You know we had to come back and finish discussing the first drop from “Love Is Blind Germany” season 2, and we are doing that today! But first, we needed to unburden ourselves about a couple other Cultural Conversations: the Golden Globe Awards adding a Best Podcast award, and Ashley Tisdale French’s essay in The Cut about leaving her toxic mom group.

First, we get into the momentous decision of the Golden Globes to finally recognize all the valuable podcasting work being done by celebrities. We get into our feelings about celebrity podcasts in general (with all due respect to our queen Amy Poehler), the swamping of the industry by big-money deals for big-name movie stars, and the Golden Globes’ approach to recognizing this entire diverse genre of art and journalism.

Next, we turn to actress and businesswoman Ashley Tisdale French’s underbaked but provocative essay in The Cut about how her mom group turned toxic — and how she bravely chose to leave. We break down the speculation that followed about the mom group, which was instantly identified as likely being Hilary Duff and Mandy Moore’s well-publicized crew of celeb and celeb-adjacent moms. The speculation was followed by a denial from French’s camp that the piece was about Duff’s group, but also tacitly confirmed by the prickly reactions from the direction of that particular social circle. Duff’s husband Matthew Koma posted a parody of French’s Cut portrait and headline strongly implying that she was squeezed out of the group for being self-involved and tone-deaf! Meghan Trainor posted an “I’m so unbothered” TikTok about the gossip! We discuss the essay’s weaknesses, why it seems to have backfired on French to some degree, and why we’re so fascinated by the idea of “mean” or “toxic” moms.

Finally, we run through the major plot points of “Love Is Blind Germany” episodes 5-8, which take our newly engaged couples from honeymoons in Crete to daily life together in Munich, culminating in the beginning of their weddings. There are a couple of relationship casualties on the way, and cracks begin to form in some of the stronger couples. But there’s one real exception: Josy and Gunnar seem to go from strength to strength, slowly blossoming in each stage of the experiment. They remain our sweethearts, our favorites, our babygirls. Don’t fail us; we need this right now.

Timestamps for easy listening:

0:00 — A rant about the Golden Globes podcast category

14:06 — Ashley Tisdale French toxic mom group drama

47:19 — “Love Is Blind Germany” eps 5-8

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We have long been fans of the Emily Henry romance-novel universe. So when we heard that “People We Meet On Vacation” would be getting the movie treatment, we were unquestionably excited.

“People We Meet On Vacation,” which was published in novel form in 2021 and dropped on Netflix in movie form on Jan. 9, follows polar opposite best friends Poppy (Emily Bader) and Alex (Tom Blyth), who after meeting in a gender-swapped “When Harry Met Sally” post-college road trip, decide to go on vacation together every summer… platonically, of course. Poppy is quirky and chaotic and wanderlust-y — a classic free-spirited gal. Alex, on the other hand, loves structure and steadiness and home. But when he goes on vacation with Poppy, his more adventurous side awakens.

The book, which we unfortunately did not have time to re-read before recording this podcast, is a delight. The movie… is fine?

Like most rom-coms that make it to Netflix or commensurate streaming platforms, “People We Meet On Vacation” is watchable and cute. But when it comes to the things that differentiate a rom-com you watch once and a rom-com that burrows into your soul — distinctive and dense dialogue, truly funny comedy, a story that makes you really feel something — the adaptation falters. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what’s missing. Perhaps it’s the fact that the interiority of a character in a novel is simply tough to translate into movie form. Perhaps the story’s non-linear structure would have been better served with a mini-series. Perhaps it’s that Bader’s Poppy is a little too much of a caricature, and Blyth’s Alex is a little too flat. (These deficiencies are particularly notable when we meet Poppy’s parents, played by Alan Ruck and Molly Shannon, who pop more in their one scene than most of the other characters do in the entire film.) Perhaps the screenplay packs too much plot in without enough room to let us see why these two unlikely friends are so ultimately right for each other.

Whatever it is, “People We Meet On Vacation” left us wanting more — even as we found a few moments of true enjoyment. This rom-com ultimately felt neither like a true escape from real life nor a reflection of it.

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In 2026, the sun never sets on the “Love Is Blind” empire. With two US seasons a year, plus endlessly proliferating international spinoffs, there’s a new set of pod daters clamoring for our attention every time the last reunion has begun to fade from memory. And this month, we’re headed to Deutschland!

“Love Is Blind Germany” season 2 has landed, and if you watched any of the first season (which Claire accidentally did, assuming, in a post-holiday fog, that she was viewing screeners for the new drop), you’ll quickly see that this edition has leveled up. The characters are popping, the love geometry is mathing, and one man takes it upon himself to innovate a dastardly new form of pod dumping. Let this be a lesson to us all: Never trust a tall 42-year-old with a stacked roster.

The first drop was a staggering 8 episodes, so we took it upon ourselves to break it into two manageable halves. This week, we’re discussing the first four, which carry us through the drama-packed pod dating and into the beginning of the couples’ dreamy honeymoon in Crete. We get to know the new daters, form some snap judgments, and discuss the ongoing tyranny of gender role discourse in contemporary dating shows. And of course, we have many, MANY words for the audacity of Andi.

Next week, we’ll be back to break down episodes 5-8 — and in the meantime, we have a pod coming soon with our thoughts on the Netflix adaptation of Emily Henry’s rom-com “People We Meet On Vacation.”

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2025 felt more like a lifetime than a year. Personally and globally, a lot happened in the last 12 months — much of it filled with darkness and despair, but also punctuated by bits of joy and light.

To round out 2025 and welcome in 2026, we decided to sit down and tape a bit of a reflection. We discussed our highlights (Emma’s wedding! Claire’s home purchase!), the lowlights (everything that the current administration is doing to our nation and the world), and our hopes and dreams for the year to come.

Thank you for being a part of this community of ours — one of the bits of light in the darkness. We are so grateful for you. Cheers to a 2026 we can all be proud of.

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When I got screener access to the season finale of “Heated Rivalry,” aptly titled “The Cottage,” I knew that the holiday break simply couldn’t stand in the way of a conversation about the back half of the super-gay hockey show that has become a solid 75 percent of my personality.

Unfortunately, Claire had to do things, like… spend time with family… and her children… and celebrate Christmas (fine, fine, fine), but as a Jew who found herself with some free time on her hands while in South Florida this week, duty called. Luckily, pop culture commentator Josh the RHONY Stan was game to watch the finale of the little Canadian show that has taken two nations by storm and hop on to chat all about it with me. We got into the overarching plot points of episodes 3-6, and then zoomed out to talk about the heated discourse that has surrounded “Heated Rivalry.” We laughed, we swooned, and we shared our hopes and dreams for the show’s second season.

Hope you enjoy! (And please forgive any slight audio quality issues. I was recording this from the floor of a bedroom in my mother-in-law’s Boca Raton home. We all do our best over Christmastime.)

“Down to Puck: Why Women Are Going Wild for ‘Heated Rivalry,’” Seth Abramovitch, The Hollywood Reporter

“Heated Rivalry Scores Big, With Hockey and Sex,” Erik Piepenburg, New York Times

“Heated Rivalry’s Elder Statesman,” Jason P. Frank, Vulture

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Happy holidays, y’all! Here are the presents you didn’t ask for: two staggeringly bad seasons of scripted TV.

First, “Emily in Paris” is back, and this time she’s Emily in Rome, Emily Back in Paris, Emily in an American Embassy, Emily in Venice, and Emily Back in Paris Forever This Time. Emily is madly in love with Marcello — her new Handsome Boyfriend, Italian Edition — but Emily also misses her family of origin, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Pop-Tarts. Emily and her glamorous French mentor, Sylvie, are kissing their way across Europe, too boy-crazy to notice that Agence Grateau is on life support. Mindy is singing in every episode, sometimes in a giant martini glass. Alfie is just there to be toyed with by beautiful women, and Gabriel lives on a yacht now. Somehow, this is still not the last season of “Emily in Paris.” Send this girl back to the greater Chicago area already!

Next, the so-bad-it-must-be-camp Hulu drama “All’s Fair” has crash-landed into its season finale. (Don’t worry: season 2 is coming.) Allura is in divorce mediation with her sociopathic sex-addict NFL-star husband, during which he suddenly falls madly in love with her again and begs her to start over. Immediately afterward, he begins fucking her nemesis. Carrington Lane commits a series of ethical and conduct violations so profound that disbarment seems like the only reasonable consequence, but instead her long-time enemies begin to court her as a possible partner for their lady lawyer firm. Liberty becomes insecure that her best friends are judging her for being a posh blonde Brit who eats scones. And the law firm’s matriarch, Dina, is arrested for the murder of Emerald’s assailant — was she framed??

These two shows each offer us a heightened reality — one bubblegum Technicolor, the other raunchy and lurid — that, despite their differences in aesthetic and tone, both bend towards a nightmarish sense of wrongness. We discuss all the problems, and all the unhinged details we could remember, in this two-part episode. Hope you enjoy! xo

Timestamps for easy listening:

0:00 — “Emily in Paris,” season 5

1:04:08 — “All’s Fair,” end of season 1

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On this week’s Rich Text podcast, we’re talking about a spicy new television show, and a “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” reunion special that dangled the possibility of spice and instead fed us white bread.

First, we get into “Heated Rivalry,” a Canadian sports romance show that has broken out into the mainstream since it’s first two episodes dropped (on HBO Max for U.S. viewers) on Nov. 28. The show, created for Crave by actor/writer/producer/director Jacob Tierney, is based on the second novel in romance writer Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novel series. “Heated Rivalry” follows two rising hockey stars of Major League Hockey (a fictionalized NHL): Canadian Shane Hollander, who plays for the Montreal Metros, and Russian Ilya Rozanov, who plays for the Boston Raiders. They meet during their rookie years, and the tension is basically immediately palpable. They quickly end up developing a very public heated rivalry (see what we did there?), while entering into a private situationship that spans years.

In this episode, we get into why “Heated Rivalry” has broken through into the cultural conversation so quickly, the insane chemistry between the lead actors, whether it matters that this queer romance was written by a woman in a genre largely consumed by straight women, and why more romance shows should take the genre as seriously as Tierney clearly did.

Then we move on to the much-anticipated, but deeply disappointing, season 3 reunion of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.” As fans of the show who have been breathlessly following the adventures of MomTok both on-screen and off, we had high hopes. But unfortunately, this reunion special offered a lot of throat-clearing and very little that actually cleared much of anything up.

The hour-long special, hosted by Stassi Schroeder, gave us… nothing? We were left with multiple frustrating back-and-forths that only ended when Stassi stepped in — not to ask a follow-up question, but to simply move right along to the next segment. It left us wondering who is to blame here: The filming schedule? The fact that the cast is holding back for Season 4? The host? The editing? All of the above?

Before we wrapped up, we also got into some of the far-more-interesting off-screen “SLOMW” news, including the big Fruity Pebbles reveal, and Jessi and Jordan’s dual Viall Files appearances.

Timestamps for easy listening:

0:00 — “Heated Rivalry”

50:06 — “SLOMW” S3 Reunion

1:16:45 — “SLOMW” non-reunion gossip

Hope you enjoy! xo

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It was a big week for vampy girlbosses with flawless blowouts and questionable politics.

Olivia Nuzzi, the wunderkind politics reporter who left NYMag in disgrace when her digital affair with her source and then-presidential candidate RFK Jr. became public, has returned with not only a plum gig at Vanity Fair but a splashy memoir that seems to position her ethical lapse as a romantic tragedy. Meanwhile, her problematic ex Ryan Lizza, who left his own prestige media job in disgrace after being accused of sexual misconduct, has begun dropping Substack missives accusing Nuzzi of more and more lapses: another affair in 2020 with another source and then-presidential candidate, Mark Sanford; writing strategy memos and doing catch-and-kills for RFK Jr. while still covering the race as a reporter. (We recorded this episode before his second installment dropped on Friday night.) We discuss the framing of Nuzzi’s comeback tour, the purple prose and the emptiness behind it, the media rot that enabled it, and the grotesque parade of older, powerful men (very much including Lizza) who have participated in her rise and fall.

Next, we dug into season 4 of “Selling the O.C.” After season 3 ended in complete chaos, it’s unsurprising that the cast has been completely overhauled — but it is surprising, and disappointing, that the show has been almost completely whitewashed in the process. Yes, Alexandras Rose and Jarvis, classic MAGA Barbies, are gone, but they’re not the only ones. Every cast member of color was either ousted or reduced to occasional cameos. And to replace them? A host of new white women from the San Diego office. We discuss the new additions — Ashtyn the pregnant pot-stirrer, Fiona the Alex Hall acolyte, and Kaylee the raver chick — and break down the major points in this season’s drama. We also discuss the MAGA drift in the “Selling” franchise, the return of a much weepier Tyler Stanaland, and the persistent unlikability of the show’s central protagonist, Alex Hall.

Finally, we get into the hit Hulu drama “All’s Fair,” which stars Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts, and Glenn Close as feminist divorce lawyers serving the fairer half of the uber-wealthy, alongside a crack investigator played by Niecy Nash-Betts. The show had been panned so roundly that we couldn’t resist taking a peek. And yes: it is that bad. It’s so bad that, while watching, we felt unmoored from reality. The pacing is off-kilter, the dialogue is flat and stilted, the plot is unhinged and leans too hard on half-baked feminist politics, the lighting and visuals are harsh and ominous, and the acting is so wooden that it’s hard not to root for the one person really going for it in her performance: Sarah Paulson as the villain, a female misogynist divorce lawyer whose sole objective is to destroy the show’s heroines. We talk about all of the above, as well as the show’s obsession with wealth and conspicuous consumption — including the consumption of expensive beauty procedures.

Timestamps for easy listening:

0:00 — The Nuzzi drama

51:06 — “Selling the O.C”

1:29:37— “All’s Fair”

Hope you enjoy, and happy Thanksgiving! xo

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As people who talk and write about reality television professionally, we know that being on a high-profile show can incentivize people to act in all sorts of ways. Everything is heightened, everyone has an agenda, and everything is — even when it’s very real and raw — in some part for TV. So when you combine that landscape with sexual assault allegations, things very quickly become very icky.

In this episode, we’re tackling the back half of season 3 of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” episodes 6-10. (If you missed our earlier coverage, here it is!) And, unfortunately, much of this half of the season is spent parsing assault allegations made by Demi against “Vanderpump Villa’s” Marciano. We tried to approach this as sensitively and thoughtfully as possible, but, as always, please listen with care.

But we promise this episode isn’t all doom and gloom! We also get to talk about Whitney’s rise from the social ashes, Stagecoach fuckery (if you’ve watched “Bachelor In Paradise,” you know that a Stagecoach hookup is never a good idea), and the final nail in the Taylor and Dakota relationship coffin. We hope you enjoy! (As much as possible, given the subject matter.)

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Season 3 of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” is back, and it’s full of the juicy answers we’ve been waiting for: Did Jessi have an affair with slimy “Vanderpump Villa” star Marciano? Did Demi have an affair with slimy “Vanderpump Villa” star Marciano? Is Whitney still in MomTok? Did Jen and Zac Affleck fix their crumbling marriage? And what unspeakable thing finally blew up Taylor and Dakota’s on-again-off-again relationship?

In this episode, we tackle the first half of the season, which mostly revolves around the first two questions. Marciano has become a de facto cast member, as his shifting accounts of his relationships with Jessi and Demi keep upending the narrative. But we finally do get some answers — with the help of a polygraph test that the women trust a little more than the science warrants. We also discuss the darker side of Jessi’s marriage to Jordan, the DadTok/MomTok rift, Whitney’s burning desire to audition for “Dancing With the Stars,” and so much more.

We’ll be back soon to discuss the deeply upsetting second half of the season, but for now… we hope you enjoy! xo

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