Survivor 44's best episode yet • Spring Baking Championship conspiracies • Top Chef's Restaurant Wars changes • and more!
Dear newsletter friends,
One thing I realized putting together today's newsletter is that I wrote a lot of headlines as questions this week.
On the Internet, this can often be a clickbait¹ tactic—ask a question for which there is no answer, write a bunch of keywords, publish.
But I use questions when there is actually an answer.
Sometimes the answer would be a spoiler, but most often the answer is more complex than I can summarize in a single sentence. And occasionally, there's a question without a definitive answer, but exploring why there isn't an answer is worthy of a full story.
Anyway, here are two examples from this week, about two separate Food Network conspiracy theories that I examined:
Is Spring Baking Championship's winner married to a producer? (People are Very Mad about the finale!)
¹ Clickbait, by definition, is content that gives you a compelling reason to click, but ends up being nothing of value. I try to make my headlines compelling—and I hope that there's always worthwhile content!
👀 A review
5 reasons why Big Brother Canada 11 was a disastrous mess, reviewed by Hamsterwatch
😃 Recaps
Survivor 44:
Episode 11: Season 44's best episode yet delivered an outstanding narrative arc
Jeff Probst's podcast, which I listen to so you don't have to:
Episode 11: ‘Your Burning Survivor Questions’, which has a lot of great tidbits about everything from a first-out season to the return of live finales—and in which Probst also says, "I’d rather [Survivor] died because [I] went too far" 😱
Top Chef:
episode 9: Top Chef changed Restaurant Wars yet again. Was it a success or a failure?
episode 10: coming later today!
Spring Baking Championship:
Big Brother Canada:
The feed-less season has ended! How did it go? Here are Hamsterwatch's final pieces:
episode 29: Who won BBCAN11? A recap of the finale and its surprises
episode 28: BBCAN’s final veto comp, fourth-place eviction, and The Little Mermaid (!)
episode 27: ‘She’s back, bitches!’ If only BBCAN houseguests knew who she was…
And the final Digital Dailies:
🗓️ This week's reality TV
The reality TV shows premiering this week include the new Jeopardy! Masters tournament, which continues tonight and for the next two weeks; a new season of The Real Housewives of Atlanta and the new spin-off Summer House: Martha’s Vineyard; and new seasons of Queer Eye and RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars (today!)
Among the documentaries on TV this week are the next of Jada Pinkett Smith's Netflix documentaries about queens, which focuses on Queen Cleopatra ESPN's exploration about Dennis Rodman’s Stolen Millions; and Frontline's report on Clarence and Ginni Thomas who've, uh, been in the news recently
🗞️ Reality TV news
Here are the 14 Project Runway alum returning for Bravo’s first Project Runway All-Stars—which is different than the Lifetime show with the same name
Fox renewed Next Level Chef for two more seasons
"The Kelly Clarkson Show Is Toxic Behind the Scenes, Staffers Say"
E! ordered House of Villains, a show it calls "outrageously sinister" with "10 of reality television’s most iconic and infamous villains under one roof where they must outsmart, out-manipulate and out-scheme each other." Let's hope the casting is better than this show.
Oxygen ordered a seventh season of Cold Justice, which will air in 2024, plus a new show with Kelly Siegler talking through murder cases
Carla Campbell, the bounty hunter featured on Showtime's Love Fraud, died recently, according to a note posted on her GoFundMe, which she started in 2020 after learning she had "stage four metastasized lung cancer."
💬 Comment of the week
"We get so focused on winners and losers that we sometimes miss the point of the show, which is to witness the joy of the contestants just being there.
They say no one ever remembers who came in second, but we will definitely remember these bakers. In the end we know who WE think is better. We don’t need the judges to tell us that."
—Abbie, on this story
🤩 I recommend
This episode of Survivor, which can still be outstanding
This episode/recap of Jeff Probst's podcast, about Survivor crew films and records audio
This t-shirt that I made for Traitors fans, because I'm very proud of myself 😆
best,
Andy
🌄 This is issue 336 of reality blurred’s weekly newsletter, first sent 12 May 2023, and it's ready for an evening of just Survivor and Amazing Race this fall!
📸 Photo of tulips at the Keukenhof in Holland by Jasmin Maag