LOVE IS BLIND: THE LAWSUIT EDITION
With the SAG-AFTRA strike continuing (hell yeah!), even prestige TV networks like HBO are peddling reality TV. That’s not the first time that unscripted shows are being used to fill in the gaps during strikes in Hollywood. According to an LA Times article: “The 1988 Writers Guild of America strike, which lasted 153 days, helped popularize shows like “Cops” and “America’s Most Wanted” for Fox, then an upstart network.”
The fact that anyone would ever sign up to go on a dating show is wild: Why would you EVER agree to be on a show where the producers have control over your life and the final cuts? Don’t people know that any person can be turned into the devil with the right editing?
Naturally, the producers are not in the business of making anyone look good, they just want to entertain the audience. An example that comes to my mind is from the recent season of Netflix’s Love is Blind (which can only be consumed at 1.5x speed). The producers of the show decided to keep a clip of one of the contestants where he puts what looks like fake tears in his eyes. Upon the clip being released, a Twitter storm ensued. The producers, whose ENTIRE JOB is to make people act out, thought that the guy deserved to be made to look like a fool and a total psychopath because he was trying to be a lil dramatic.(^ here is
poorAndrew, putting drops in his eyes)
Anyway, in 2022 Love is Blind was sued by one of the show’s former contestants named Jeremy Harwell and now more shocking details are emerging about the alleged treatment of the cast during filming. Jeremy claims that the participants had their phones taken away from them, had no access to food or water, but were given plenty of alcohol AND were forced to film for up to 20 hours a day. Let’s just say, there are easier ways to get to 300k followers on Instagram….
The lawsuit is interesting because in my mind, at least, it’s the first time that reality TV participants are asking to be viewed as workers. We don’t think about reality TV stars as needing protection because we don’t really think of reality TV as any sort of a job.So the combination of low production costs and little respect for the participants seems to make for a perfect storm. Here is a video detailing the mistreatment further:
GOOP AT SEA
I devoured a fantastic article by Lauren Oyler about her experiences on a 9-day Goop cruise. This shit is just good. It’s the kind of writing that makes you forget for a second that journalism isdeaddying and all we have is infinite product placement.Lauren brands cruises as tacky and I agree: there is something so weirdly lame about cruises even if the premise – go see lots of places while drinking and tanning on a boat – sounds great. And YET, cruises are just undeniably uncool.
The only time I thought about a cruise as a sexy endeavor was while watching the scene from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” when Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell saunter into the dining room.Oyler achieves a remarkable feat: she writes about something as unserious as Goop in a way that’s sharp but not condescending. She doesn’t insult the women and men that chose to go on this trip and she doesn’t insult Gwyneth Paltrow. She just lets the ridiculousness of the premise speak for itself. In fact, the only person who gets the brunt of her condescension is David Foster Wallace, whose cruise essay “Shipping Out” is apparently a staple of the cruise-writing genre.
Read the article here:
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/goop-cruise-gwyneth-paltrow-goop-at-sea/
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