Sean Duffy in the Real World
I am a sucker for a travel show—if it involves people going to a place and doing a thing, count me in. My current favorites include the BBC’s “Race Across the World,” in which the scenery is usually the star—last season, sweeping shots of frozen mountain vistas had me itching to book a trip to Mongolia—and “Jet Lag: The Game,” a web series that a friend of a friend got me very, very into, in which three charming American nerds and a rotating guest player turn the world into the setting for a real-life board game, or similar. Here, the scenery is less the star than the hosts and the silly challenges they take on. In one recent season, the players had to “claim” as many adjacent U.S. states as possible by, for example, sculpting a butter animal (in Iowa), drinking at a bourbon distillery (in Kentucky), or doing time-zone trivia at a Margaritaville (in any state with a Margaritaville). It is, after all, five o’clock somewhere.
You can imagine my excitement, then, when I learned about a forthcoming YouTube offering called “The Great American Road Trip.” This one promised not only travel-show vibes but, perhaps, a sprinkling of reality TV, another guilty pleasure of mine. One of the hosts, Sean Duffy, appeared, back in 1997, on the sixth season of “The Real World,” the MTV staple in which bright young things from varied backgrounds moved in together, in this case in Boston; his memorable moments included calling one castmate a bitch and dry-humping another before gyrating with a pool cue. The new show’s other host, Rachel Campos, also appeared on a season of “The Real World”; later, she and Duffy met on a spinoff, “Road Rules” (more of the same, but on a road trip), got married, and had nine children. Campos-Duffy is now a host on Fox News; Duffy, who has hosted on Fox Business and served as a congressman from Wisconsin, is currently Donald Trump’s Transportation Secretary. Indeed, it was in this capacity that he launched “The Great American Road Trip,” with a promise to inspire other families to hit the road in honor of the country’s Semiquincentennial. “Our motto is ‘To love America is to see America,’ ” Duffy said, on Fox, in May. Campos-Duffy, sitting next to him, added that, in our “PornHub world,” the show would be “really wholesome, good family stuff.” A trailer promised as much—but also some drama.
By the time Duffy spoke about it on Fox, “The Great American Road Trip” was more or less in the can, and he said that episodes would drop in June, perhaps in time for the peak of the Semiquincentennial celebrations and summer travel season. But June brought no show, and neither did July. Meanwhile, controversy swirled around the initiative. Some critics attacked it as tone-deaf, given the war in Iran and the attendant, spiralling gas prices. (Rolling Stone calculated that a Duffy-style trip this summer might cost upward of a thousand dollars in fuel alone.) Others highlighted ethical concerns: the show was funded by a namesake nonprofit that cut sponsorship deals with various major companies—the aerospace giant Boeing, the construction provider CRH, the autonomous-driving service Waymo—that fall within Duffy’s regulatory purview. The Transportation Department insisted that this was all above board, claiming, among other things, that the road trip was official business and that Duffy had folded in relevant work meetings. After the trailer met with a withering reaction, Duffy took aim at a “radical, miserable left” that, he said, didn’t like what he was doing because “it’s too wholesome. It’s too patriotic. It’s too joyful.” During a contentious hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, suggested that the whole endeavor stank. Duffy shot back, “Don’t you want to celebrate America? Let’s celebrate this country. It’s our birthday.”
On Wednesday, “The Great American Road Trip” finally landed on YouTube, in six episodes of a half hour or so each. (Technically, it should have been called “The Great American Road Trips”; as officials were keen to point out, it was filmed in installments over a period of months.) At long last, it was time to tune out the naysayers and joy haters, and judge the show on the only terms that matter for a product of the Trump Administration: whether or not it’s good TV.
During Trump’s first term, in particular, the President couldn’t pass a bowel movement without pundits declaring it “made for TV.” More often than not, I found this unbearably annoying—part of a persistent media inclination to grade the optics of the things that Trump did rather than, well, the things that Trump did. But I also felt annoyance at critics who seemed to see any mention of TV in politics as tantamount to dumbing down. TV, after all, can be very good!
Embarking on “The Great American Road Trip,” I quickly started to fear that it was not very good. The first episode—a trip to see Trump at the White House, then on to Philadelphia to learn about the Liberty Bell, meet a Benjamin Franklin impersonator, and race up the “Rocky” steps—has the feel of a promotional video that one might watch in the back of a cab. Patrick—one of the Duffys’ kids, a few of whom have clearly inherited their parents’ screen chops and brightened up the show considerably—matched my energy when a producer asked if he found it cool to visit the White House, and he replied that “it’s kind of boring, because you’re just sitting there watching your parents talk.” (“What’s so good about having cheese and steak?” Patrick asks later. “You can make that at home.”)
If Episode 1 put me to sleep, Episode 2 quickly jolted me awake. Before the Duffys even leave for their destination—Boston, this time—we learn that their daughter Paloma is applying to colleges, including Harvard, which, she says, would be hard to turn down. “Well, me and Mom can say no,” Duffy replies. Cue tense music and a disquisition on the importance of Catholicism to Duffy père and mère, who are concerned that Harvard has perfected how to take “good young girls” and “corrupt their minds.” Paloma doesn’t think that this is very open-minded, and the argument continues in the car. Eventually, both are parked—Duffy has taken the kids to see the firehouse that he once inhabited on “The Real World,” where they are welcomed in by Montana, the castmate he dry-humped. But the college plot soon recommences, and the Duffys eventually speak with a Harvard chaplain who, to some extent, is able to allay their anxieties about brainwashing. (“There is a refuge, it appears, in the Catholic Church” at Harvard, Duffy reflects. Campos-Duffy admits, “I didn’t wanna like the situation as much as I did.”) By this point, I was getting a little worried about the separation of church and state. Then I remembered, with relief, that the series was funded by corporate sponsors.
There is more drama in Episode 3 (Wyoming and Montana—the state, not the castmate): the Duffys’ eldest daughter, Evita, and her husband, Michael, who has amazing eyebrows and is currently vying for Duffy’s old congressional seat, invite an ultrasound technician to their cabin to find out the sex of their unborn child; meanwhile, Patrick has to go to the hospital after collapsing with visibly agonizing stomach pain that doctors think might be appendicitis. Happily, it turns out to be constipation, much to the amusement of the rest of the family. (“I don’t want to embarrass him,” one of his sisters says, long after that horse had bolted.) The remaining episodes—a trip to Charleston, with a detour to a Boeing plant; a trip to Texas, with a detour to a CRH subsidiary; a trip to Arizona, with a ride in a Waymo—mostly settle back into the tedium of Episode 1. Perhaps most upsetting for me, the show, as a whole, never seems to figure out whether it is primarily travel or reality, or whether the scenery or the people should be the star. The creators could have done more to bring out the gorgeous landscapes that the Duffys visited; they could, at least, have fed us some dumb challenges, with alcohol or not. Ultimately, I came away with no idea who the show is supposed to be for, although, if its paltry early view count is any guide, the answer might be “no one.”
A few months ago, in anticipation of the show’s release, I watched some old episodes of “The Real World” to get in the spirit. They were extremely dated. They were also vastly more interesting than “The Great American Road Trip” would prove to be. Duffy, for his part, came across as a real jerk at times, but surprisingly charming at others, with a half-nerd, half-jock mien—sweepy hair, big glasses, a megawatt smile—that put me in mind of a Wisconsin Sam Seaborn. (Call it “The Midwest Wing.”) According to the Times, Duffy told his “Real World” castmates that he aspired to be President one day, and “The Great American Road Trip” certainly had me wondering whether the point was to promote American travel or Duffy himself. For the record, Duffy has strongly disclaimed any interest in the White House, which is, after all, just a bunch of boring grownups talking. His show—in which he does beautiful family things with his beautiful family—does feel like a shop window, though. And, even if it isn’t, it’s an interesting thought experiment to consider whether, in this media moment, it would work as one.
It’s tempting to look at Duffy’s political ascent—and Trump’s, of course—and reflect on the surprising cultural sticking power of turn-of-the-millennium-style reality TV. And so, I will. The Trump Presidency likely wouldn’t have been possible without “The Apprentice.” Duffy’s rise has been less meteoric, but his launchpad, if anything, was an even purer distillation of the genre; as my colleague Emily Nussbaum has written, “The Real World” pioneered many of reality TV’s modern tropes—the cast of strangers, the apartment as set, the confessional interviews—and cultivated a viewership that no longer saw reality TV as a “crummy stopgap” for scripted fare but the thing to watch. When I revisited the show earlier this summer, it seemed a particularly propitious moment to assert the ongoing influence of reality TV, not least in politics. Spencer Pratt, the villain from “The Hills,” was running for mayor of Los Angeles, depicting the city as a hellhole and attracting reams of media coverage. Luke Gulbranson (“Summer House”) was running for a (year-round) U.S. House seat in Minnesota. Mark Moran (“FBoy Island”) was running for Senate in Virginia.
The moment no longer seems so propitious. Moran dropped out; Gulbranson lost, as, more significantly, did Pratt, occasioning some hand-wringing about whether his supposed surge had ever been real to begin with. (In fairness, almost nothing is more reality-TV than that.) More broadly, the genre’s future, at least as conventional TV, is in doubt, in this era of social media, podcasts, and YouTube. And yet, arguably, this array has made everything into reality TV and given everyone the tools to be a star; certainly, the genre’s codes—chiefly, its obsessions with conflict and with evaluating people’s authenticity—are baked into our modern media culture. Perhaps the most reality-TV moment of the past week came when the Georgia senator Jon Ossoff mocked Trump for flying around on his plane with “Natalie,” a winking reference to a young aide who is known for her particularly obsequious devotion to the President—and as the “human printer,” because she follows him around feeding him digital content in hard-copy form. The footage was endlessly clipped and debated. Trump responded by likening Ossoff to Pee-wee Herman. The White House communications director called him “the biggest cuck loser in politics.” (Ossoff, not Herman.)
It was certainly the most reality-TV moment of the past week to involve a politician’s travel schedule. Ironically, given his impeccable credentials, Duffy’s show didn’t come close: to the extent that it trades in “authenticity,” it is of the performative, Americana-drenched variety that the word has come to signify in politics, despite bearing little relationship to what’s real; nor does the show serve up any conflict. (Aside from the Harvard row, anyway, and even that ends happily. Spoiler ahead! Paloma is pleased to be accepted to the University of Chicago.) Throughout his political career, Duffy has seemed ambivalent about his reality roots, at times dismissing them as irrelevant, and at others leaning in, as he does, explicitly, in the Boston episode of “The Great American Road Trip,” and, implicitly, in the show’s over-all orientation. He has pushed back on the idea that the show is reality TV, but not all that convincingly—you can take the star out of reality, but not reality out of the star. Maybe, if he’d more successfully kept his distance, he could just have made a great travel show—something less “Real World” and more “real world.”
Duffy, of course, might believe that this is exactly what he did. Touting the series on X, he wrote, “America isn’t something you can understand through a phone screen. You have to get out and see it.” This is fair. If his show makes a compelling case for anything, it’s less screen time. ♦