Photographs by Chantal Anderson

The room where I’m set to meet Usher is glowing. I don’t mean that in a figurative sense, though the megastar certainly does luminesce in his own way. The space itself, a storefront-size chamber tucked away from the Las Vegas stage where he would perform that night, is awash in an almost eerie, LED blue. Along the far wall, light strips flank the liquor-covered bar, illuminating a step-and-repeat covered with $100 bills bearing Usher’s likeness. “The teal room,” as Usher and his team call it, is where the artist will later celebrate the spring kickoff of his new residency. I waited for him on a couch in the middle of the afternoon, leaning back against gold-lamé throw pillows, feeling as though I’d stumbled into a therapist’s office decorated to look like a strip club.

Into this uncanny scene walked Usher, the veteran R&B musician with a discography so obviously peerless that his only viable Verzuz competitor is himself. He strode into the room diamonds first, a thick chain around his neck sparkling against an all-black backdrop of sweatsuit, sunglasses, and durag. It wasn’t until he removed his sunglasses midway through our interview that I felt the weight of his celebrity, his innate sense that any room he walks into is distorted by his magnetism.

That night was a big night for Usher, an unveiling of sorts: the first official performance of the new leg of My Way, his residency at the Park MGM hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Much of his own family would be in the sold-out audience, along with fans who’d traveled from around the world to see him break into the infamous “U Remind Me” shadow choreography, sway his way through “You Make Me Wanna …” in a satin robe and leather pants, and strip the set bare to let his “Can U Handle It?” falsettos float.

Usher was fresh from a full-body workout when we met. He grew more animated as we talked. This is his second Vegas residency. In July of 2021, he became the first Black male singer to hold court at the famed Colosseum at Caesars Palace. This time around, he would have an even larger venue, and he wanted to do more than a standard concert. I asked him what to expect. He told me that without the burden of packing up a set, hopping onto a tour bus, and assembling it all over again across the country, he could run wild with My Way. He reminisced about the early days of planning the show. “We’re getting ready to light this bitch up,” he said.

A few hours after our conversation, in the giddy run-up to the show, I watched the crowd swell into the Dolby Live. The venue seats just over 5,000 people, a far cry from the 20,000-plus fans who have piled into a sold-out Madison Square Garden to see Usher over the years. To my left, standing nearly within reach of the stage, a woman in an silver monochrome outfit—sequined dress, metallic sneakers, princess tiara, and all—danced to Trap Beckham’s twerk-inducing “Birthday Bitch,” before pausing briefly to adjust the pageant sash draped across her chest, which proudly identified her as USHER’S #1 FAN.

Without giving away too much, Usher’s grand entrance hinges on a sly, crowd-centric interpretation of the song for which the residency is named. Just before he walks out to ear-piercing screams, in an all-white outfit set off by the same diamond chain he wore earlier that day, the last lines of the “My Way” chorus blare from the speakers. The lyrics set the tone for the rest of the show: “What I say goes / And I’m in control.”

Over the next two hours, he will skip across albums and eras, slipping into songs like costumes: One minute he is a sexed-up heartthrob, the next a wounded lover. He will push himself beyond traditional choreography into riskier stage work, including a few different set pieces on roller skates. During one, Usher and his dancers take to a medley of other artists’ hits—among them “Get Your Roll On” and “Drop It Like It’s Hot”—with the energy and precision of a college step team. Their moves are impressive, terrifying, fun. (Notably, the choreography involves none of the violence that reportedly broke out at an actual Las Vegas roller rink earlier this month, when Usher was allegedly assaulted by Chris Brown or a member of his crew before both singers performed at the seemingly jinxed Lovers & Friends Festival.)

Roller skates are an Atlanta thing—and not just in the movies. Cascade Family Skating, the real-life setting of T.I.’s 2006 classic, ATL, is one of more than a dozen rinks throughout the Atlanta metropolitan area where Black patrons have congregated for decades to dance and commune. After he unlaces his skates, Usher transports the audience to a decidedly less family-friendly Atlanta hallmark: Pole dancers descend from their elaborately designed perches with exhilarating speed. In one scene, a dancer approaches the stage to the sound of fight music. By the time she vaults herself onto the pole to begin her routine, the drum rolls have given way to the first notes of Usher’s timeless bad-bitch hype anthem, “Bad Girl.” Suspended upside down, the dancer claps her legs on beat as Usher sings the opening line that has supercharged women’s pregame primping for more than 20 years: What y’all know about a supermodel?  

Later in the show, the same $100 “Ush bucks” I first saw in the teal room rain down from the ceiling. (What a delight it would’ve been for the bespoke currency to have cameoed alongside him in Hustlers.) Usher told me that, amid all the spectacle, he wants to make sure to situate the show within Atlanta’s larger cultural tradition. “I want you to always see that,” Usher said of the funk, the soul, the Blackness that makes the city a source of constant creative regeneration. “There is sophistication; there is a technical side to it that people should understand on the same level [as] Cirque du Soleil or any of the other kinds of theatrical things that come to Las Vegas. Atlanta has that, and we had that opportunity to be able to introduce it to the world here.”

Usher’s supporting cast hails largely from Atlanta and other parts of the South (including the show’s DJ, who has been a fixture in Usher’s performances for decades). In the teal room, Usher and his creative director Aakomon Jones, also the singer’s longtime choreographer, talked about the joy of channeling the city where they both got their artistic start as children. Jones told me that students would race out of their classrooms to share different moves “in between class, in the restroom, going over a routine before the bell rings, and you show up late,” he said with a smile, referencing a sense of childhood mischief that was deliberately built into My Way. “We cast for the legacy and the maturity, but then we also cast for the ‘dangerous’ youth energy,” Jones said of the performers onstage with Usher. “We build connective tissue between those generations.”

The show’s audience was intergenerational too. Parents brought their children; couples of all ages grooved together. Whether you were a toddler, a teen, or firmly into grown-n-sexy territory when “Nice & Slow” was first released, the opening chords entranced you all the same. The only time that mattered was 7 o’clock on the dot. For concertgoers such as myself, Usher has been creating an R&B canon since we’ve been forming memories. Thinking back on the pantheon of celebrity posters that graced teenagers’ bedroom walls in the aughts, I can’t remember many cover images that elicited as much libidinal adolescent fervor as that of Usher’s 8701. For fans who’d perhaps already swooned over the likes of Marvin Gaye, Teddy Pendergrass, and the Temptations well before Usher, the teenager boldly singing lyrics written by Babyface in the late ’90s didn’t exactly break the R&B sex-symbol mold. To them, the strikingly good-looking middle-aged man who now performed slow jams with generation-spanning charisma was once just such a handsome young man. One of the more unnerving things about Usher is that he’s arguably the only music-industry heartthrob who could still draw compliments like these from aunties.

After performing some of his highest-octane hits, Usher pared down the show for a mesmerizing stretch. No dancers, no elaborate set pieces. Just that voice and its acrobatics. Usher told me that he’d modeled his career path after athletes, not musicians. “Not many people know this, but my father was a basketball player and my mother was a basketball player,” he said. Watching them channel their energy into the sport, he figured that he could use that same focus to build something lasting for himself as a performer. In addition to ensuring that his body would always be in spotlight-friendly shape, that push toward athleticism also cultivated the agility he’d need to pull off signature flourishes such as his handstand choreography. “I didn’t look at myself like a dancer. I didn’t look at myself like a singer.” He saw himself more as Allen Iverson than Al B. Sure.

Watching the sheer exertion required of him in Vegas does feel a little like catching a glimpse of an athletic prodigy. Getting to that level takes diligent, unsexy work. “Mama Jan” Smith, an Atlanta-based vocal coach, has been training Usher for more than two decades. When he was first referred to her as a teenager (by Elton John, she believes), the industry veteran was struck by Usher’s clear talent: “He could dance with his voice,” she recalled. “And I don’t mean just dancing physically at the same time while he was singing. His voice also danced—it was his riffs and his runs, it was his tone.”

When Usher finishes singing “Climax,” the vocally taxing 2012 ode to a slowly dying relationship, the lights change. The artist is enveloped in a telltale haze of flame-colored smoke. “Burn” is coming, and the wait for it is deliciously agonizing. It is this emotional space that most distinguishes Usher. The sex appeal is always self-evident; the studied sentimentality is not. Across the My Way survey of his discography, he told me the three songs he considers quintessentially his are “Confessions” (no surprises there), “Burn,” and “Climax.”

Of the three, “Climax” admittedly gave me pause when he first named it. But during My Way, the song primes the crowd for “Burn” with its own dramatic flourish. With his tank top pulled up over his neck to reveal a still-statuesque upper body, Usher drops to his knees as he sings—“We’re going nowhere fast”—then falls to the floor as he lets the audience take over: “Come together, now we’re undone.”

By showcasing Usher’s willingness to come undone, “Burn” quickly became one of modern American music’s most enduring breakup records. The song was Usher’s initial choice for the Confessions lead single, which would ultimately be the inescapable Lil’ Jon– and Ludacris-assisted club banger “Yeah!” But along with that track, “Burn” was one of the key records keeping Usher at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for nearly half of 2004. The ballad is undeniable, elemental R&B—romance refracted through the lens of grief. Any selection of lines from the song telegraphs anguish and depth, but the internal conflict of its bridge is Usher at his most exposed: “I’m twisted ’cause one side of me is tellin’ me that I need to move on / On the other side, I wanna break down and cry, ooh.”

Usher co-wrote “Burn” with the super-producer Jermaine Dupri, who has worked with him since 1997’s My Way, and the fellow producer Bryan-Michael Cox. On a recent call, Dupri told me that “Burn” is one of their collaborations on which Usher was most heavily involved in the conceptual process. He titled the song and gave Dupri the map before the producer ever sat down to write. Dupri anticipated “Burn” being a hit with women. After all, he figured, what woman doesn’t want to hear a man be vulnerable? But he never predicted how intensely it would resonate with men. Looking back on it now, Dupri happily acknowledges that he was wrong: “I think that’s the true secret to his success—that you have a man that actually is saying something that other men want to say.”

Usher sees songs like “Burn” as the centerpiece of his artistic legacy because they capture the devastation of heartbreak for men specifically. Since the song’s release, “Burn” has served as a lingua franca for a fragile kind of masculine pain. “It’s a very important role that I think I played in young men’s lives. And I obsess over it because I’m always trying to find the best way to articulate that emotion without making them feel uncomfortable,” he told me. “These are things that I think men need as tools.”

Given that it was released in the early aughts, when hip-hop and R&B were closely entwined but firmly distinct, “Burn” feels all the more poignant. Usher’s vocals in the song mirror its lyrics: He unravels, slowly and methodically creating a sound that feels cracked open. Just as the narrative doesn’t end with a neat resolution, his voice doesn’t rise with linear intensity. He remains raw. Exercising that kind of control, what Mama Jan referred to as “attaching emotional inference” to how one sings, is a deceptively difficult task. Doing so within a cultural climate that prioritized suave, swaggering braggadocio would have been all the more challenging.

It’s not altogether surprising, then, that “Burn” immediately broke through—or that it’s the song that draws the most impassioned response from concertgoers at the Vegas show. Every night, Jones said, he looks out into the audience and sees “the hardest of the hard still singing the lyrics to the love ballad.”

As Usher nears the end of “Burn,” he invites the audience to sing the falsetto-filled bridge with him. No one in the room matches his tone, but our shared sense of release fills in where our harmonies do not. The crowd cools down, the beat drops, and Usher issues the now-memefied directive “Watch this” before beginning a song that sends the energy in the room skyrocketing. When we spoke a few weeks later, Dupri pointed out a statistic that “sounds like a dinosaur to me”: Almost 20 years later, Confessions is still the last R&B album to ever be certified diamond.

For many musicians, producing a genre-defining work like Confessions at just 25 could lead to some real complacency. But after that album, Usher kept grinding. In 2008, he released Here I Stand, a ballad-heavy record that trades the debauchery of Confessions for declarations of love inspired by his relationship with his then-wife, Tameka Foster. Two years later, after they’d parted ways, he put out the aptly named divorce manifesto Raymond v. Raymond. Both albums debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. As the R&B star solidified his standing in the music industry, he also dipped his toe into other genres. The dance-pop single “OMG,” an Auto-Tune-heavy will.i.am collaboration, clinched the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 for four weeks in 2010. And the years that followed saw him collaborating with an eclectic array of popular artists including Pitbull, Enrique Iglesias, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj, Young Thug, and Diplo. The hits rolled in.

In the lead-up to Usher’s residency at Caesars Palace, the musician was still massively popular but creatively adrift. It had been almost five years since he’d released a solo album, 2016’s thematically incohesive Hard II Love, also his first LP since My Way without a massive hit. On the path to becoming a megastar, to selling out arenas and courting crossover appeal, he’d lost his passion for creating music and felt less connected to his fans than in the past. “I had stopped caring, because I had done it for so long and just obsessed over success,” he told me. He found himself constantly “trying to figure out how to create something that everybody is going to love, because my audience had grown so much.”

The beautiful thing about being able to slow down in Vegas, he says, is that it made him care about the music again. When Usher performs now, he sees an audience respond with rapturous enthusiasm to the R&B that first catapulted him to fame—before the EDM chart-toppers, the Justin Bieber career coaching, or the “revolutionary pop” that earned him a wider fan base and the ire of some early fans who felt abandoned by his moves outside the genre. Onstage and in his new music, Usher is channeling the glory of an earlier R&B era. In March, he even released “GLU,” a sexy, falsetto-filled teaser for the forthcoming album that fans have anticipated as a kind of Confessions 2. (The full record is slated for release later this year.) As Usher told me, “I needed to come to Las Vegas to just get to the place where I was having fun again.”

As My Way wound down, I observed the faces around me. Overwhelmingly, the audience seemed united in feeling, not thought. People danced in the aisles and serenaded one another from their seats. Back in the teal room, Usher had recalled a scene almost like this one, which had brought the meaning of his career—and the immensity of this residency—into sharp relief. While performing, he said, he saw his son, his mother, and his grandmother all reveling in the audience. His son, now a teenager, had recently experienced something that made “Burn” feel like more than just one of his dad’s old songs. That night, he understood. “It was a tender moment for me,” Usher said. “I could see him singing it, and he’s really singing it.”

Justin Rose and Rory McIlroy are among a stellar group of contenders who will challenge leader Brooks Koepka in Sunday's final round at the US PGA Championship.

Justin Rose sets the clubhouse target in round two of the US PGA Championship at Oak Hill with the top three in the world among the later starters.

In 2009, John Rogers, the creator of the crime drama Leverage, wrote a blog post describing how an episode of the show had come together. In it, he noted one of the things he’d learned from fans: They loved the moments when the show’s core team simply chatted about their cases—the thrill of watching smart people being smart together. “Competence porn,” the show’s writers began calling it, and the coinage caught on. The comforts of competence help explain the appeal of films like The Martian and shows like Ted Lasso; they also give a soft rebuke to the pyrotechnic individualism so common in American pop culture. Competence, recast as entertainment, is humble. It is team-oriented. It is also, in its way, a challenge, because it will ask its audience to realize the same thing its characters must: A superhero isn’t coming to save us. We’ll have to do the saving ourselves.

We live, though, in uniquely incompetent times, and one of the shows that best captures this fact is a work of stylized history. White House Plumbers retells the story of the Watergate break-in with a focus on the burglars themselves: the foot soldiers who blundered their way into disgrace. As with traditional treatments of competence, the story delights in the details, turning Watergate into a step-by-step origin story. Richard Nixon is merely a spectral presence in the HBO show; many of the other infamous participants in the scandal are, here, recast as supporting players. Instead, White House Plumbers zeroes in on the antics of the political operatives E. Howard Hunt (played by Woody Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux)—the “plumbers” initially enlisted to simply plug information leaks in the Nixon White House. Through them, the show examines an incompetence so consequential that it took down a presidency.

“The following is based on a true story,” the show’s disclaimer reads, against a blackened screen. “No names have been changed to protect the innocent, because nearly everyone was found guilty.” Its first scene opens on the facade of the Watergate office building, lit against the night. A group of men in suits stands in a neat line in front of the building. They enter. Soon they’re at the door of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, flashlights in hand—the camerawork is tight and hectic—as one of them fumbles with a pick in the door’s lock. He grimaces as he realizes that the device … doesn’t work. “These are the wrong tools,” he announces. As the men erupt into arguments, more of the show’s text appears: “There were four Watergate break-in attempts … This was attempt number two.”

White House Plumbers is most directly based on the memoir The White House Plumbers: The Seven Weeks That Led to Watergate and Doomed Nixon's Presidency, by Egil “Bud” Krogh (the White House operative who hired Liddy and Hunt) and his son Matthew Krogh. But it’s more broadly based on the wide readings its creators and writers, Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck, did as they researched the lesser-known stories of Watergate’s genesis: its connection to the Pentagon Papers and the Bay of Pigs, and how its bunglings were made worse by the fact that even these White House–appointed conspirators were affected by budget cuts. As history, Watergate is excessively well documented—in part because, as Gregory told me, pretty much everyone involved eventually wrote a book about their involvement. “That was almost the challenge,” Huyck told me: “to read every autobiography, watch every interview.”

Gregory and Huyck wrote for the HBO satire Veep, and White House Plumbers is directed by David Mandel, who ended Veep’s run as its showrunner and an executive producer. But the new series is not Veep with a Watergate twist. White House Plumbers is a comedy, but a decidedly dark one. It offers moments of waggish parody—the drawl that Theroux gives Liddy, all sinews and smarm, is its own category of satire—but its humor is typically more blunt than acute. The point is not simply that Hunt and Liddy bumble. The matter is how they bumble: brashly, loudly, melodramatically.

“I think you learn a lot more from antiheroes than heroes,” Gregory told me. And both Liddy and Hunt are plagued by a self-regard so thorough that it becomes its own form of incompetence. They are fervently loyal—to their country, to their president, to their cause. They believe themselves to possess the quality that makes competence so compelling, as a cinematic proposition: a sense of common purpose. But again and again, as they (attempt to) carry out the crimes they have come to see as their duty, their collaborative impulses are stymied by egoism. Both men, the show makes clear, see themselves as the hero of their own story—and, for that matter, of everyone else’s. At every moment, Theroux conveys his character’s conviction that he is starring in an endless show. He carries himself as if he were bathed in invisible limelight, speaking loudly—and decisively—in a stage whisper meant for no one in particular.

Gordon Liddy is not a good guy: Explaining his fascination with Hitler, he confesses that listening to the dictator as a boy made him feel empowered to conquer his fears. (The line is a version of one the real Liddy said during a 2004 interview.) Hunt is not a good guy either. But the men’s badness is not straightforward. Their villainy is complicated by their delusion, and tempered by the fact that both conspirators are ultimately betrayed by the people they trusted to protect them—foremost among them, the president. It’s also complicated by the fact that the qualities that typically account for a character’s villainy—fearsomeness, loathsomeness, cruelty—are, in their case, overridden by their ineptitude. That first break-in scene sets the tone for the show. Many things go wrong as their initial efforts to plug White House leaks expand into national scandal. But all of the error, after a while, adopts an air of inevitability. Liddy and Hunt, as the show portrays them, are tangles of deference and defiance; those qualities can coexist for only so long before something has to give.

[Read: What did Atlantic readers think of Watergate?]

This is one way White House Plumbers is akin to that other political satire. Veep balanced its comic hyperbole with acknowledgements of its characters’ mundanity. Selina Meyer is a terrible person and a mediocre politician. But as she lives her own version of empowered ineptitude—freeing Tibet and then un-freeing it, systematically betraying the people in her orbit, becoming a war criminal—the show offers momentary reminders of how she earned the power she is abusing. Those moments read as interruptions—competence rearing its tidy head—and their effect is to make the character of Selina, and her show, much more nuanced than it might otherwise have been. They also give Veep’s comedy a tinge of tragedy. Selina is a villain, yes, but a deeply prosaic one. Her villainy is neither dramatic nor especially unique. Instead, it results from that dullest of things: inertia. Her badness is a habit she can’t be bothered to break. It is the result of daily choices that accumulate, over time, into history.

White House Plumbers applies that idea to its historical villains. “Tragedy is that much more tragic when you can have a laugh in it,” Mandel told me. The opposite is true as well. “Real life doesn’t plan out when it’s going to be funny or when it’s going to be serious,” he said. “They bump up against each other—sometimes in sloppy ways that do things to you emotionally.” Hunt and Liddy are cartoonish, and foolish in their cartoonishness; they are also bureaucrats and family men. Their histrionics are offset by the attention the show pays to their families, including their wives and several children. (Lena Headey plays Dorothy Hunt—who, like her husband, is a former CIA operative and, unlike him, is often a voice of reason on the show; Judy Greer plays Fran Liddy.) White House Plumbers, in emphasizing the men’s personal lives, might in that way whiff of the villain-rehabilitation impulse that is now common in works of pop culture.

But the show does none of that. It is clear about who these characters are, and who they are not. There is no reputation-laundering here. Instead, the show emphasizes the banality of their villainy. The story, Gregory told me, is ultimately “about the cost of fanaticism.” And Hunt and Liddy embody that. They are at once larger than life and tragically small. They are husbands and fathers and criminals. They are loyal government servants and betrayers of their country. They are victims. They are culprits. And their incompetence makes those complications even more legible.

Monsters reflect their moments: Fire-breathing beasts channel the fear of atomic bombs; vengeance-seeking plant life captures anxieties about climate change; formless malignancies convey the encroachments of the digital world. Villains work similarly. They teach audiences what to fear. They teach us whom to mistrust. There’s urgency, then, in a show that explores the radiating consequences of even the most seemingly oafish forms of misconduct. “They’re too incompetent to be dangerous” was never compelling as a political argument. But if the past several years have proved anything, it’s that incompetence—when fueled by delusion, and convinced of its own righteousness—can be its own kind of threat.

Justin Welby was caught doing 25mph in a 20mph zone near his official London residence.

Overheard in the men’s bathroom of a movie theater in Boston, after a screening of Creed III:

“That movie basically just makes me want to get in shape.”

“It makes me want to get in shape mentally.”

“Huh?”

“Bro, that movie was all about mental stuff. You didn’t get that?”

The mental stuff. That’s where it’s at. The mind, the mind—it can bear you sweetly along on pulses of transparent super-energy, or it can rear up and bite your face off. And if, like me, you’ve watched 432 episodes of survival TV, the beloved subgenre that pits bare, forked man against the unrelenting wilderness, you’ve seen it happen over and over again. It’s not Alaska that breaks you, or Mongolia, or northeastern Labrador—it’s the contents of your own head.

Remember Jim Shields from Season 3 of Alone ? How passionately I relate to this guy. Deposited on the cold shore of a fuming-with-bleakness lake in the Andean foothills, with only a couple of GoPros for company (that’s the hook of Alone : no camera crews; the contestants film themselves), he spreads his arms, throws back his head, and, in an attempt at exultation, bellows, “PATAGONI-AAAAH!”— only to be almost visibly demolished, half a second later, by the ensuing unresponding immensity of silence and solitude. He exhales, as if the weight of it is about to collapse his rib cage. He looks momentarily holographic, like he might go fuzzy and vanish from the picture. And sure enough, on only his third day out there, his third day in the storm and vacancy of his own aloneness, Shields “taps out.” He can’t take it anymore: He radios the producers. His Alone time is over.

For comparison, Zach Fowler—the modest prodigy of durability who won that season of Alone—lasted 87 days (and lost more than 70 pounds in the process). Fowler, a boatbuilder, kept himself busy, did not wallow. This is the aspect of Alone, which has run for nine seasons, that made people love it with particular intensity during the pandemic. For those 87 days, Fowler was Kipling’s “man of infinite-​resource-​and-​sagacity”: fishing, chopping wood, a marvel to behold as he managed his plummeting calories and husbanded his plummeting moods. Shields, in contrast, Shields, my spirit-mirror. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have the skills,” he reflected to his GoPro. “It’s just a matter of one skill that I can’t control. My brain.”

On USA Network right now, you can find Race to Survive: Alaska, in which eight pairs of contestants huff and puff their way into some very hard-core Alaskan topography—six races over 100-plus miles, with no shelter provided. Interpersonal crack-ups are inevitable. Look at Jeff and Hunter Leininger, father-and-son partners, laden with gear, laden with father-son issues, toiling grimly through the Tongass Forest in the first episode. “OUGHH!” says young Hunter, bringing up the rear, as he gets thwapped by a recoiling limb. “Right in the face !” “Don’t be right behind me, Hunter,” his father responds testily. “You know that!” The wilderness glints; the producers rub their hands. This will get worse.

[Read: Reality shows don’t have to be cruel]

Alaska seems to be a perfect place for all of this to go down—the flapping, still-open, still-wild, burning-and-freezing American frontier where you’re either alone, alone, all, all alone, or tearing each other to pieces. Outlast, which you can find on Netflix, is the next twist. Here 16 aloners/survivalists/bushcrafters/berry-munching nutcases are dumped in the Alaskan outback for as long as they can stand it. No rules, no end date: You either tap out or get medevaced. As usual, everybody’s plodding around in the cold, whittling and splicing and setting snares and muttering about protein, but with a crucial refinement, the contest’s single law: They must form teams. Nobody wins this game in isolation. No prizes, this time, for going it alone. It’s the last team standing, the last unit of cooperation, that shares the booty: a million bucks. You see the tension, right? The drama-generating torque? These are lone wolves, alpha personalities, rugged individualists, huge pains in the American ass, and they must work together, be together, in a classic Sartrean hell-cell of a reality-TV situation.

It’s different now, watching reality TV. Years ago, pre-everything, on a flight out of Salt Lake City, I sat next to a man who had been on one of those construction reality shows—about tiny houses, I think. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said to me as we popped open our second beer. “It’s all made-up. Everything that happens in the show. It’s complete bullshit.” At the time, I didn’t really believe him. I didn’t want to, so happily and beerily invested was I in the narrative tropes of reality TV: the villain, the meltdown, the redemption. But now, post-everything, we distrust narrative. So when plot enters a reality show, when story starts to happen, we think, Yeah, right.

[Read: Survivor, 20 years later, keeps teaching us to trust no one]

In the case of Outlast, however, I buy it. When one of the ad hoc teams abruptly goes feral and starts wrecking the campsites of its rivals, stealing sleeping bags, and so on, that feels real to me. I do not sense the hand of the producer. Or rather, I sense the producer’s glee at how fucked-up everything is getting, at how readily it’s all reverting to a state of nature. Isn’t this the secret agenda of all reality shows: to become the Stanford Prison Experiment? And Outlast has the characters. Team Alpha, the rogue team in question, is three people: Jill, who has all the evil ideas; Justin, slashing tarps and twiddling the ends of his Mephistophelian mustache; and Amber, with her eyes of wolfish clarity, who aids and abets. They really run riot, this lot. They accelerate into a space of no compassion at all: “This isn’t about survival!” protests one of their appalled and out-gamed victims. “It’s about who’s the fucking meanest.” Now, doesn’t that have the ring of truth, the authentic clang of 2023? In lockdown, we watched Alone ; now we’re dealing with one another again, and we’re watching Outlast.

The greatest, boldest, craziest aloner of them all was Timothy Treadwell, cracked wilderness king and director of his own bootleg reality show. You’ve seen Grizzly Man, I hope—one of the director Werner Herzog’s masterpieces, and a prime text of the Alaskan sublime. Treadwell is the protagonist: the hero, why not? He filmed himself, like the contestants on Alone ; he asserted himself in hard company, like the contestants on Outlast. Only the company was bears, not people: the roaming grizzlies of Alaska’s Katmai National Park, among whom Treadwell camped for 13 summers. Bear-loving, bear-obsessed, eventually eaten by a bear, Treadwell never muttered about protein—at least not in the footage I’ve seen. He was too busy watching the bears play their own game of survival. And he entered the game. He was with them; cherishing them; backing them down; giving them names; talking to them in eerie, rapturous singsong, half shaman, half preschool teacher. Don’t you do that … don’t you do that … It’s okay, I love you, I love you. Next to this strange ecstasy, Herzog’s German-accented voice-overs are cosmic deadpan. “In all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.”

[Read: The movie review: Grizzly Man]

How nature feels about us, that’s the great imponderable. That’s somewhere under all these shows. The wilderness gapes. The wilderness crackles. Trekking across it, trying to make a home in it, aloneing, outlasting, or diving profanely into its mysteries, we never quite get the answer to our question: Are we strangers in this world, or not?

This article appears in the June 2023 print edition with the headline “Call of the Wild.”