This Week

• Screaming about the best episode of TV. 

• The one movie I want all of you to see. 

• 2024 is off to a great, gay start.

• The Golden Globes telecast I’d actually want to watch.

• Stanning for Carey Mulligan.

Truly, the Best Episode of Television

Do you ever watch TV that is so good, you feel like you’re vibrating when you’re watching it? That is so directly attuned to your specific taste that, at one point, you look down at your couch and it turns out you’re levitating? Like you are so enraptured by what you’re watching, it’s as if what is happening on the television screen has created some sort of channel through your eyeballs directly to your soul, creating an electric connection that jolts you in a transformative way? 

That is what watching this week’s season finale of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City was like. 

There’s no shame in feeling that spellbound by an episode of reality television; what I described above is barely even hyperbole. Some people may have felt that way watching a great episode of Game of Thrones, when one of those major catastrophes happened on Grey’s Anatomy, or maybe even during an airing of SpongeBob SquarePants. To each their own! This finale was my Red Wedding, my Kyle-Chandler-and-the-bomb, my “Chocolate With Nuts.” 

Every element of the episode sang with the harmony of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. (No disrespect to Heather Gay’s Ex-Mormons and Their Allies as Well as People Who’d Like to Be on TV Choir from last season.) 

It was shot as cinematically as many of the movies being talked about for Best Picture—hell, more so. The summit of O.G. Housewives Gay, Whitney Rose, Lisa Barlow, and Meredith Marks on the Bermuda beach played like a scene from a Fellini film. If every screenshotted image that fans posted online with the caption “hang it in the Louvre” was actually displayed in the museum, the Mona Lisa would have to be taken down to make space. But it’s not just the visuals. Bravo’s resident snowbunnies brought the content.

“Shakespearean” is often used to justify the histrionic drama of Real Housewives, but it’s never been more apt. Phenomenal pacing—brimming with delicious teases, throwbacks, intense build-up, and dramatic reveals—led up to the climax: a wild twist that no one saw coming. A cast member is not who she said she was. Saltburnwishes. More like Talent-less Mr. Ripley. M. Night Shyamalan should take notes. 

All of the episode’s excellence is owed to new cast member Monica Garcia, who meticulously crafted an arc that may rank as the best of any first-time Housewife. She became an instant fan favorite and, with this finale reveal, transformed herself just as quickly into one of reality TV’s all-time best villains. But that leads to a conundrum: Was she too good? She may have made great TV, but did she also make it so that she could—or should—never be invited back to film again? 

Or, counterpoint: Did Monica just make the case that she’s unfireable? 

The thing about Real Housewives is that, obviously, fans are so extreme in their devotion that just one word needs to be said before an entire history of plot lines and catchphrases pop up in their heads, like a keyword search in an online encyclopedia. But I do think—and I’m a broken record about this—that, like any TV show or film, a reader can be clued into a project’s greatness without having seen it. So let me attempt to break down this geyser of intrigue that exploded during this RHOSLC finale. 

Heather receives a phone call that indicates someone has betrayed her, and she’s in shock about it. “I can’t believe it’s her!” she wails. She calls a needlessly, yet gloriously theatrical secret meeting with the O.G. cast members, gathering them on a windy beach at sunset on the last night of their trip to Bermuda. After a build-up filled with enough pregnant pauses to fill a grammatical maternity ward, she tells the women that Monica, who they thought was their friend, is not who she says she is. She is, in fact, Reality Von (Tea)se.

Those three words—Reality Von (Tea)se—are ridiculous-sounding at face value. That they’re the big revelation only adds to the perfection of the moment: gravity meets absurdity. With a delivery that should merit some sort of elocution award, Heather then explains, detail by detail, that Reality Von (Tea)se was an Instagram account that spent years spreading dirty gossip about the RHOSLC cast. More, when confronted with (aka screamed at with) proof at dinner, Monica admits that it’s true…“partially.” 

What?! This woman who just spent months ingratiating herself to these cast members had been behind a troll account that had, before joining the show, leaked information and spread baseless rumors about them? It’s chilling. While admitting some involvement, as well as her assumption this would eventually come out—“Even Gossip Girl couldn’t stay Gossip Girl forever”—Monica claims that she only contributed videos meant to take down her former boss, Jen Shah, who is now in prison for fraud. The other women, who were attacked by the troll account’s other posters, she says were “collateral damage.” 

It may be the juiciest episode of Real Housewives I’ve ever seen. But where does the show go from here?

Whatever the truth is, as far as the extent of her involvement with the Reality Von (Tea)se account, it’s clear that the other RHOSLC women are so traumatized by the posts and feel so betrayed by Monica that they’ll likely never want to film with her again. A version of the show where one cast member films by herself and the others pretend she doesn’t exist is not a feasible one. Could they bring in allies to film with Monica (maybe upgrade Mary Cosby to full-time?) and pit them against the O.G.’s? Is there a world in which Monica embarks on a year-long apology tour that bleeds into the new season, which she spends groveling in front of the other ladies? 

In the aftermath of the Reality Von (Tea)se unmasking, a floodgate of information and leaks have come out about what is and isn’t true, who did and didn’t know what, and what Monica did or didn’t do. There’s also a polarized fanbase between those who think that Monica is a hero for staging such a great season of TV and those who think she’s demonic and has set an awful precedent for Bravo, where an obsessive fan manipulated her way onto the show. (The potential danger that poses to current cast members is real.)    

It’s just a few days into January, and it’s already hard to imagine a reality TV storyline more thrilling to come in 2024. I can only imagine that the drama will metastasize a few dozen more times before cameras are up on the new season. Who knows where we—or Reality Von (Tea)se—will be then?

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Please Go See All of Us Strangers

Each award season, there’s a movie that becomes my child. I think about it constantly. I want to nurture it, and hope for the best for it. I talk exclusively about it to anyone who will listen, and especially those who don’t care. I cry when it comes to mind. (I dunno…this is what I assume people who have children do.)

This year, for me, that film is All of Us Strangers.

That attachment is perhaps fitting, as the film explores what you hold onto from your childhood—what you wish you had gotten, what it would be like if you actually received it, and how both things shape your life. 

The film is so simple, with such a direct line to the heart of the human experience. Yet when you describe the plot, it sounds ludicrous. It’s about a screenwriter named Adam, played by Andrew Scott, who gives the performance for which I have already planned my prayer circle for an Oscar nod come nomination morning. He lives in a mostly empty high rise, except for a neighbor named Harry (Paul Mescal), with whom he cautiously starts a romance.

As he gives into the splendor of a deep, intimate love with someone who seems to understand him in ways that opens him up to himself, Adam also starts revisiting his childhood home. There, he meets his mother and father (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), who died in a car crash when he was 11. 

They are and look exactly as they were then, not having seen Adam in 30 years. They get to know Adam as he is as the adult they were robbed of raising; he gets the pleasure (and discomfort) of revealing himself to the parents he always wished were around. He comes out to them. As this ghost experience—because that’s what it is—is happening, he and Harry find an even more intimate and sexual connection.

The film finds an unusual path to the rawest emotions: loss, love, yearning, and acceptance. There are three scenes between Adam and his parents that unfold so subtly, with such grounded beauty, that I wasn’t even aware I was crying until I tasted the salt of a tear. All of Us Strangers expands to wider release this week, after a limited debut before the new year. If you can, go see it. 

2024 Is, at the Very Least, Bicurious 

On Thursday of this week, I woke up to the Extremely Online equivalent of a fire alarm: Dozens of messages in group texts and everyone I follow on social media talking about the same two things. 

First, it was announced that Nicole Scherzinger, lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls and the most underrated pop supernova of our lifetime (real ones know!), is bringing her take on Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard to Broadway.

Scherzinger’s wholly original take on the role Glenn Close won a Tony Award for (I’m always saying Nicole Scherzinger is the next Glenn Close) has left audiences in the U.K. stunned during the show’s West End run. I know several people who flew to London just to see it. (OK, I think they may have other things on their itineraries.) Now I get to make my entire personality going to see it on Broadway. 

As even more of a treat, every post about that news was alternated with photos of The Bearand The Iron Clawstar Jeremy Allen White in his sensational new Calvin Klein underwear campaign. Yaaas, chef. 

I’m thrilled about this campaign because, first of all, it is hot. But also because Jeremy Allen White is the first rational person in show business: If a studio is paying for a trainer and nutritionist to get you in the shape he was in for The Iron Claw and the first call you make isn’t to your publicist saying, “Please find a way for me to take photos mostly naked,” what are you doing?

Apparently 2024 is the year of the dragon, according to the Chinese zodiac calendar. Now, I believe that everyone deserves their own time and journey to discover their sexuality. But between these two news items at the start of 2024, I’m not surprised the year’s animal is literally flaming. If that dragon isn’t quoting from Steel Magnolias, spending their nights watching videos of Best Supporting Actress Oscar speeches, and ranking Mama Roses in Gypsy by its teenage years, I’ll be shocked. 

The Hottest Table in Hollywood 

I’m going to need a microphone, Andy, and a camera at this table for the entirety of the Golden Globes. Forget the (corrupt, disgraced, yet somehow we’ve all forgiven that and are going along with a glamorous Hollywood charade anyway) award show. I just want live-cam of footage detailing every conversation at the Globes table that features: Barbie’s America Ferrera, Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie, and Ryan Gosling; Killers of the Flower Moon’s Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone; and The Color Purple’s Oprah Winfrey, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino. 

Exquisite Campaigning 

For her Hollywood Reporter roundtable of Best Actress contenders interview, Maestro star Carey Mulligan wore a blazer sized for The Iron Giant and then gave this answer to a (truly asinine, like, why are you asking this) question about Taylor Swift. 

An icon.

More From The Daily Beast’s Obsessed 

Let’s be honest: It’s time for the Star Wars franchise to go to the retirement home far, far away. Read more. 

The biggest star at The Golden Bachelor wedding wasn’t walking down the aisle. Read more.

Parker Posey checking into The White Lotus alert! Read more. 

• Night Swim: A haunted swimming pool? Sure, why not. (Now in theaters)

• The Society of Snow: A horrific plane crash, cannibalism… and a true story. (Now on Netflix)

• Pokémon Concierge: Sometimes you just want to watch something nice/Pikachu being adorable. (Now on Netflix)

• Mayhem!: If you’re going to put an exclamation point on there, you better live up to it. (Now in theaters)

• Good Grief: If you’re going to make that the title of your movie, it will be used against you. (Now on Netflix)

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