Content Consumed: Challengers, new shows, SHEIN influencers, and so much more

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Content Consumed

7 min readJun 26, 2023

Hey, hey! Happy Monday. Let’s chat.

In today’s PACKED edition of Content Consumed, we’re discussing…
🎾 Zendaya takes care of her little white boys in Challengers
🍯 Two steps to understand Caroline Calloway
📚 Book haul: My Year of Rest and Relaxation and more
🎥 To be watched: The Bear, Eric Andre, and more
🧨 The Great’s shocking Episode 6
📬 Worth noting: the SHEIN influencer trip, Righteous Gemstones, and more

Just watched the Challengers trailer again…

Hello, hottest movie of the year! (Like, as in, sexy. We know Barbie still holds the title of Most Hyped at the moment.)

The trailer for Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers dropped last week and I know I’m not the only one who keeps returning to it. It’s a love triangle for the ages, starring Zendaya and her “two little white boys”: Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor. (Life imitates art, no?)

The actual premise:

Following a losing streak, the wife and coach of a Grand Slam champion signs him up for a challenger event where he will face off against her former lover.

See ya in theaters on September 15, 2023.

Want to understand Caroline Calloway?

I’ve written a tiny bit about Caroline Calloway before, but I really don’t blame you if you’ve escaped her over the past 4ish years that she’s been an Internet phenom.

I have a two-step Get To Know Caroline Calloway program for you.

Listen to Celebrity Memoir Book Club’s episode on Caroline’s new, self-published book.
Listen to Celebrity Memoir Book Club’s episode interviewing Caroline herself and grilling her on the contents of her book.

As per usual, Claire and Ashley do not hold back when it comes to Caroline Calloway (a person who claims, repeatedly, that she is friends with the CMBC girls, which they have denied to her face). They genuinely try to understand why she wrote her most controversial chapter of the book, in which she exposes more details of her arch nemesis’s sexual assault and speaks very graphically about being turned on by it. The CMBC girls also call out the endless webs of false narratives constructed by Caroline, which she seems to get a thrill out of defending.

If you need more background on Caroline before diving into the podcast episodes, I recommend this old NYT piece or this recent Vanity Fair profile piece.

My garage sale book haul

I am nothing but a woman of the 21st century, so I usually read via my Kindle. But! We hit up a few garage sales this weekend and here was my $10 book haul:

Not a Happy Family by Shari Lapena
I read a sample of this on my Kindle forever ago and forgot to return to it! Already got about ten chapters in last night and I’m enjoying myself. A good, classic suburban thriller.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Yeah… I’m a bit scared to read this one. Either it’ll enlighten me or send me into a self-destructive spiral. There’s really no in-between.

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
I just read and loved The Pisces so I’m stoked for another Melissa Broder masterpiece.

Haven’t watched, desperate to watch

First, The Bear. Season 2 premiered last week and I haven’t seen it yet. I know—I’ve been talking about this for months. But listen: it’s a headspace thing. If I’m in a bad mood, no f*cking way could you catch me watching The Bear. It is a purposely stressful show about difficult relationships and career anxiety. Not for the weak!

On the other hand, will I ever be ready for it?

Second, No Hard Feelings. The Jennifer Lawrence raunchy comedy hit theaters last week and I gotta grab my group of girlies to go see it. Or I’ll see it alone! Screw it! I just didn’t actually have time to hit the theaters this past weekend.

Third, the sixth season of The Eric Andre Show. He wasn’t planning on coming back for another season, but apparently didn’t make enough money off his last movie and appreciates the full creative control that Adult Swim has given him. Fair enough!

How to carry on after The Great’s Episode 6: “Ice”

I CANNOT EMPHASIZE THIS ENOUGH: Skip through the rest of today’s column if you haven’t watched Season 3, Episode 6 of The Great.

Ready?

Okay.

How are we supposed to continue, to carry on the show, when Peter is dead?

This is nothing against Elle Fanning, but Nicolas Hoult is the lifeblood of The Great and I don’t understand why this happened!!!

My chest caves in when I think about their last conversation. Chills all over, honestly. It was so perfectly scripted that my exact thought was: Could they ever be together again, with such different perspectives and goals, while madly in love?

And then Peter walks out onto the ice, on his horse. The ice that had held up on his journey over to Catherine. And it cracks, and the horse plunges, and Peter, stuck in the stirrups, is dragged to his death at the bottom of the lake.

It feels strange to write that. I can’t think of the last TV death that shocked me so much. Logan Roy: we saw coming. Maybe we thought it would happen a few episodes later, but we knew it would happen within the season. Even when Jon Snow plunged his dagger into Daenerys, it didn’t feel so painful (maybe because the show had already gone so far down Looney Tunes Lane in Season 8). The Red Wedding might be comparable, but even then—those weren’t main characters, per se. (Don’t come after me for that. I’ll stand my ground.)

Anyways, to sum up my feelings: holy shit.

So what comes next? Interestingly, the death came early in the episode, maybe twenty minutes in. In the rest of the episode, we feel the death mostly through Catherine (insane denial) and Gregor (massive depression). How will the palace handle such news? How will Russia handle it? Is this Catherine’s last straw; could she go full dictator mode?

I had to do a bit of historical research on this. AKA, Wikipedia. The show calls itself occasionally true, so I had a feeling Peter III of Russia didn’t actually die in this manner. But, strangely enough, we don’t know how Peter died in real life.

Much mystery surrounds his death. The official cause, after an autopsy, was a severe attack of hemorrhoidal colic and an apoplectic stroke, while others say he was assassinated. Other accounts state that after a midday meal, Peter’s captors tried to suffocate him by using a mattress but he managed to escape. This then led his captors to strangle him to death with a scarf.

Seems like the showrunners didn’t need to use too much artistic liberty here, as the mystery already existed.

Like I said, I can’t imagine watching The Great without Nicolas Hoult. While Elle Fanning is fantastic—she really, really nailed the delusion post-death—the best part of the show was the duo’s chemistry.

I still haven’t watched Episode 7. Too scared. I know I’ll get to it though.