The reality show-ification of American politics is nothing new at this point; even before the trend hit what increasingly feels like it might have been a terminal inflection point with the national election in 2016, the collective dumping of “famous for doing things that matter” and “famous for being famous” types into the same buckets had already started to chum up the country’s political waters pretty nicely. The sharks who grew up in that feeding frenzy might be inbred, obnoxious, and deeply depressing to contemplate, but they’re also a particular kind of relentless; just look at Spencer Pratt’s recently launched campaign to be Los Angeles’ least-qualified mayor ever, which is now apparently set to get a brand new reality show to exhaustively, and exhaustingly, document it.
The former The Hills star, whose previous electoral experience amounted to a dominating run in Yahoo! TV’s “Greatest Reality Villain Ever” poll, announced that he was running for LA’s mayor back in January, apparently spurred on by anger over the government’s handling of his house burning down during the 2025 Pacific Palisades fires. Despite having literally spent the last 20 years documenting his failings for money in so much detail that the evidence is now spread across basically every subscription streaming service you can pay for (plus a book), Pratt has done pretty well for himself in the election: He’s polling in second place, behind incumbent mayor Karen Bass, but ahead of Democratic Socialist city council member Nithya Raman. He recently generated life-giving attention by claiming he was living in an Airstream trailer on his destroyed property when he was actually staying in a hotel, and then his campaign reposted some extremely ugly AI videos of him as a superhero and a Jedi fighting against Bass. Which is to say that the playbook this guy—who’s running on giving more money to the LAPD, and less to the city’s homeless, among other right-leaning talking points—is working from is not exactly subtle in its influences.
All of which brings us back to today, when Deadline reported that of course Pratt’s campaign bid is getting turned into a reality show, produced by a studio that previously worked on documentary miniseries AKA Charlie Sheen and Welcome To Wrexham. In fact, the first chunk of footage has apparently already been shot, with producers planning on filming him through the city’s June primary, and then hypothetically up through the election. (And then, presumably, up through his run for planetary domination in, like, 2055.) No word yet on which network might pay for the privilege of running the series, and then the secondary privilege of apologizing for the series, after a guy whose current business interests involve selling magical “Pratt Daddy” crystals to lonely people successfully hate-watches his way into a position of actual power.
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