Unless you hold a position in Washington or you’re someone who reviews reality television for a living you have more than likely not put yourself through the exercise of enduring perhaps the most transparently grifting and narcissistic series to drop on any platform in a long time. As of this writing, the most-viewed episode of THE GREAT AMERICAN ROAD TRIP has garnered 17,000 YouTube views. The sixth and final of the theoretically bingeable series has registered approximately 4500. That’s a 27 per cent completion rate and a cumulative universe reach of
By any objective media metric that’s abhorrent and infinitesimal. And it’s still slightly better than the qualitative assessment that’s out there. One would have expected something like this from the decidedly conservative-exchewing HUFF POST’s Curtis M. Wong that dropped yesterday about how like-minded soul felt:
John Oliver has joined a growing chorus of viewers left unimpressed by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s latest foray into reality television…The six-episode series chronicles Duffy’s seven-month trek across the U.S. with his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, and their nine children…Since its release, “The Great American Road Trip” has drawn mostly negative reviews, with The New York Times likening it to “watching a Cabinet member Kardashianize his family while vacationing on the corporate dime.” On Sunday’s episode of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” Oliver echoed those sentiments, pointing out that Duffy’s insistence that the show didn’t represent a conflict of interest despite sponsorship from companies that are directly overseen by his department rang a little hollow. “The only worse answer to ‘Who paid for this?’ than ‘the American taxpayer’ is ‘a bunch of companies I oversee and regulate,’” Oliver said.
But even those who embrace the genre wholeheartedly and for the most part shun ideological debates were equally disgusted. Witness the sentiments of Collin Woodward of the bizarrly named JALOPNIK.COM:
Even beyond being an ethical nightmare, it’s an incoherent mess of a show that’s beyond boring. Oh, and it barely includes any actual road-tripping. It does, however, include lots of shots of Rachel Campos Duffy’s bare feet for some inexplicable reason…(M)any of the sponsors are the same companies Sean Duffy is in charge of regulating. Boeing, CHR, Enterprise, Lyft, Royal Caribbean, Shell, Toyota, and United Airlines all gave money to The Great American Road Trip, and while the Duffy family didn’t get a free cruise, they did drive Toyota vehicles and visit several other sponsors in various episodes. If you want to hear how great Boeing is or get inspired by CHR’s asphalt, you won’t leave disappointed.
Based on the title, you’d assume “The Great American Road Trip” would include more road tripping. Or at least some road tripping. Instead, there’s barely any… A few episodes feature some in-car conversations, but it’s more of a travel show — in the sense that I’m pretty sure the Duffy family flew from city to city and then drove around for filming…But it’s not actually a travel show. Not really. It’s edited as more of a family reality show, and it comes off feeling like Duffys are mostly hoping to land a post-Trump TV deal.
Which considering the average live span of a Trump cabinet member’s tenure might not be all that bad an idea for the Duffys, who themselves are of course reality TV royalty from their stint on the granddaddy of them all, THE REAL WORLD. A LOT more than a few thousand bots have watched that program in almost 36 years of availability. It was a brilliant and groundbreaking concept developed by a veteran soap opera producer, Mary Ellis Bunim, and a gentleman I knew since his days programming the ABC affiliate in Rochester, New York, Jon Murray. Because of my prior relationship with Murray, who later went on to a similar role to the one I began my career with advising local stations what syndicated shows they should buy and what time slots night optimize them, I got the chance to work with them when they were starting their company. Bunim was convinced that there was as much opportunity to find compelling storylines from everyday people as there was in developing a fictional world with expensive writers and actors. During a brief development role I had with a now-defunct company they pitched me what became THE REAL WORLD and explained in detail that “reality” was both a wink and a misnomer. Between editing and a scheduling of events designed to produce conflict and drama we were as likely to get the same sort of emotionally charged results as any script could provide. I was convinced that the potential to take a similar approach for an older daytime viewer by tapping into the lives in a cul-de-sac (a reality “KNOTS’ LANDING, for those that know) was there. Jon and Mary Ellis shared my intrigue and promised they would start work on it as soon as they delivered what they thought would be this one-off special for MTV. You know the rest. And sadly, with the company sold and Mary Ellis gone that window is permanently closed.
So I do think I speak with some authority about exactly why folks like Sean Duffy–and certainly his boss–wind up in projects like these and then have the opportunity to take those talents to elected office. We are convinced they are as real as we are and we’re either oblivious or complicit with the truth that pretty much everything we saw them in was, as the saying goes, “fake” reality. It’s even more core to attempting to explain the degree of grip that Bravo, which has perfected the format many times over via the vision of Murra’s visionary twin Andy Cohen, has on its uberfans. They will be converging on Charleston, South Carolina this coming October for a “fan fest” that serves as an off-year bridge to the more elaborate Bravocons which last year filled an entire Las Vegas convention center. They will be in town just as early voting will begin for a midterm election featuring an incumbent interim Republican senator who until her brother died last month had zero political experience and I suspect knows less about foreign affairs than most Bravo fans–save, of course, for the one Teddi Mellenkamp’s hubby had.
In the years that followed that non-window of opportunity I talked on many occasions with Murray about the beast he and Bunim birthed. He lamented the reality that he heard from both his fans and his happy business partners that the need for the escapist fare that reality TV provides is more necessary in times of great distress. It’s video comfort food–as high-carb, low-nutrient and sensation-numbing as any Munchie Meal. One look at the morass of headlines that cropped up elsewhere yesterday would support the fact that this was an opportunistic a day as ever for someone to throw away their resolutions and indulge. Between all of the wars of words between Scott Bessent and Iran, Doug Ford and the United States and Rob Bonta and the state of California it’s either that or the 4 mg Xanax my ex used to pop like rock candy.
If there is indeed a ray of hope to be gleaned is that amidst this tumult and chaos the percentage of us that chose to find a haven with THE GREAT AMERICAN ROAD TRIP was a mere 1/5.27950311 x 10-5.
So maybe things haven’t quite bottomed out just yet.
Until next time…