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

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?

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…

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.

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

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.

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.

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!