When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the financial indebtedness that has connected them to their crushing grocery bills and mortgage payments, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation, and then start an OnlyFans.
Thus, we are here with the cast of “Double Lives of Suburban Wives,” a new TLC reality show based on the premise that almost every sourdough-baking mom in Missouri has a secret, and that secret is, you know, naked stuff for cash money.
Tammy is a former vet tech who also goes by “Erika Swingz.” Brianna made her first saucy post “out of a need to provide for my family” and now grosses “a couple hundred thousand dollars a month.” Macy, the daughter of a pastor, grew up in a culture of purity rings and uses the moniker “Church Girl” in her adult content.
“When Jim had his sales job, he would work 60 hours a week,” Macy explains in a talking head interview with her husband. Jim almost never got to see their son. Jim wanted to have his time back, so Jim got the bright idea that his wife could post nudes online. Jim says this has worked out well for their family. “She would shower and walk away with four or five grand.”
Heather’s husband also facilitated her entrance to the OnlyFans world. A mom of four, she was feeling down about her body so Sean, in an attempt to be, uh, supportive, “started posting pics of me on social media.” You know, for self-esteem.
For what it’s worth, we hear multiple versions of this story from cast members in the first two episodes of “Double Lives”: hubby lost his job, the bills kept accumulating, until, whoops, one day this woman’s picture just somehow accidentally ends up, fanny to the wind, on OnlyFans. The husband explains: He just wanted his wife to feel better about her appearance! The wife explains: No, she hadn’t been initially excited but it’s great because now she has so much more time to make healthy snacks for the neighborhood potluck!
I am a big proponent of the idea that people can have any kind of marriage they want, but (butt?), and I cannot stress this enough, may this kind of holy matrimony never find me.
However things started, where they’ve ended up is in the safe bosom of financial security. Heather describes the penniless terror of having four kids in her 20s; when her first naughty post made $100, she ecstatically planned to spend it on groceries. By the time we meet her, she’s breezily taking her kids’ hoagie orders for a lunch run, her coupon-clipping days long faded in the rearview.
Is this empowerment? Freedom? It doesn’t really look like either to Macy, terrified of being recognized in public, takes to wearing wigs and dark glasses when she leaves her house. Or when the women, all of whom are religious, worry that their churches will excommunicate them when the reality show starts to air. Or when Megan breaks down in tears because she misses her old job as a high school English teacher. She was fired after administrators were informed of her side hustle. These women are free to make lots of money, but not free to be themselves without judgment from the outside world.
But also, that teaching job paid $37,000 a year. Two masters degrees, dealing with demanding parents, teaching to standardized tests with shifting goalposts, making Shakespeare feel relevant to teenagers when said teenagers are at their rudest and smelliest, and the pay was $37,000.
Nobody likes every part of their job. We make trade-offs that hopefully result in the good outweighing the bad. So I don’t know. Maybe at some point you shrug and say, “feet pics.”
The other thing I was watching this week was the government-sponsored “Patriot Games,” which were streamed on ESPN+ with a planned recap Thursday on ABC. Part of the White House’s celebration of America’s 250th birthday, this is a sporting competition that involved the government selecting one teenage boy and one teenage girl from every state in the land and gradually whittling down the field until we are left with only two victors.
Perhaps you are already understanding why the snarkiest people online started making Katniss Everdeen jokes, but when you watch the Patriot Games, they really seem more like a flashback to every P.E. class for which a 15-year-old might have pretended to have real bad period cramps, coach.
Here is kickball, here is tug-of-war, here is a game of dodgeball in which the competitors are each given a color-coded sweatband assigning them to a team, and the team names are all things like “Valor” and “Freedom.” You know you’re in America, by the way, when you’re watching Courage whip rubber balls at Honor across a squeaky gym floor in the hopes of affording college.
Because that’s the prize of the Patriot Games: $125,000 in scholarship money per winning girl and boy. This is potentially life-changing money, which explains why I have become so invested in rooting for wholesome kids with names like Rockwell Myers and Tyler Gorrell as they belly-crawl under a web of ropes, flip over a tractor tire, and then monkey-bar their way to a finish line.
There, a sideline reporter asks chatty questions like, I hear you’re interested in mythology. Which Greek god would you channel to help you win this event? And the kid answers, “I wouldn’t channel any of them. I would channel my one true God.”
As the Patriot Games kicked off earlier this week, they had already become heavily politicized. Sports journalists pointed out that aspects of them felt a bit hinky: most of the contestants were White, for example, including the representative of Puerto Rico, who doesn’t even live on the island, though he once was stationed there with his military dad. A colleague of mine, in an earlier story, noted that it appears these teens were chosen not because of their physical prowess but their political leanings.
Based on the athletic performance of some of the participants (no, we are not naming names on this point; these are children) that is … not surprising.
But as a viewer, that somehow gives the viewing experience even more pathos. You get the impression that for many of these kids, Duke or the University of Michigan is not knocking on the door with a track and field scholarship. For the sweatband-wearing members of teams Liberty and Unity, a solid financial future depends on whatever mom and dad have managed to scrape together, and the hope that you can bean the kid from Minnesota and eliminate him from play.
The annual tuition to Duke, by the way, is more than $73,000. With room and board it skyrockets to nearly a hundred grand. Which is the only truly galling aspect of any of this: that the stewards of Freedom 250 have set, as a grand prize for the country’s landmark birthday, an amount of money that wouldn’t even get the winners through sophomore year.
Why are we talking about OnlyFans moms and Patriot teens in the same article? One broadcast features well-scrubbed high-schoolers showing up for God and country. Prize money, yes, but also a blend of bragging rights, patriotism, fellowship with other students from around the country. The other show features a mom explaining, “it started with panties.”
We’re talking about them because it’s what I watched this week, naturally; the weekly all-you-can-eat buffet of a screens critic sometimes starts off with fresh Italian and ends with Jell-O and the burnt end of what used to be an egg roll.
But we’re also talking about them both because I was struck in the oddest way by how American both of these shows seemed. American, in whatever buoyant, cheerful, what-the-heck-is-this-place way you might define it.
“We’re just out here being moms, trying to have the same luxuries as everyone else,” one cast member of “Double Lives” says, explaining that her job is unorthodox but her goals are mainstream.
I’m going to hazard a guess that the viewership demographics for the Patriot Games and “Double Lives” are radically different. I’m not watching “Double Lives” with my relatives; I’m not watching “Patriot Games” with my group chat.
But I could also imagine each show, viewed in each bubble, eliciting the same reaction: This is no way to make money. Whether we’re talking Trump-sponsored sporting events or whatever it is Tammy is doing with her feet (Lalala I do not want to know), somebody is watching this and thinking, this is no way to make money. Why are we making money like this? What is going on that we have to make money like this?
A teacher is paid $37,000, a scholarship is $125,000, a college tuition is a gazillion dollars, the cost of living is too much. Wherever you live, it’s too much, but this is America so you must find a way to monkey-bar your way to solvency and/or pull yourself up by your own boobstraps.
Where has life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness gotten us in 2026? Heaven only knows, but on television it’s gotten us to some very weird places.
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