John Oliver is an outspoken fan of reality TV — but not this former “Real World” star.
On Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight,” the political pundit took aim squarely at Sean Duffy, President Trump’s Secretary of Transportation and former congressman and “The Real World: Boston” cast member. You see, on Wednesday, Duffy dropped all six episodes of “The Great American Road Trip” to YouTube. Though it bills itself as a reality show celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, its travel and its people, as Oliver pointed out, “It’s basically just an expensively-produced test run of a Duffy family reality show with each episode featuring a bare minimum about travel or America but a ton of manufactured reality-TV drama around the Duffy’s doing stuff like planning a family party or, over the course of several episodes, watching their daughter decide which college she’ll attend.” (Duffy’s wife is Fox News contributor Rachel Campos-Duffy, who he met on MTV’s “Road Rules: All Stars.”)
In a clip from the show that was widely mocked online, while discussing whether his daughter can go to Harvard, Duffy remarked, “If I send you there, I think what happens is they have professionalized figuring out how they can take good, young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” exclaimed Oliver. “First, this was supposed to be a road trip — why are we still in your kitchen? Second, is there anything less relatable than a family whose conflict is, how do I tell my daughter she can’t go to Harvard because we did too good of a job raising her?”
Duffy claimed that the show was shot over seven months and that no taxpayer money was used; rather, the show was funded by the independent company Great American Road Trip Inc., which listed 17 sponsors, Boeing, Toyota, Shell and United Airlines among them, all companies overseen and regulated by Duffy’s Department of Transportation.
“That’s not great! The only worse answer to ‘Who paid for this?’ than ‘The American taxpayer’ is ‘a bunch of companies I oversee and regulate,’” cracked Oliver.
And, when Duffy was pressed about the conflict of interest in Congress, he replied, “Don’t you want to celebrate America?” adding, “It’s our birthday!”
“It’s our birthday? You sound like a fucking child!” exclaimed Oliver. “You do get that just because it’s America’s birthday doesn’t mean you get to do an ethics violation, right? Grow up, Sean!”
The show was supposed to come out in June but Duffy said it needed to be re-edited so it abided by ethics rules. And Duffy, of course, is a reality-TV veteran.
“[Duffy] has long loved being on camera. He was actually on ‘The Real World: Boston’ in the late-90s, where he presented himself as deeply horny,” explained Oliver. “In his audition, he reportedly said that he wanted to be on the show because of his interest in ‘cute girls,’ and when asked by a producer how many times he’d had sex in the last six months, he — and I’m quoting here — flashed a big smile and said, ‘Three times. Three different individuals, yeah. And three different times,’ adding, ‘I’m sort of starving right now, guys.’”
Cue Oliver: “And I’ve got to say: I had sex with three different women, none of whom were interested in an encore, says a lot more about you than I think you wanted to reveal there.”
What’s worse, during his time on “The Real World: Boston,” Duffy “got attention for annoying the fuck out of his Black castmate Kameelah, who he fought with over affirmative action, complaining he would have gotten into a better college ‘if I were a Black male,’ and at another point, ‘compared [her] to Adolf Hitler while accusing her of reverse racism,’” Oliver offered.
As for “The Great American Road Trip,” its YouTube views are dwindling in the thousands and its YouTube page has less than 3K subscribers at time of writing.
“Everyone involved in ‘The Great American Road Trip’ seems like they’d rather sweep it under the rug,” Oliver maintained. “Since it came out, the Duffy’s have barely promoted the show and the Department of Transportation hasn’t posted about it at all… But even if everyone involved wants to move on and act like it never happened, I’m not sure the rest of us should, because the appearance of a conflict of interest here is not going to go away.”
Oliver then cited how the Department of Transportation has two open investigations into Waymo, which is featured in the series, including for striking a child in the vicinity of a school.
“Having watched all three hours of this godawful show, from gender reveals to the Duffy’s renewing their vows for no clear reason, it feels less like the country’s been taken on a road trip by Sean Duffy and a lot more like we’ve all been taken for a fucking ride,” he concluded.