This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by editor Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, to Big Brother, it’s nothing particularly new or revolutionary. Actors, musicians, athletes, and politicians who are starved for attention—whether it’s because they’re has-beens or they think that appearing on reality TV could elevate them to a new tier of fame—subject themselves to certain humiliation. We, as viewers, get to delight in some sort of karmic balancing of the scales: seeing the rich and famous be demeaned and treated like shit.
Listen, it’s not noble or something I’m proud of. But I’m not going to act like Donald Trump yelling at Marilu Henner isn’t good TV. (Hell, put Joan Rivers in the mix and it’s excellent TV.)
The casting of these shows is an artform. It’s a delicate house of cards built on people who were maybe very successful at one point, but you haven’t thought about in a decade or two; athletes with aggressive publicists who want them to be seen as “fun;” people who won gold medals at the Olympics and now have nothing going on; tabloid fixtures who want to be seen as “more” than just their controversies; and Real Housewives. Dancing With the Stars has always been gifted at this. Special Forces just raised the bar.
The show includes former New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza and Olympian Gus Kenworthy. Gymnast Nastia Liukin is competing on the same show as former Jon & Kate Plus 8 reality star/villain Kate Gosselin. Real Housewives of Atlanta’s Kenya Moore and celebrity psychologist Dr. Drew Pinsky are jogging through the desert alongside Food Network chef Tyler Florence, R&B singer Montell Jordan, and former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci. At one point, Mel B and NBA star Dwight Howard are filmed taking a shit next to each other. Truly, what fresh hell is this? (It is heaven.)
Pete Dadds/Fox
The heavily scripted dialogue used by the military coaches is laughably corny. (“If you should die, that’s nature’s way of saying you failed” is repeated multiple times throughout the episode.) But it does its job of making you realize how intense this all is.
In the premiere, the celebrities really do that backwards swan dive out of a moving helicopter. They are forced to run several miles in 100-degree desert heat. They go through an obstacle course so difficult that several of them collapse after completing it. One person is sent home after injuring her neck. Another suffers heat exhaustion. A third flat-out leaves because he’s so concerned for his safety when told that he would have to cross a canyon using only two thin ropes to balance on.
When Kate Goselin has a full-blown panic attack before the helicopter stunt, it could, on other shows, be an opportunity to laugh at her. But what they’re doing on Special Forces is actually scary. You feel so bad for her.
Pete Dadds/Fox
After Jamie Lynn Spears belly flops and is called a buffoon, she throws up when she gets back to land and starts weeping. “This reminds me of rescuing my daughter,” she says, referring to an incident in which her little girl nearly drowned in a pond. Kenya Moore starts crying in the background. Beverley Mitchell is consoling her. You start getting teary-eyed. “What the fuck am I watching?” you might think. The answer is Special Forces, the greatest series of our time.
I can’t remember the last time I was so captivated by a reality show. It has all the trappings of everything terrible and unwatchable about the genre. Yet there’s something intangibly riveting about it. It’s all so random, yet the stakes really do feel legitimate. There’s a viral clip that’s gone around of a future episode in which Gus Kenworthy is set on fire. I can’t think of a greater metaphor for our relationship to celebrity culture right now, and I can’t wait to watch.
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