happy international women's day, ct
I think that I could get away with writing a novel based on the song “Travelin’ Soldier” by The Chicks without getting sued and in doing so achieve great success. My girlfriend thinks that I could not. This is just one example of how sometimes in this strange mud wrestling marathon we call life one person is right and another is wrong. Many more examples of this phenomenon are on offer in NBCUniversal’s Peacock’s Alan Cumming’s THE TRAITORS.
The American version of THE TRAITORS provides the typical reality contest viewing experience i.e. kind of bad even while also enjoyable—as opposed to the Australian version, or the one season that’s available on Peacock, anyway, which just slaps—but this year’s Oops All D to C List Reality Competition Show Regulars and Bravolebrities version of the program was a massive improvement over the atrocity called season one. The sights and sounds of sniveling broke down empty-headed haters Quintin and Andie crying sour grapes so viciously to poor, perfect Cirie who had done nothing but play the game magnificently and in accordance with every rule set forth by production will haunt me until I either die or destroy them both. TRAITORS 2 (TRAITOR2?) was not short on the same style of inappropriate moral handwringing, but gratefully everyone here had enough media training to ensure we avoided the full-on wet diaper red face whining weeping choking demon hissy fits which sank its predecessor.
Traitors Deux ended last night in a mostly pleasant, boring finale followed by a reunion that I found interminable. My very own Christopher “CT” Tamburello, big ass chunk of Massachusetts ribeye and former (?) dangerously insane man who once wore the wretched John From Real World Key West aka Johnny Bananas as a backpack and had an intense impact on the blossoming of my sexual imagination and appetite beginning as far back as sixth grade, and his fellow Paleolithic relic of 2000s MTV Trishelle Cannatella, who is and has always been a significantly less beloved (although not less historic, for who could forget young Trishelle on Real World Las Vegas having a hot tub threesome with Steven and Brynn, then immediately calling her father to confess??) figure, to say the least, banished their way to victory and will split the gold that CT mostly earned for the group on his own.
Hackles were raised amid the cast and on “the web” by the fact that CT and Trishelle chose, as their final move, to banish MJ, a short of stature cargo pants queen from defunct Bravo show Shahs of Sunset who no one for a single second thought could have possibly been a traitor in part due to her good nature, I’m sure, but mostly because it was so apparent that she had not the slightest idea what was ever going on. They got rid of MJ so that they could split the money two ways instead of three because that’s what’s obviously going to happen when you go to the end of a game with two people who know each other better than they know you! I feel for MJ, who was naturally disappointed to lose at the last moment, but the depth of injury she claimed to experience, and the fury which has smoldered into flame on social media in the aftermath, is a bizarre surprise. What else could you expect? The prize is split among whichever “Faithfuls” make it to the end. Splitting between two means you get more money than splitting between three and they wanted more money!
Perhaps therein lies the fundamental issue in cross-pollinating game show lifers with lifestyle TV performers.1 Some of these people are on the television show The Traitors to win money and some of these people are on the television show The Traitors to be on television. There’s overlap, naturally, and neither approach is inherently wrong. But like.. Larsa Pippen doesn’t care about $100k. Phaedra Parks, in addition to being trained in approximately twelve skilled trades, I think, has been steadily employed by one television show or another for fifteen years. She was on The Traitors because Bravo can’t bring her back to Real Housewives of Atlanta, but the greater NBC universe is unwilling to let a good thing go. Of course, then, Phaedra takes it as a personal attack that that twerp from Big Brother attempted a Hail Mary to save himself and send Phaedra down in his place. The plan failed spectacularly yet months later Phaedra is still upset about it because someone playing hard to win a game translates to her as meanness and brutality. Tamra–who is violently insecure but kind of a jock and so, had she been able to play a bit longer, could have proven a better sport than some of her colleagues OR a much, much worse one–probably really could have used the money after the collapse of her fitness empire and all but even she has that horrible podcast now. Every one of these people (with the exception of that British politician??? What was the deal with that…) collects some sort of side hustle cash as a benefit of their time on TV, but the Bravo money machine is vast and lucrative, and appearing on a show like The Traitors, for any of those women, is about the increased visibility which can be turned into profit down the line–through spon-con, other TV appearance opportunities, hawking their varied wares to an ever expanding audience, etc.–not about actually taking home the cash prize. I don’t care that they don’t care, right, but this attitude that the money isn’t really important creates the implication that there is something uncouth about wanting it, and such an implication undermines the whole proceeding. The financial situations of strangers are none of my business and I would hardly guess that CT or Trishelle were in dire straits without this win, but it seems obvious that the money is more significant to either of them than it would be to anyone who has ever been a full-time cast member on one of Bravo’s many shows about ogling wealthy people.
Please know I don’t care that people are mad at Trishelle. She is nothing to me. Worse than nothing she is, in fact, very annoying. That she is taking significantly more heat for this whole thing than new American sweetheart CT is a symptom of sexism and of whatever animal magnetism let CT also get away with years of egregiously bad behavior on The Challenge while remaining a perennial favorite and heartthrob but ! it is also a symptom of Trishelle’s personality being bad. Trishelle was a beautiful teenager and we the viewing public have spent twenty years paying the price for MTV finding out about that. Her voice is grating, and her outfits are bad, and she was loudly, stupidly wrong about Peppermint! I am with you. I would not have chosen to give her the money if this were a show where I just got to look at the contestants and choose one to get the money, but, importantly, that sounds like a pretty bad game. And this was a game! And the point of games is to try and win, not to try and be nice to a Calabasas real estate agent. Belly-aching about greed within a game where for weeks you ran around in waterproof spandex collecting literal gold coins and bars and barrels feels a little pathetic and, more to the point: depressing. Where’s the fun in so much griping? You guys watched Alan Cumming in full funeral regalia pretend to bury that woman from Love Island alive. I thought we were all having a laugh!! The Traitors has already been renewed for a third season and I can only hope that the almost-famous people they scrounge up for that round will finally be as excited about the bloodletting as I am.
I went to a soccer camp in middle school where we would sometimes play rounds of Mafia—the actual children’s game being played on The Traitors there between the challenges with the dubious, bending time clock and everyone’s little Scottish Gossip Girl looks—in groups of ten or fifteen during meal breaks or if it unexpectedly rained and some hundred campers in dripping Puffy Paint t-shirts had to clot together on a basketball court. Cassidy, our not quite college-aged counselor, had beautiful dark braids and stunning footwork and she seemed to have committed to Mafia as her go-to move for avoiding talking to seventh graders more than was absolutely necessary. I can recall only one instance of a player storming away from a game in tears. Not trying to draw any conclusions here just. We were twelve.
consider: I read this really kind, earnest exchange in the comments on a mobility exercise YouTube video posted by an Australian physiotherapist and thought I might throw up from facing the bravery required to move in the world with such gentleness. This is also how I feel on the rare occasions when strangers are making small talk on the bus or when I read cards my dead grandfather wrote me when I was too young to read them. Birthdays but also Valentine’s, Halloween. ** Okay, okay, one more thing about The Traitors…….but like. Sandra is so powerful for going on TV with adult braces. I’m sorry. I am not making fun of her I think she’s near to a god among men. ** I’m at heislergoldale on Letterboxd if you want to see whether or not Love Lies Bleeding makes me go sicko mode tonight. ** Do any tall people know where we are supposed to get normal looking jeans? I remain perpetually in the market for this. ** Not An Ad whatsoever (though full disclosure I am open and ready always to review offers to sell out) but it’s a bit insane and almost disconcerting how good Ellenos greek yogurt is. If you take one tip ever at all from my blathering let it be this. I like the lemon curd one best. ** I am looking forward to this Sunday’s Oscars because they are a fun thing to watch on the couch while talking shit with friends, but it is sort of remarkable that at the close of what really was a good film year the awards themselves feel so completely dull, predetermined, and just deeply beside the point. But whatever. I’ll still eat chips and dip about it. Go, Messi!! **
Obviously, OBVIOUSLY Bravo Housewives (and all people on television or otherwise!! but let’s not peel back too many layers right now) are performers! It was fascinating to see Parvati’s comment about how the Housewives having years of performance experience is a factor in the game get thrown back at her in the reunion as if she had said something rude. They are obviously performers! To exist before others is to perform, so it should go without saying that to exist in front of television cameras is a performance?? Even Andy couldn’t parse this basic truism? And anyway it was a compliment!! All my sympathies to these people who were not assigned any Erving Goffman in college and didn’t even go on Tumblr to make up the difference. It’s okay, Parv. They can’t all be enlightened hardbodies like us. (I went to the gym three times this week and did an Instagram workout with five-pound weights.)