The Stars just can't stop quitting Mars

Ariel Winter is the latest celeb to step away from Stars On Mars, following her rival Lance Armstrong last week

By Emma Keates  |  August 15, 2023 | 2:16pm
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The Stars just can't stop quitting Mars
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Ariel Winter on Stars On Mars Screenshot: Fox/YouTube

We really should have given Matt Damon’s character in The Martian more props for how mentally and physically exhausting it must have been to survive on the Red Planet. His fellow “celebronauts” can’t even seem to last a week running around in fake suits saving fake dogs in fake space. (And yes, “celebronauts” is actually what they call them.)

The latest star to hurl herself out of the Stars On Mars Hab (their nickname for “Habitat”) and into the cold and unforgiving void is Modern Family’s Ariel Winter—just one week after her bitter rival Lance Armstrong also chose to take an escape pod rather than engage with the “social component” of the show. And, because this is one of the silliest reality concepts of all time (a bunch of B-list celebrities play games and pretend they’re astronauts, if you hadn’t already gathered), she and her fellow strandees said the words “mission critical” a whole lot while she did it.

Anyway, Ariel Winter said she “loved being on this team” and “even enjoyed missions, even hard ones, in a stupid ass suit” after being placed in the bottom three with Marshawn Lynch and Real Housewives of Atlanta’s Porsha Williams Monday night, per Entertainment Weekly. “But as you know, I love the word fair,” she continued. “I was not mission critical today and I feel like I deserve to go.”

Olympic skater and fellow Mars traveler Adam Rippon also weighed in. “I get where Ariel is coming from. In this mission, she fell short. In my eyes, she’s one of the most mission-critical people of this entire experiment,” he said.

For Winter, it sounds like surviving the cold expanse of an unsettled planet offered the mental equivalent of a team-building retreat in the Catskills. “I got a lot of great things out of this, a lot of great friendships, personal growth, and a little bit more confidence,” she said in a confessional post-elimination. “I’m very happy I did this even though it was like a little bit of hell… I definitely feel at peace. I’m good to go.”

Winter becomes the fifth contestant to essentially beg to be freed from the show, after Armstrong, Richard Sherman, Natasha Leggero, and Ronda Rousey all quit in previous episodes. Is this the biggest reality show exodus of all time? With a dwindling population, it’s starting to look like everyone left in the Hab had better be mission critical if this “experiment” ever wants a second season.

 
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