Is This New Show the Yellowstone of Brain-Dead Reality TV?

This is an edition of the newsletter Pulling Weeds With Chris Black, in which the columnist weighs in on hot topics in culture. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday. When he launched his hit neo-Western Yellowstone , which aired for five seasons on Peacock and spawned several spinoffs, Taylor Sheridan ushered in a new kind of television. Publicly, Sheridan avoids political labels and party affiliations, but his shows lean in a particular direction, and it isn’t left. But he’s not one to deploy a dog whistle as much as he is a sly grin and wink. Yellowstone had a rugged, anti-institutional, frontier-realist worldview that often read as conservative but never fully veered into modern partisan politics. While this resonated with conservative audiences, it wasn’t over-the-top culture-war messaging. There is no anti-LGBT rhetoric, religious moralizing, or explicit social conservatism. Luckily for Sheridan, guns, beautiful women, and competence-based masculinity (I should learn how to break a horse ...) worked very well across all viewing audiences. The show was a huge hit, and his follow-up, Landman , about the West Texas oil business, has continued his winning streak. The sexier, female-leaning version of this programming is The Hunting Wives , which I covered in this column when it first came out last year. For fans, it was transgressive, decadent, and pulpy; the show used conservative signifiers as props in a gun-toting power fantasy. I wondered when this trend would come to my preferred genre: Brain-dead reality TV. Reality as a genre has always given loudmouths with bad views and politics a platform to be themselves, because it often equals ratings. There have been plenty of right-leaning characters on The Real Housewives franchise over the years. It did start in Orange County, after all. (Real heads know about Gretchen Rossi and Kelly Dodd.) When I logged on to Netflix over the weekend while on a quick getaway upstate, my laptop screen lit up with a new show called Members Only: Palm Beach. I clicked play as fast as I could. Reality television of this ilk usually sticks to a simple formula. The cast is a mix of obnoxious losers, lobotomized hotties, people who are funny without realizing it, and, if you are lucky, one or two lovable dopes that don’t take themselves too seriously and are easy to root for. They go to parties, forced group vacations, and 1-on-1 day drinking gossip sessions at dismal local restaurants that almost always have some sort of neon sign. After devouring eight episodes of this show, it was the first time I can remember where not a single cast member was likable. The show isn’t Real Housewives . There’s no screaming, drink throwing, and sadly, no table flipping. The power moves are quieter and, truthfully, more boring: Who gets seated near the host, who’s introduced with proper context, who never gets called back. They are obsessed with manners, etiquette, and status. Palm Beach is a very wealthy zip code with almost zero...

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