God help me I have thoughts about The Ultimatum: Queer Love

It is so clear that Mal wants to be little spoon. Will someone please just let them be little spoon.

My girlfriend strong-armed me into watching The Ultimatum: Queer Love this weekend. She’d lost her appetite for it halfway through episode two, but I told her this was kind of like the apocryphal dad catching his kid with a cigarette and making him smoke the entire pack. Now, I told her, we’re gonna watch the whole thing.

I have a very ambivalent relationship with reality television. I find some of it—most of it—unbelievably stressful, and while I am fulling aware that the “reality” in its name is doing a lot of work, I do find actual human suffering way harder to watch than, say, someone being chopped up with an axe in a horror movie. (This is why I noped right out of Great British Bake Off after Rosie dropped her custard tart on the floor with a diarrhetic splatter. The little “oh” she made cleaved my heart in two and I have never recovered.) I feel slightly less bad for the people in shows like this because they’re there to launch acting/influencer/etc. careers, not bake pies. They are consenting to this by-definition batshit premise, and my sympathy for that is far more limited. But I still struggle with seeing real sadness in real people on TV.

And yet! The first two reality shows I ever watched were Flavor of Love and A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila¹. I guess seeing that unmitigated garbage really imprinted on me. Because I resisted this TU:QL and resisted it and then gave in, and as a result, I’m having serious thoughts about this profoundly unserious thing and it’s making me want to light myself on fire. But I still woke up wanting to talk through it. So here we go.

(Also, for further TU:QL content, I loved the

TV Dinner

recap of the first four eps. Especially appreciated the detail about how the reason they’re all drinking from shiny metallic goblets is so you can’t see the level of liquid and the scenes can be cut together with no continuity issues. I did not know!)