on the show before. It happened for the first time this week, when he was ranting about how disgusting it was that Angela Bassett and Courtney B. Vance’s son participated in that vile TikTok trend of pranking parents by telling them a celebrity died. (I will not link to it, because it’s gross.)

Cohen was so reviled that he let the f-bomb slip, and, honestly, if there was ever a reason to do it, it was talking about that trend. Fucking good for you, Andy.

Let’s Talk About Sex

I will be thinking about this exchange between Emma Thompson and Colin Farrell in a recent Vanity Fair interview roughly every three minutes until the day I die.

Mayfair Witches: You’re better off watching the other recent Anne Rice adaptation, Interview With a Vampire, instead. (Sun. on AMC)

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