A Compelling Made-For-TV Reality Season
6 min read
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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Jinae West, a senior producer at The Atlantic who works on our Radio Atlantic and Good on Paperpodcasts.
Jinae has been catching up on Survivor to sate her voracious reality-show appetite; she’d watch Steven Yeun in anything, and she enjoys watching Shark Tank while doing laundry. (As she puts it: “This culture survey is a real win for network TV.”)
First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
- The one place in airports people actually want to be
- The art of survival
- The Atlantic’s summer reading guide
The Culture Survey: Jinae West
My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I take public transit to work, so I’m addicted to what I think of as commute-friendly games. My favorite, of course, is The New York Times’ Connections, where you group together words that have something in common. (My preferred playing order is: Connections > Strands > Wordle > Crossword.) If I don’t get all the groups right away, I revisit the game later, usually on the commute home. But then, if I don’t guess another group in a sufficient amount of time, I get self-conscious about the people sitting nearby, judging me for not knowing that loo, condo, haw, and hero are all one letter away from bird names. The reality is nobody cares, and I never think about loons.
Sometimes I’ll do the mini crossword just to feel something. [Related:The New York Times’ new game is genius.]
Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: A few weeks ago, my niece and nephews made me play Ultimate Chicken Horse on Nintendo Switch. It’s a multiplayer game where you collectively build an obstacle course that’s full of both helpful things and perilous traps. If the whole group fails to finish a level, you respawn and get to pick another item to add.
The result is generally a chaotic minefield of wrecking balls, flamethrowers, and black holes—and I’m pretty sure I got hit by a hockey puck? I lost every round and died within seconds. But Ultimate Chicken Horse is my favorite kind of game: low commitment, fun for all ages, and less about winning or losing than about making sure other people have a hard time.
A good recommendation I recently received: A friend suggested a while ago that I watch the back catalog of Survivor to sate my reality-competition-show appetite. I am a glutton for it in every genre: cooking, baking, glassblowing, interior designing, dating. Survivor has more than 40 U.S. seasons—and had somehow been a big cultural blind spot for me—so it was right up my alley. Who knew that watching a person build a fire or give up the chance at immunity for a plate of nachos could make for such thrilling television? And the blindsides! Oh god, the blindsides.
I started with Season 37: “David vs. Goliath,” or: “The One Where Mike White Probably Thought Up The White Lotus.” I quickly moved on to Season 28: “Cagayan—Brawn vs. Brains vs. Beauty.” Most recently, I finished Season 33: “Millennials vs. Gen X,” which was interesting to watch as a now-30-something Millennial (it aired in 2016). But as the season wore on, and the contestants shed their generational stereotypes, it became a much more compelling show for other reasons. By the time I watched the finale, I was surprised to find myself in tears. It’s a near-perfect made-for-TV season. [Related:Survivor is deceptive. That’s what makes it so real.]
An actor I would watch in anything: Steven Yeun. He’s endlessly watchable. And he can sing! Toni Collette is another.
A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: If Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” is pure pop summer, Ultimate Painting’s cover of the song is its more muted slacker-surfer counterpart, and very much my vibe. It’s also part of a compilation album—Lagniappe Sessions, Vol. 1—that features another great cover song: Tashaki Miyaki’s version of the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You” (which is itself an adaptation).
Wet Leg’s “Angelica” is the loud song I have on rotation. It’s a track about a dull party, and it has a good beat and deadpan lyrics such as “Angelica, she brought lasagna to the party.”
The television show I’m most enjoying right now: If I’m being very honest with myself, it’s Shark Tank. (This culture survey is a real win for network TV, I guess.) Once a show I only considered watching in a hotel if nothing else was on, it has now been upgraded to a show I watch in my everyday life while doing other things. The stakes are just high enough to keep me invested and just low enough for me to walk away from the deal (to go fold laundry or something).
Is the show an overt celebration of capitalism? Yes. Is it a warped version of the American Dream? Sure. Is “Hello sharks” a mildly funny punch line to use on many occasions? You bet! Unlike, say, America’s Next Top Model or The Voice, the show actually does have a track record of investing in a few hits. I mean, once upon a time, Scrub Daddy was just a man with a sponge and a dream.
My fiancé has bought at least one thing from Shark Tank: a little fast-food-ketchup holder for our car. We’ve used it maybe once? Twice? It was fine. The show is fine.
Also: Baby Reindeer. Watch it with a friend. You’re going to want to talk that one out. [Related: The Baby Reindeer mess was inevitable.]
The Week Ahead
- Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, an action film starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the eponymous character trying to make her way home in a postapocalyptic world (in theaters Friday)
- Tires, a comedy series co-created by the comedian Shane Gillis about a crew working at a struggling auto shop (premieres Thursday on Netflix)
- Butcher, a novel by Joyce Carol Oates about a 19th-century doctor who experiments on the patients in a women’s asylum (out Tuesday)
Essay
The Dream of Streaming Is Dead
By Jacob Stern
Remember when streaming was supposed to let us watch whatever we want, whenever we want, for a sliver of the cost of cable? Well, so much for that. In recent years, streaming has gotten confusing and expensive as more services than ever are vying for eyeballs. It has done the impossible: made people miss the good old-fashioned cable bundle.
Now the bundles are back.
Read the full article.
More in Culture
- The Baby Reindeer mess was inevitable.
- Amy Winehouse was too big for a biopic.
- The cruel social experiment of reality TV
- What Alice Munro has left us
- The wild Blood dynasty
- Conan O’Brien keeps it old-school.
Catch Up on The Atlantic
- The Israeli defense establishment revolts against Netanyahu.
- George T. Conway III: The New York Trump case is kind of perfect.
- Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deserves.
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