There is a convention, when someone launches a spinoff of a hit TV show, of having the star of the original appear in the pilot to give it a boost. As it is in Hollywood, so it is in Washington.
Thus the first episode of “The Great American Road Trip” — the family-reality-show-meets-sponsor-showcase-meets-political-branding-exercise starring the secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy — includes an Oval Office cameo from President Trump. The former “Apprentice” host, in effusive M.C. mode, grants his blessing to the legacyquel, as Duffy and his family begin a six-episode tour.
It’s a fitting project for an administration in which camera-readiness is a chief qualification. And it’s a fitting assignment for Duffy and his wife, the Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, both 1990s alums of “The Real World,” the MTV fishbowl series about “what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.”
Having a video brand is now part of politics. Years ago, the former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin shot “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” and “Amazing America.” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has started a YouTube cooking show on which he touts nutritional yeast as “great for your microbiome.” On the Democratic side, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a multipart Instagram series about freezing her eggs, a personal testimonial that doubles as a political statement about reproductive choice and health care costs.
“Road Trip” was announced this spring, to a hail of controversy over its sponsorship by a host of companies that the Transportation Department regulates. It was meant to come out in June, ostensibly to inspire Americans to travel the country before the semiquincentennial on July 4. Now it has landed on YouTube as a belated 250th birthday gift, held up, Duffy recently said, for “extra editing” to comply with government ethics rules.
One can only imagine what sponcon landed on the cutting room floor. What remains still includes hero shots of a succession of gleaming Toyota S.U.V.s (the company is one of the patrons), as well as lengthy “work visits” by Duffy that plug sponsors Boeing, CRH and Waymo. (For the last, Duffy takes his children in a driverless car and says it will “have a huge impact on saving lives on American roads.”)
This is what happens when people stop being contrite and start cutting deals. A disclaimer at the opening of each episode says “Road Trip” was paid for “through the generous support of sponsors” and “accepted as a gift by the Department.”
Scrape off the thick coating of advertorial, and “Road Trip” is a mash-up of familiar cable reality genres: the travel show and the big-family reality show. The Duffys have nine children, and they’ve held out the size of their brood as a natalist political statement.
Several of the kids get subplots: the pregnancy of the eldest daughter, Evita; the college search of teenage Paloma; the experience of raising Valentina, 6, who has Down syndrome. The children, arguably, have the most important job here, helping Duffy rebrand himself as a patient, chuckling Everydad and injecting comic relief. One child describes the 1990s aesthetic of Duffy’s “Real World” season as “like somebody vomited a rainbow.”
The reality-family genre is often conservative-religious-coded (think “19 Kids and Counting” or “Duck Dynasty”). “Road Trip” makes the Duffys’ Catholic faith prominent — prayers at dinner, at bedtime, before big decisions — and there’s a trad-family thread throughout. When Duffy visits his daughter Lucia at college and asks her what she’s “in search of,” one of her friends guesses, “A husband!”
The vibe is competently basic-cable. Any TLC viewer will recognize the beats, the gentle bickering and the generic good-time music cues as the adventure sites move from Philadelphia to Charleston, S.C., to Route 66. (There is generous praise of the national parks, where the Trump administration has made deep cuts.)
But “Road Trip” is mostly about watching a Cabinet member Kardashianize his family while vacationing on the corporate dime, as the price of gas and nearly everything else has skyrocketed. There are guided tours of the Grand Canyon, a skiing detour at Jackson Hole, Wyo., V.I.P. treatment at Yellowstone, stays at gorgeous hotels and a Texas ranch.
It must be nice! And it’s all very wholesome. But it’s a snooze.
There’s a more interesting series trying to get out here, about life in a political family with conservative-media-star parents whose reality-TV careers are literally the reason the kids were born. (Duffy and Campos-Duffy met on the “Real World” sister show “Road Rules.”) And for one episode, “Road Trip” is almost that show.
In the second installment, the family drives to Boston, where Sean revisits the converted firehouse from his season of “Real World,” in which he was cast as the rowdy young conservative. (There’s a brief reunion with his feminist housemate from the season, Montana McGlynn.)
Duffy’s past as a cast member in a show about diverse coexistence soon collides with his present as a partisan political figure. Paloma is touring colleges — including Harvard, one of the elite institutions the administration has assailed with lawsuits and funding cuts. He tells Paloma that he’s not sure he’d let her attend the school, for fear it would change her values: “They have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds.” Later, Campos-Duffy says that her job is to get her children into heaven, not Harvard.
It’s a glimpse of a reality show with history, generation gaps and actual conflict — what you might have made if the imperative were not to polish the people, locations and companies involved to a dealer-showroom sheen. Instead, we get a soft-focus family album with a faint whiff of advertising.
But what, or who, is being pitched? Toyota and Boeing? The Trump administration? Duffy himself, who might have other political destinations on his mental road map? (For that matter, there’s his son-in-law, Michael Alfonso, who’s running for Congress and is portrayed on the show as a doting expectant dad.)
On the one hand, the show makes Duffy’s Cabinet job seem mostly like a series of fun junkets to glad-hand the companies he regulates. On the other, it does show that he and Campos-Duffy are still eminently comfortable in front of a camera, knowing how to give it just the quips, flirtations and sparring it wants. In this administration, making effective content is Job 1.
Duffy’s return to reality TV may have limited reach; a day after its release, some episodes had fewer than a thousand views on YouTube. And it may have come a little late to spur families to pack up the car and see America this summer. But it does suggest that the road to the political future is increasingly lined with cameras — preferably your own.