Alan Cumming Doesn't Need to Be Here

Which makes him the best reality TV show host of all time

“Morning has broken and sadly so has the news that Robyn is no longer with us. Robyn robbed, indeed, of life,” the man, dressed like a chic Christmas ornament in a sparkling turquoise suit and gigantic snowflake-shaped broach, says to a room of his shocked, captive audience.

“....Oh well,” he concludes with a shrug, chucking at a photo of the dead Robyn to the ground while the crowd gasps. “No biggie.”

I am of course talking about Alan Cumming in Peacock’s The Traitors — a hosting role he has crafted with the same precision and joy he’s brought to everything from X-Men to Romy and Michele's High School Reunion and Josie and the Pussycats. I, like many, loved Cumming as Mr. Floop in Spy Kids giving a freaky lil performance Timothée Chalamet could only dream of, as well as his "Willkommen" performance from Cabaret at the 1998 Tony’s Awards. You’ll have to scroll a bit through his IMDB to find the Alan Cumming role that I watched so much as a kid I’m convinced it had a butterfly-effect-like¹ impact on my life: The 1999 TV movie musical Annie, and specifically the performance of “Easy Street” with Kathy Bates and Kristen Chenoweth. Alan as Rooster in that hat and little mustache, Kristen giving Rita Skeeter, Kathy as Ms. Hannigan, scarier than she was in Misery… they changed lives that day. His incredible performances aside, Alan is also a bisexual icon and the owner of one of the only things that used to get me from Brooklyn to Manhattan: Club Cumming on the Lower East Side.

So perhaps I am biased when I say Alan Cumming is the best reality TV show host of all time, and I am certainly unqualified to say this — but when has that ever stopped this newsletter before? The Traitors, which just finished its third season hosted by Cumming, is basically a big version of the game mafia in which several of the contestants are picked to be “traitors” while everyone else are “faithfuls,” but no one knows who is who, except Cumming. The faithfuls need to banish the traitors via a vote while the traitors strategically murder a faithful each night.

Traitors, with its sinister music and castle in the Scottish Highlands, plays on the overdramatics that are typical of reality television. There are costumes, candelabra everywhere and a real turret where the traitors convene to murder. Contestants meet up in a secret room behind a bookcase, discuss the previous night’s murder over tea and crumpets daily and even don cloaks. The central tension in many reality shows is whether everyone is “here for the right reasons” — the participants' decisions are equated to whether they’re “moral” (as if anyone is actually looking to find love or split a pot of money with strangers on television). Traitors doesn’t have that, since the only thing that differentiates a traitor from a faithful is that Alan tapped them on the shoulder heads-up-seven-up style in the first episode. At times, they act like they’re actually sentencing or being sentenced to death, like when Selling Sunset’s Chrishell Stause was kicked out of the game in a gothic horror-style scene Nosferatu would have been jealous of. At other times, the cast show us that they know how silly this all is, like when Big Brother’s Danielle Reyes broke down in tears as if another banished contestant had literally lost her life, and everyone else was like … Danielle, girl, get up.

Danielle when someone got murdered, or me when my Courage the Cowardly Dog essay garnered us two haters?

It’s a tough note for the show to hit, and the key to its success is Alan Cumming. The Scottish actor is the most over-the-top character on Traitors — and certainly the main one — treating the hosting gig as the role of a lifetime, and giving everyone else permission to have some fun, too. His outfits are immaculate , somehow serving both Edgar-Allan-Poe and Clueless at the same time in floor length yellow kilts and veils. He speaks in riddles. He hardly breaks character, but when he does, his charm overwhelms the screen like when he giggles at former Bachelorette Gabby Windey’s quips or scolds Lord Ivar Mountbatten — who is sure to tell us he attended Princess Diana’s wedding — to not listen to Tom Sandoval.

Part of what makes Alan Cumming an elite reality TV host is his dedication to the camp the role requires, but the other part is his notoriety. Cumming might not be a household name to the Gen Z and Alpha youth but he is royalty in his own right and one thing is for certain, he doesn’t NEED this. It feels like some kind of blessing that Cumming has graced us with his presence here, a benevolent gesture we should be grateful for. He could be doing so many other things. He could be at drag brunch. He could be snooping around other people’s mansions as he is wont to do. But instead he is in the Scottish Highlands subjecting Summer House’s Ciara Miller to a shower of earth worms and scorpions (with a devilish delight, I might add). He’s such a treat, and when it comes to the cannon of reality tv hosts, he’s certainly the exception, not the rule.

Most reality dating show hosts are people whose spotlight is waning (Ariana Madix of Love Island USA) or has all but flickered out (Jesse Palmer of The Bachelorette and JoAnna Garcia Swisher of The Ultimatum: Queer Love) — it’s no surprise they’d jump at the chance to be on the small screen again in any capacity.

Take Nick and Vanessa Lachey, who host Love Is Blind, if I’m being generous.

I was born a little late to be excited about the Lacheys (former boy band member/Jessica Simpson’s ex² Nick Lachey and former MTV host/actress Vanessa Lachey) getting together, but I understand that in some circles they are Y2K royalty. Either way, what we all must admit is that they are so bad at their jobs. By now you probably know the premise of Love is Blind whether you want to or not. Singles in a city spend days dating through a wall. By not being able to see one another they’re apparently able to determine whether love is “blind” — whether you can fall in love without ever seeing the other person. They can choose to say yes at the altar just over a month later or “walk away forever" (again, they all live in the same city so they can absolutely just date … an option they act like is off limits). Now that we’re on season eight, I think we should all collectively accept that love is in fact not blind, at least not in the way the show is trying to prove, but I digress.

The way these two spend their three seconds on screen to give one another doe eyes and pet names… oh you just know they loathe each other

The Lacheys appear in the first few minutes of each season to explain the premise that hasn’t changed since the show first aired in February 2020 (cursed). They then pop up here and there — like when the cast are trying on their wedding dresses and tuxes — to ask deep questions about family dynamics and how the couple feels about getting married, as if that isn’t an insane thing to ask someone who probably couldn’t tell you their fiancé’s birthday.

The Lacheys (unfortunately) also host reunions that take place about a year after the cast members have said “I do” or the correct choice, “I do not,” and so by now they’ve formed alliances. They’ve been breaking up and making up all over Minneapolis, the location of season eight. They’re running into each other drunk at bars and reliving their time in the pods, they’re posting about one another on social media and talking trash on The Bachelor’s Nick Viall podcast — the one that gives me a headache everytime I see it come up on my for you page. In short, all the actual drama has happened off-camera, and the Lacheys have to bring it out into the open. It’s incredibly clear all these people are very eager to hash out their beef publicly on that couch³, so the job should be easy… in theory. But Nick, bless him, never has any idea what’s going on. In the intro to this latest reunion, Nick says “If only these walls could talk” to which Vanessa responds “They basically do babe, and we get to see it all” and Nick contemplatively says “True, true…” as if he’s actually just figuring out what Netflix is paying him for. Vanessa pulls out what she can — and by that I mean one cast member will say something like “Well I learned a lot about [insert name like David, Andrew or Brian] that really changed the way I see him” and Vanessa will ask, as if she’s Diane Sawyer interviewing George W. Bush, “.... and what did you learn?” Then she’ll move on without getting anything juicy after I’ve sunk hours of my life into this godforsaken show.

Jeremy is all of us

The Lacheys are not up to the task, and that’s in a cast of normies. The Traitors quad is a smorgasbord of C-list celebrities from various TV shows — everything from The Challenge and Survivor to The Bachelor and Real Housewives — plus Zac Efron’s brother for some reason.

These are all people (perhaps with the exception of Britney Spears’ ex-husband whose biggest character trait is that he wears Britney’s headband sometimes) who have some level of name recognition if you care about reality TV. The Lacheys would be competing for airtime, and losing. The only host that works for the tongue-in-cheek show filled with people who have already proven they can reach fan-favorite status is a flamboyant, funny character who’s both overshadowing everyone and yet appears professional and elusive.

Cumming looms over the cast as a god-like figure, making them laugh, spooking them and keeping them in line in a way that feels reminiscent of Rupaul’s Drag Race’s RuPaul and America's Next Top Model’s Tyra Banks. Like Cumming, Tyra’s reputation preceded her when she joined ANTM, and all the contestants both admired and feared her. You could tell she was relishing putting on a show for the camera, upping the stakes of the competition’s premise. And like Cumming, Banks — a successful model and actress (never forget Life-Size) — really didn’t need to be there.

Though what’s interesting about Banks is, through the success and longevity of ANTM, her public persona has become entirely intertwined with the show. Most have stopped being able to differentiate (if they ever even could) Banks’ over-the-top smizing performance as a host with who she really is, especially as a newer generation gets introduced on TikTok through clips of Banks being outrageous, telling models to go bald or fix the gaps in their teeth or saying she modeled through 9/11 and “people were dying but I still worked it and was fierce.”

Us to Dylan on Traitors when he voted Carolyn out instead of Danielle.

Banks’ commitment to the bit was so strong, it’s easy to forget that she was a titan of industry behind the scenes. But she made sure to remind us last month when she was named the first-ever Luminary Spotlight honoree at the ESSENCE Black Women in Hollywood awards.

“Over 20 years ago, I created a show called America's Next Top Model, and you have no idea how hard we fought to bring diversity to that television show when it didn’t even exist,” Banks said in her acceptance speech. “Did we get it correct? Hell no. I said some dumb shit. But I refuse to leave a legacy of material linked together on the internet when there were 24 cycles of transforming the world.”

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Banks’ taking the show and what it represents seriously resulted in it overtaking her image. Could this happen with Cumming? It feels doubtful, although he also takes the show seriously (at least, just as seriously as it deserves). On The Tonight Show, Cumming recently talked about how hard it was to keep a straight face when the contestants were banishing someone they shouldn’t have, and you can tell how much he respects the cast and premise. Different from the Lacheys, both he and Banks feel like they have a central hand in the show’s success. They’re irreplaceable — although Siobhán McSweeney (Sister Michael in Derry Girls), who will be taking up the mantle in the Irish Traitors, will likely come incredibly close.

But the point is it’s clear that Traitors needs Alan Cumming a lot more than Alan Cumming needs Traitors. Cumming could easily pick up another big-screen acting gig or sell out a theater, but instead he’s spending weeks befriending Boston Rob and Bob the Drag Queen. It’s possible that, like Banks, his relationship with the show could become a little less lopsided as it goes on and he becomes known, especially to a younger generation, primarily as the goofy-yet-menacing Agatha Christie to a cast of reality TV misfits. But what Traitors has that ANTM didn’t is a necessary levity. Even as Cumming is taking his role seriously, the show itself keeps the stakes relatively low. No one is sobbing in a dressing room being forced into a pixie cut that will ultimately do them no favors. It’s all just good, clean, murdering fun. And in this circus, what a privilege it is to have a ringleader like Cumming.

B Plot

Question: Who is a celebrity who has never hosted a reality TV show but should?

Mallika: Now that Meryl Streep and Martin Short are finally admitting that they’re together, they should take the next obvious step: host a reality dating show. With three Oscars and five Emmys and a Tony award, they’ve earned to have a little fun for once. Plus, we’d probably get a parade of A-list guest judges (someone be brave enough to create a reality dating show with judges…). But mostly just Selena Gomez.

Rachel: I’m finally catching up on the new season of Abbott Elementary (which somehow keeps getting better… God is in that writer’s room) and Cheryl Lee Ralph (Barbara Howard) AND Janelle James (Principal Ava Coleman) would both make stellar reality TV hosts. I see Ralph in more of a Wheel of Fortune or Deal or No Deal situation, but James would absolutely slay as a Love Island host. The entrance she would make in a floor-length gown stoking the fear of god into those poor Islanders as she ushers them to the firepit. She’d be flirting with all the men like crazy but also reading them for filth as soon as they act up in Casa Amor. I’d kill to see it.

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C Plot

A tech billionaire is dismantling our government, people are dating AI chatbots, deepfakes of celebrities are flooding the internet… and Netflix said, you obviously don’t have enough waking nightmares, here’s Peter Capaldi and Paul Giamatti in an AI simulation that is sure to go horribly wrong. Black Mirror’s newest installment is premiering April 10. Ok, thank you!

And while we’re on the subject of nightmares dressed like a daydream, Nathan Fielder has been visiting Elizabeth Holmes in prison? Oh he’s cooking up something maniacal.

We’ve seen a litany of spinoffs and reboots in recent years — like that spinoff of Young Sheldon (which is also… a spinoff) about Sheldon’s parents or something (? not our culture, but we’re always wishing Emily Osment well) and How I Met Your Father — and Hollywood is showing no signs of stopping. We’re actually intrigued by the upcoming Buffy reboot and the new Harry Potter show, unfortunately, has made an incredible casting choice in I May Destroy You’s Papa Essiedu as Severus Snape. But do we need another Prison Break or The Office⁴? We are just like Connie Britton in that the Friday Night Lights reboot is barely on our radar.

Speaking of Harry Potter, The boy who lived himself, Danielle Radcliffe, will play a filmmaker in Tracey Morgan’s new NBC comedy, which involves some of the key 30 Rock team, if the pilot gets picked up. If this never makes it to our screens because NBC was too focused on Suits LA … avada kedavra.

And finally, Ride hive rise! The first look at Overcompensating, starring Benito Skinner and Mary Beth Barone (our favorite gay son and thot daughter) just dropped. A college backdrop with guest stars Connie Britton, Kyle MacLachlan, and Charli XCX?? Those of us who haven’t filled the hole in our heart left by the cancellation of ABC Family classic Greek are rejoicing.

1. Not sure if this is accurate, I never saw that Ashton Kutcher movie The Butterfly Effect and now it’s too late.

2. And more importantly for all One Tree Hill heads, the guy Brooke took to a wedding to make Julian jealous.

3. See this issue’s B plot for an example: Cutie-gate.

4. Though this reboot might be worth it just to see Eric Rahill live his life’s dream of being in the presence of celebrities all day long.