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“Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish? I know it’s tuna, but it says chicken… by the sea. Is that stupid?”
If you remember just one thing about Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica, the mid-2000s MTV reality sensation that chronicled the marriage of Jessica Simpson and 98 Degrees alum Nick Lachey, it’s probably this ridiculous string of sentences, uttered by Simpson as she curled up on the couch with a bowl of what was, of course, canned tuna fish. Appearing just three minutes into the series premiere, which aired on Aug. 19, 2003, the scene established the show as an unscripted variation on a classic sitcom dynamic. Like Lucille Ball in hip-hugging denim, Simpson would play the ditzy wife to Lachey’s exasperated husband. After silently staring at his bride for a few dumbfounded beats, he grumbles: “You act like you’ve never had tuna before!”
Act was the operative word. If Newlyweds harkened back to I Love Lucy, that was because Simpson’s father and then-manager Joe Simpson pitched it as precisely that. Over the past 20 years, and especially since the release of her bracingly candid 2020 memoir, Open Book, it’s become clear that Simpson was in on the dumb-blonde joke all along. As her recording career floundered, following a muddled sophomore album whose six-figure sales had disappointed in the wake of a double-platinum debut, the show was an opportunity to get her music back on MTV. It also gave her a chance to resolve an identity crisis exacerbated by the era’s surplus of gorgeous, young, female pop stars. With Newlyweds, she remade her image—and, in doing so, played a seminal role in the creation of what would come to be known as influencer culture.
Reality TV as we know it today—a full-fledged industry, rather than the curiosity it was in the early years of MTV’s The Real World—was still a burgeoning genre in 2003. E!’s Keeping Up…
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