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After four years and four seasons of television, Emily Cooper has finally been in Paris for an entire year. That’s right: despite seasonal hopscotch, some misleading pregnancy timelines, and a general sense among the show’s audience, characters, and seemingly even writers that our plucky young marketing phenom has been in Paris forever, t’s really only been about 12 months in “Emily in Paris” time.
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
The minute the beat drops on Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ “Unholy” during the opening scenes for Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” you know you’re gonna be in for a god damn ride. The camera is trained on social media star Taylor Frankie Paul, a mother of two in her late 20s who is all hair extensions and highlights. She’s also the closest thing this series has to a protagonist. A producer asks a question to set the scene: “So tell us how a couple of Mormon moms, getting together, making TikToks, suddenly turns into this crazy swinging sex scandal?”
The show is ultimately more about Whitney Leavitt leaving the group chat than about a Mormon sex scandal... and yet we are HOOKED. In this episode, we discuss Paul’s tricky role as the show’s emotional center, saints and sinners, Whitney’s villain edit vs. the real villain (Zac), Demi’s feminist soapbox, Jessi’s company branding, and whether MomTok “can even survive this.” Hope you enjoy! Xo
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
Last season of “Selling Sunset” saw Chrishell Stause victorious, the undisputed queen of the Oppenheim Group and, more importantly, of the reality show about it. In season 8, her power can go unstated, but it’s felt; she and her clique run the school (complimentary). But as their stars are rising, and other agents jockey for similar clout, the narratives on the show seem to be driven less and less by real estate affairs and more and more by reality TV production affairs: Who set up what on-camera conversation, and for what purpose? Who said what about whom during an Instagram Live or in a social media conversation about the show? If a show depicts the personal lives of its stars — their marriages, family lives, romances — is everything pertaining to their personal lives fair game, or are some things too sacred or too sensitive to be used as TV fodder?
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
Spoiler Alert: This podcast and post contain spoilers for the “Love Is Blind UK” reunion.
The “Love Is Blind UK” reunion show dropped Monday, and we were ready. While we were eager for updates on all of our troubled but mostly lovable duos, there was one from whom we expected to hear nothing noteworthy: Sabrina and Steven Smith, the standard-issue golden…
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
Spoiler Alert: This podcast and post contain spoilers for the final drop of “Love Is Blind UK” episodes.
In this episode, we discuss the stag and hen dos, the most beautiful wedding venue we’ve ever seen on a “Love Is Blind” show, and, of course, who got married and who got jilted at the altar.
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
Spoiler Alert: This podcast and post contain spoilers for the second batch of “Love Is Blind UK” episodes, 5-9.
The certified hotties of the inaugural season of “Love Is Blind UK” are officially out of the honeymoon phase. Literally. Our six (!!!) couples leave Corfu and head back to London in this batch of episodes, where they move into some immaculately-designed riverfront apartments (seriously, we would like to move in!), meet each other’s family and friends, and begin to discover the cracks in their romantic relationships.
In this episode, we talk through the highlights of these FIVE episodes, call out our stand-out friends and enemies, and Claire gives her predictions for who will get married and who will split. Hope you enjoy! Xo
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
They’ve got the pods. They’ve got the golden goblets. They’ve got a Nick-and-Vanessa-Lachey-esque married couple with English accents (Emma and Matt Willis, to be specific). And they’ve got a host of singles from across the U.K., mostly in their late twenties to thirties, who are ready to bare their hearts through a luminous opaque glass wall in hopes of finding a spouse. “Love Is Blind UK” is here, and it’s got all the romance and drama we expect from the series with an extra dash of winning British slang and cultural references.
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
It feels like we’ve been preparing for this one for years. We’ve talked about nap dresses and mom bodies. We’ve talked about the fear of losing your selfhood in motherhood. We’ve talked about egg-freezing and IVF. We’ve talked about the way that parenthood and non-parenthood are treated on both the left and the right. And now it’s time for all of these threads to merge together into a mega-discourse, thanks to Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman and Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance.
A preternaturally beautiful, homesteading momfluencer and an alt-right weirdo with the face of a socially-awkward 14-year-old (and an unsettling obsession with punishing childfree women) may seem like odd cultural bedfellows. But, as Claire put it, if Ballerina Farm is the trad honey trap who makes the pro-natalist lifestyle look romantic and joyful, JD Vance is the trad boot heel of the state who aspires to grind down upon all the childfree women in America until they’re barefoot and pregnant in their egg aprons.
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
Note: We recorded this episode last Wednesday, so some of the post-show updates we discuss may have evolved!
“Love Island USA” did its big one this season. (Like so much of “Love Island” lingo… if you know you know. Soul Ties is craaaaaazy!)
Emma was curious what was behind the show becoming such a mainstream phenomenon now, six seasons in. So she recruited “Love Island” aficianado and the author of the superb Nightcap newsletter, Laura Bassett, to school her on the show’s history, and analyze Leah and Rob’s star power, Serena and Kordell’s rom-com arc, and what made season 6 so special. Hope you enjoy!
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
“The Bear,” everyone’s favorite drama-with-just-enough-jokes-to-get-awards-nominations-as-a-comedy, which follows a tortured-genius chef who heads back to Chicago to take over his brother’s Italian beef sandwich shop, has released its third season. In this podcast, we discuss what happened (and didn’t) this season, the critical backlash, our own initial reactions to season 3, how the repetitiveness and stagnation of the season might serve a purpose in its artistic project, and where “The Bear” could go from here. And despite how this may sound, we had a lot of fun with this one! We hope you enjoy. xo
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
Emma and Adam are engaged! Claire interviews Emma all about the proposal, and then they both discuss the feelings on surprise proposals, traditional wedding traditions and how their feelings about marriage interact with their feminist values. (Bonus: Claire talks about her proposal story!)
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
Watching Netflix’s new Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders docuseries, “America’s Sweethearts,” is like diving under the water to check out what a swan’s feet are doing as she glides elegantly across a glassy pond. The frantic but hidden exertion underneath, all in service of creating an apparently effortless movement forward, becomes suddenly, jarringly visible once you peer under the surface of the water. That’s the ultimate challenge of meeting the traditional high-feminine ideal: The work, no matter how demanding, must expand to include the work of making itself invisible. A Dallas Cowboys cheerleader is an elite athlete, a brand ambassador, a pageant-ready beauty, a sex symbol and an ever-ready helping hand. She works tirelessly and accepts the meager pay as an honor. She also makes it all look easy. It’s part of the job.
In this episode, we dug into the labor exploitation of it all, focusing on the devaluation of women’s work and the expectation that women will demonstrate their virtue through a willingness to donate time and effort. We also discuss the rigid beauty standards and casual objectification faced by the cheerleaders, and the upholding of a very specific feminine ideal through this brand. Hope you enjoy! xo
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
Reading the comments on The Cut’s Instagram page is not for the faint of heart. Things tend to get weird and heated and even more weird, but sometimes they also get interesting, like they did after writer Shannon Keating wrote an essay about her confused ambivalence about having children.
The piece ran with the e…
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Dearest gentle readers, the end of Polin season is upon us at last, bringing with it relief from weepy eyes and gasping breaths. Colin and Penelope’s love story climaxes in several senses during these final four episodes: with a declaration of love, with a long-awaited sex scene featuring a mirror, with his discovery of Penelope’s nom de plume, and with his eventual acceptance of her full self. Oh, and they get married. (Details, details.)
But alongside the story of their friendship and love growing deeper and more complete, this season is telling another story: the story of how an intrepid gossip girlboss gaslights and gatekeeps her way to the top.
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
Bravo shows tend to be their most interesting and most depressing when we’re watching something dissolve, whether that’s a longterm relationship or the remaining space between reality TV cast members and their audience.
“The Valley,” “Summer House” and “Vanderpump Rules” all ended their seasons with something fundamental shatt…
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
The great rom-com stars make it look easy. Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore: When they fall in love on-screen, their charm pulls us in and the transparency of their emotions enables us to feel every moment of yearning and every thrill just as their characters do. But a rom-com lead can also, we recently discovered, turn in such a limp performance that it makes the sheer difficulty of being a rom-com lead obvious. Sydney Sweeney is a good actress, and she was surely trying to put in a rousing performance as the female lead ofthe recent film “Anyone But You.” It just doesn’t work.
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
Dearest gentle reader…
In the words of our dear gossip-monger Lady Whistledown, “Diamonds are not the only gems that sparkle.” On this season of “Bridgerton,” we are given an emerald, in the form of a no-longer-citrus-clad Penelope Featherington. The former wallflower is in full bloom, catching the eyes of both naturalist Lo…
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
“Selling the O.C.” has always distinguished itself from its older, cooler sister “Selling Sunset” by being slightly worse in almost every respect: the fashion, the characters, the politics, the drama. In season 3, that continues. The “Love Island”-inspired, Shein-designed outfits, the flatly unpleasant people, the thinly veiled bigotries, and the warmed-over storylines make for an uninspiring season. Still worse, the biggest central stories now seem irrelevant, given how many key characters have left the show since this season filmed.
But “Selling the O.C.” does offer one thing “Selling Sunset” does not: sheer villain volume. Everyone who has briefly won our sympathy on this show immediately loses it (except perhaps Brandi, who has effectively sidelined herself from the drama this go-around). The most likable characters onscreen often turn out to have the most heinous politics, and even the more sympathetic figures often have pretty unpleasant vibes themselves. There’s not a Chrishell in this bunch, folks. It’s mean girls and a*****e bros all the way down.
In this episode, we discuss the alarmingly flammable-looking fashion; the abysmal race, class and gender politics; the Alex Hall-Tyler Stanaland will-they-won’t-they flirtation that just won’t end; and the gay panic that appears to have blown up the cast. We hope you enjoy!
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claireandemma.substack.com
Are we in the golden age of friend-group Bravo shows? After doing a major binge of established shows “Summer House,” “Vanderpump Rules,” and new addition “The Valley,” we think that answer is a resounding yes. So naturally, we had to get Gibson Johns of Gibsonoma back on the Rich Text pod to do a little state of the Bravo union.
All three of the aforementioned shows track th…
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Taylor Swift’s 11th original studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was released last week into a world feverishly gripped by anticipation for a Taylor Swift album. Some were primed to adore her latest work, which Swifties broadly expected to be a thorough excavation of her relationship with her ex-partner of six years, actor Joe Alwyn; others were primed to mock and flame it. We, two rather casual Swift fans, were drawn in by the sheer intensity of the gathering discourse — not to mention our own anticipation of another album. And after almost a week of listening and relistening to the album, following the critical reactions to it, and stewing in the public debates raging about it, we decided we were ready to wade in.
We are joined by culture critic B.D. McClay of Notebook for this conversation!
Further Reading + Listening:
“Taylor Swift Still Isn’t Your Friend,” B.D. McClay’s 2023 Slate essay about the controversy surrounding Taylor’s relationship with Matty Healy
“Taylor Swift Derangement Syndrome with B.D. McClay,” Know Your Enemy pod
"Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' is written in blood," Ann Powers, NPR
“Come for the Torture, Stay for the Poetry: This Might Be Taylor Swift’s Most Personal Album Yet,” Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone
“Taylor Swift seems sick of being everyone’s best friend,” Constance Grady, Vox
“The Real Reason Taylor Swift Dresses Like That,” Cathy Horyn, NYMag
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