Peacock’s Reality Hot Seat may not convert Housewives viewers into Chiefs fans, but I’m suddenly invested in the next season of Summer House.
Photo: Peacock
Maybe it was the collective gasp when Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s field-goal attempt dinked limply off the upright. Maybe it was Top Chef star Kristen Kish’s casual reminder that the FDA had recalled the Hidden Valley Ranch dressing used in the dip, so perhaps they should rethink the spread. But somewhere between those moments and Below Deck breakout Kate Chastain using a Steve Kornacki touchscreen to draw cartoon tears down Patrick Mahomes’s face, I realized I was enjoying Reality Hot Seat, Peacock’s Sunday Night Football alt-cast pitched squarely at reality-TV and Bravo die-hards.
To be clear, it was a very weird watch. Staged on a cheap-looking pink-forward set contiguous with the Watch What Happens Live aesthetic, Reality Hot Seat revolved around NBC’s broadcast of the Houston Texans at the the Kansas City Chiefs and a core quartet nominally tasked with commentating on the game: host Justin Sylvester, whom you can usually find on E! News; Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Heather Gay; Survivor legend “Boston Rob” Mariano, the token straight guy drafted to handle anything resembling actual sports exposition; and Chastain. The early going was painfully stilted.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Sylvester said in the opening moments. “How did these reality-TV folks end up hosting a football show? We’re confused too.” Indeed, no one seemed entirely sure how the evening was intended to play out, only that they were supposed to frame the football onscreen in terms understandable to reality-television viewers. “You guys, the season premiere of a reality show usually sets the tone of the drama that unfolds. What’s the rookie mistake many newbies make?” Sylvester asked by way of the evening’s first icebreaker. As he laid out that question — not even a minute into the game — Chiefs left tackle Wanya Morris went down with a rough injury on the television screen behind him. The studio froze. “Oh no, we have an injury on the field already,” Sylvester said. Silence hung. Then Gay jumped in: “Well, let me tell you a bit about me …” It was a wonderfully discordant beat, the exact kind of awkward, impossible-to-prepare-for moment you want to see from this experiment. Let’s not forget, these are reality-television professionals adept at holding a room, manufacturing spectacle, and filling dead air with charisma.
As goofy as the execution could be, Reality Hot Seat’s attempt to capitalize on American football’s surging popularity among women makes sense. “We’re starting to see the female viewership for the NFL go up, and [Reality Hot Seat] is a way of harnessing these two huge fandoms,” Frances Berwick, chairman of unscripted television at NBCUniversal, told Deadline ahead of the weekend. It’s true: Various polls and studies in recent months suggested female NFL viewership has increased so much that the demographic now represents nearly half the league’s fan base. A Morning Consult survey even found over 60 percent of Gen-Z and millennial women held a favorable view of the league today. As much as it’s tempting to chalk this up to Taylor Swift’s regular appearances at Chiefs games, the trend far predates the Swift-Kelce courtship. As far back as 2014, Nielsen data was already showing that growth in female viewership was fast outpacing growth among male viewers, even during a period when domestic-violence and child-abuse allegations dominated headlines about the league. Today, the sport remains perhaps the last reliable monocultural engine outside of politics, and with Reality Hot Seat, NBCUniversal is placing a small bet to see if the Venn diagram between people who watch the Chiefs and people who watch Real Housewives has a significant, monetizable overlap.
I’m not convinced this was the best format for integrating those two demographics, however. Alt-casts have become fairly common complements to live-television events these days, the goal being either to deepen engagement among viewers who are already all-in (as with ManningCast, watch-alongs with retired greats Eli and Peyton Manning pitched on the promise of insight from guys who’ve actually been there) or to rope in people who aren’t already watching. The latter strategy repackages the event in a different idiom that speaks the language of the desired demographic. CBS, for instance, teamed with Nickelodeon last year for a Bikini Bottom–themed Super Bowl alt-cast aimed at bringing in kids, complete with live animation and Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke voicing SpongeBob and Patrick Star as they chimed in alongside sports commentators Noah Eagle and Nate Burleson. Outside of sports, CNN produced an alt-cast covering last month’s elections with a panel of new-media political commentators, including Charlamagne tha God and Ben Shapiro, presumably to draw those personalities’ younger audiences. (That stream was a mess, though; when Kara Swisher, billed as a panelist, FaceTimed into the faux-apartment set, she said, “This is the weirdest living room I’ve ever seen.”)
Reality Hot Seat belongs to that second category, designed to convert new viewers, in this case women, into football fans. But if you tuned in for the football game, what you got instead was the feeling of being the only person at a watch party who actually wants to watch the thing. This problem is endemic to most alt-casts meant to draw in new demographics; it’s hard to sell someone on a core product by aggressively framing it in terms of something else. One of Reality Hot Seat’s central ideas, which Sylvester cited repeatedly, is that sports are just another form of reality TV. That’s not entirely true. Yes, sports have divas, beefs, drama, extracurricular social-media warfare, and lore worthy of a Real Housewives reunion, but all that is additive to the foundational experience, the competition itself. Formula 1: Drive to Survive, for instance, is a terrific reality show, but that’s because the races carry real stakes.
And there were major stakes for last night’s game! The Chiefs, the league’s dominant star-making force of late, are having their worst run in years, and their hyperpopular tight end, the recently christened Mr. Taylor Swift himself, Travis Kelce, is on the verge of retiring on a stinker of a season. You don’t get more operatic than that, and as much as Boston Rob tried, the alt-cast never effectively sold the drama. This was a structural issue: With Boston Rob as the lone football fan, the show couldn’t avoid the dynamic of a straight dude mansplaining third-down plays to a roomful of Bravo stars. Sylvester eventually leaned into this, turning his ignorance of the game into a joke, but the sports-exposition stuff only cohered once Maria Taylor, a lead sports broadcaster for NBC, dropped by — she should have been on permanent duty.
The loose hangout structure further diluted the football, with special guest appearances from Kish, Gay’s Salt Lake City co-star Bronwyn Newport, half the Summer House cast plugging the upcoming season, Countess Luann de Lesseps doing a cabaret performance at halftime, and West Wilson pulling off a charming imitation of a sideline reporter. Reality Hot Seat barely showed the actual game; I found myself in the funny position of having the alt-cast on my TV and second screening the main NBC broadcast of the game on my laptop. And I felt a connection to poor Boston Rob, clearly the only person in the room keeping close watch on the matchup, which is not really a position I want to be in because I hate the Patriots.
But of course, you don’t go to a watch party if you want to watch the game. You go because it’s a party. And if you surrendered the football expectations, Reality Hot Seat was a delight. It’s essentially live Bravo on a Sunday night, a playful hangout featuring reality stars I adore goofing around with ones I barely know. I have my suspicions about the authenticity; outside of Gay, everyone seemed to know football better than they let on, perhaps out of fealty to the women they assume make up the core Bravo audience. (Even though we’ve already established that a lot of women watch football, and plenty of gay men do too.) But that hardly matters. I spent Sunday evening toggling between my prop bets and a genuinely fun group of people having a blast. Reality Hot Seat won’t convert anyone into a football fan, but rolling straight out of a strong BravoCon, NBCUniversal is on a tear with its Bravo-forward marketing. And now, against all odds, I’m excited to jump in cold on the new season of Summer House.
