More than two months behind schedule, Sean Duffy’s scandal-plagued reality series finally arrived on YouTube last week.
The Great American Road Trip follows the transportation secretary, his wife, Fox News personality Rachel Campos-Duffy, their nine kids, and their son-in-law, House candidate Michael Alfonso, as they travel to destinations like Yellowstone National Park and Independence Hall. It is partially inspired by Road Rules, the MTV reality series on which the Duffys met, and was even made by the same company, Bunim/Murray Productions.
When Duffy started publicizing the series this spring, he described it as a patriotic travelogue designed to boost domestic tourism ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary. “To love America is to see America,” he said on Fox News. “And there’s so much to see in this beautiful country.”
Few would dispute such a claim.
More troubling, however, is that Duffy filmed the show while employed as the nation’s transportation secretary, and that his large family’s vacations were paid for by sponsors including Toyota, Shell, Boeing, and Royal Caribbean. These companies, regulated by the very federal agency he is still, in theory, running, paid up to $1 million for placement in the series.
Ethically speaking, it was a complete disaster — the kind of scandal that, in ordinary, pre-Trump times, would have instantly torpedoed Duffy’s political career. The Real World alum responded with the defensive bluster he has been honing since his MTV days, telling the supposedly “miserable” critics of the show to stop complaining and teach their kids “civics & patriotism.”
The backlash was followed by a mysterious delay. The show was supposed to premiere in mid-June, but as celebrations for the 250th came and went, The Great American Road Trip was nowhere to be found. By the time the series finally landed in late August, kids were already back in school in most of the country — making it hard for an average American parent to throw them into the car and hit the open road.
The Great American Road Trip is not, as Duffy promised, an advertisement for the United States and its natural beauty, rich history, or tourism industry (which could surely use a boost right now). Instead, it’s a tedious, self-absorbed showcase for the extended Duffy clan, who evidently believe that reality TV stardom is their birthright.
Produced by Bunim/Murray Productions, the company behind The Real World and a slew of other reality TV hits, the show is the unscripted equivalent of a hacky network sitcom about a tightly-wound dad, his feisty wife, and their large brood of boisterous children. In this series, the United States is — at most — a supporting player to the Duffy family.
Over the course of six episodes, the Duffys spend as much time visiting family landmarks — like the converted Boston firehouse where Sean lived while filming The Real World or the chapel in Arizona where Rachel and Sean got married — as they do visiting actual tourist destinations like the Grand Canyon.
Even if you have the capacity to watch the entire series without suffering a rage stroke in the process, you will learn virtually nothing about American history or the many wonders this country has to offer. You will, however, learn more than you ever wanted to know about the Duffy kids, their bowel movements, their college plans, and their Sweet Sixteen party preparations. You will hear the Duffys talk extensively about their Catholic faith. And you will watch them pray over deep-fried food in at least three different states.
The Great American Road Trip is somehow worse than what it appeared to be in the trailer. Not only is it an ethical dumpster fire riddled with conflicts of interest, it’s also a brazen attempt to launch the next generation of Duffys into careers in reality TV, right-wing media, and MAGA politics (like their parents).
Most fatally of all, it’s operating from the assumption that the Duffys are somehow interesting, eccentric, or telegenic enough to sustain several hours’ worth of screen time. If only! The Osbournes, they are not. (The most-watched episode has racked up a measly 22,000 views.)
Below I’ve compiled five of the show’s worst moments — and one noteworthy omission.
Disclaimers
Each episode opens with a carefully worded legal disclaimer noting that “no taxpayer dollars were spent for the participation of Secretary Duffy’s family,” and that production costs were covered by a non-profit funded by corporate sponsors (whose logos appear at the end of each video). I’d check the comments to see how all this legalese is going over with the public — but I cannot, as the comments are disabled!
Adventures in constipation
Easily the most ridiculous episode of GART is the one where the family visits Yellowstone. There’s roughly one minute in total about bison and the history of the park. Then we get 29 minutes devoted to the Duffy family’s various medical adventures. Evita, the eldest Duffy child (who is pregnant), gets a traveling tech to do an ultrasound in her hotel room so she can do a gender reveal while on vacation with her family — an extravagance few people outside of reality TV could afford. Meanwhile, nine-year-old Patrick is rushed to the emergency room, 90 minutes away from the crew, because this is rural Montana — with what appears to be appendicitis but turns out to be…severe constipation. (See clip above.)
A show about a kid who really needs to eat more fiber: what a tribute to America!
“The Harvards of the World”
The series follows a season-long arc about seventeen-year-old daughter Paloma and her college application process. In clips that have been making the rounds on social media, Duffy warns his daughter about going to Harvard (even though she hasn’t even been accepted). “They have professionalized figuring out how they can take good, young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds,” he says, as ominous music plays in the background.
This conversation sets up the episode when the family travels to Boston, where they visit the house that Sean lived in when he was on The Real World nearly 30 years ago, catch up with his co-star Montana McGlynn, tour some colleges, and meet with a priest who assures them that Harvard — which, again, Paloma has not gotten into — is not a godless cesspool.
Brought to you by Boeing!
The first few episodes of GART are relatively light on product placement, but in the back half of the season the corporate shilling goes into overdrive. A trip to South Carolina includes a visit to a Boeing facility to “marvel at American ingenuity and innovation,” and presumably not ask any questions about the 737 Max. Later on in Texas, Duffy checks out an asphalt and concrete plant operated by CRH (yet another sponsor) which is somehow even less entertaining than it sounds.
Kids on camera
I gasped out loud in the first episode when — TRIGGER WARNING — Duffy playfully swats his wife’s behind after they’re done praying and putting the kids to bed. It’s a pretty obvious attempt to show that they’re still hot for each other after decades of marriage, an attraction that can’t be dimmed by the daily grind of work or child-rearing. It’s gross, to be sure, but playing it up for the cameras is what this couple has done for 30 years.
Their kids, however, shouldn’t have to be a part of the performance.
Ultimately, the most morally reprehensible part of GART is the way that the Duffys put their minor children on camera — violating their privacy, exposing them to public scrutiny, and sharing potentially embarrassing personal information with the entire world, all in the name of creating “content” to boost the family’s visibility. Kids — especially kids like the youngest Duffy, Valentina, who is six years old and has Down Syndrome — cannot meaningfully consent to participating in reality TV (or its even more sinister twin, the family vlog).
There are countless examples of children who grew up on reality TV or became underage YouTube influencers — with disastrous results. This tends to be true even, maybe especially, when the family purports to be wholesome while using reality TV to advance a conservative political and religious agenda, as the Duggars did for decades and the Duffys are doing now.
Whither Royal Caribbean?
There is at least one sponsor conspicuously absent from the final version of the series. The trailer released in May shows the Duffy family frolicking on board Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world (which, according to Gary Shteyngart, resembles Istanbul “had it been designed by idiots.”) But these scenes don’t appear anywhere in the episodes posted on YouTube. Maybe producers decided it would be too tone-deaf to show a cabinet member and his family enjoying a free vacation on an obscenely gargantuan, gas-guzzling cruise ship at a time when people can’t afford basic groceries — much less safely eat them? Who knows! But given how much can go wrong on cruise ships, I am glad we were spared the possibility of a “Dad-comes-down-with-norovirus” storyline.
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian.
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