Rich Text

Our nation’s preeminent insta-marriage reality show has taken its talents to the capital for season seven! It’s “Love Is Blind,” DC edition, and this mammoth first drop (six episodes, some close to 75 minutes long) showcases that special DMV flavor. Cast members work at think tanks and ponder whether they would have spoken to each other if they’d met “on the Hill.” One recites a love poem that rhy...

There are a lot of things to love about the new Netflix show “Nobody Wants This.” Unfortunately, its depiction of Jewish women isn’t one of them. When news first broke that a rom-com show was in the works starring Adam Brody as a hot L.A. rabbi who falls for an agnostic, blonde sex/relationships podcaster played by Kristen Bell, we were ecstatic. We are rom-com devotees who have crushed on Seth Co...

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 for ever , it’s really only been about 12 months in “Emily in Paris” t...

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 a...

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...

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 couple of the season. In each six of the U....

Spoiler Alert: This podcast and post contain spoilers for the final drop of “Love Is Blind UK” episodes. Turns out that Claire is a goddamn “Love Is Blind UK” oracle, because *almost* all of her wedding-related predictions from last week came true. She sees the future, and we must give credit where credit is due. And yet, even if the outcomes were foreseen, the finale episodes of LIB UK’s inaugura...

Spoiler Alert: This podcast and post contain spoilers for the second batch of “Love Is Blind UK” episodes. 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 w...

SPOILER ALERT: THIS PODCAST AND POST CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST BATCH OF “LOVE IS BLIND UK” EPISODES. 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...

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-dis...

“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! ) I was a self-enforced “Love Island” ascetic. I avoided the show at all costs, didn’t want to understand how it worked, and didn’t even want to be tempted to watch it. I mean, there are just SO MANY EPISODES each season! How could I possibly keep up? Turns out… I can...

“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. And because the season arrived in one bingeable drop, we started to hear the critical response well before we found time to finish it ourselves. And th...

Having a newsletter and podcast where you lay snapshots of your life bare is a funny thing. We share snippets of our lives with each other and with you, our dear community. And though the relationship is technically one-sided, we feel the embrace of love and encouragement from our readers and listeners every time we offer up a piece of ourselves. Two Fridays ago, on June 28, I (Emma) got engaged t...

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 wate...

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 eye-catching headline “Should I Be A Mom, or Should I Stay A ‘Brat’” ? (‘Brat’ is a ref...

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...

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 shattering. On “Summer House” it was Lindsay Hubbard and Carl Radke’s engagem...

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...

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 Lord Debling and her old friend Colin Bridgerton, newly returned from his tr...

“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 seas...

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 the semi-glitzy, semi-dep...

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 rath...

It was sometime last year that it started to feel like Big Conversations about marriage and divorce were *everywhere.* David Brooks was lecturing young people to “obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage” because marriage rates have been falling. Emily Gould was contemplating leaving her husband and then not over on The Cut. High-profile writers like Lyz Lenz , Leslie J...

Last week, New York Magazine’s The Cut published an all-time banger of a hate read — which is saying something, considering the run they’ve been on recently (from the “$50k in a shoebox” piece to the “tried to leave my husband and then realized I was just having a breakdown” piece). Grazie Sophia Christie’s floridly written and smugly framed essay, “The Case for Marrying an Older Man,” argues, wit...

One of the first things you notice about “Irish Wish,” the latest output of Lindsay Lohan’s deal with Netflix, is just how… saturated the colors are. The pink accents in her plaid knee-length dress look a little too pink. The green grass of the Irish countryside is a little too green. The blue of the water is a little too blue. Are we in Ireland at all, you start to wonder? Is that real clothing?...