John Oliver took a close look at what he called a “less-covered story from this week” on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight: a reality show from U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy called The Great American Road Trip.
Duffy debuted a trailer for the show in May. At the time, a press release stated that the series “asks: Who are we? Following U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and his family, this five-part journey encourages Americans to step away from their screens for a vital civic experience. From small towns to iconic landmarks, the series captures the unscripted moments and shared values that prove to love America, you have to see America. The series will be released for free on YouTube, allowing every American family to follow along.” The show was timed to debut during this year, the nation’s 250th anniversary.
“So the motto is to love America is to see America,” Duffy explains to President Donald Trump in the trailer. He continues in voice-over: “It’s more than a road trip. It’s a civic experience. It’s one of the most powerful ways to understand the vast, beautiful, complicated place we call home.” (Watch it below.)
Said Oliver of the trailer: “OK, lots not to like there — from the generic ‘hey ho’ folk rock to Trump giving insane grandma’s new boyfriend vibes to the very conspicuous close up of the Toyota logo to the seemingly AI-generated images of cars, which makes sense. No one’s ever thought to film a real car before.”
At the time the show was announced, Duffy’s wife, Fox News Channel host Rachel Campos Duffy, “even claimed it was a solution to what ails us as a nation,” Oliver said.
“I’m going to be really honest, we live in a Pornhub world,” Rachel said in a Fox News clip shown by Oliver. “This is really wholesome, good family stuff. This is what families need to do is just get together. That’s what our kids want from us.”
Replied Oliver: “Is it? Because I think what every kid really wants is for their mum not to say the word ‘Pornhub’ on national TV. Also, she clearly hasn’t spent a lot of time on that site, or she’d know, families getting together is very much its own category.”
However, the road-trip series drew controversy for a few reasons: the high cost of gas, the fact that Sean was out filming a reality series when he had an important government job to do, and who was paying for the show. Regarding the latter, Sean said that it wasn’t funded by taxpayer money; instead the series was funded through a nonprofit production company called Great American Road Trip Inc. However, that organization’s website lists 17 sponsors, many of which are companies that the Department of Transportation oversees and regulates.
“Yeah, that’s not great,” said Oliver. “The only worse answer to who pay for this than ‘the American taxpayer’ is ‘a bunch of companies I oversee and regulate.’ Actually, I suppose an even worse answer would be a bunch of companies I oversee and regulate, and also my close personal friend Jeffrey Epstein.”
The show was supposed to be released in June, but “all the scrutiny seemed to delay it,” Oliver noted, and all six episodes were “quietly dumped on YouTube” last week.
Oliver said that it’s no surprise that Sean, a former star of MTV’s The Real World: Boston, wanted to return to reality TV. (He also met his wife on Road Rules: All Stars.) But Oliver pointed out some discrepancies in how Duffy recalled his time on those shows over the years. For example, in Road Trip, he visits the house that the Real World: Boston cast stayed in while filming and “tries to rewrite some history,” the Last Week Tonight host said.
During the segment, Sean reflects on the tension between him and housemate Kameelah Phillips, denying he called her a “bitch.” But Oliver showed a clip from The Real World in which Duffy says, “I walked up ahead of the group and I called her a bitch.”
“You did call her that,” Oliver said. “Call me CVS, Sean, because I will always bring the receipts.”
As for Sean’s claim that the show is “a nationwide storytelling movement that invites Americans to explore the open road, connect with their communities,” Oliver said, “That’s not really what it is at all, because it turns out it’s basically just an expensively produced test run of a Duffy family reality show with each episode featuring a bare minimum about travel or America, but a ton of manufactured reality TV drama around the Duffys doing stuff like planning a family party or over the course of several episodes watching their daughter decide which college she’ll attend.” As for that lattter point, Sean and Rachel are seen talking to their daughter about her desire to go to Harvard, which they evidently don’t support because they believe Harvard has “professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and I think corrupt their minds,” Sean tells his daughter in the show while the two are chatting in their kitchen.
Replied Oliver: “What the fuck are you talking about? First, this was supposed to be a road trip. Why are we still in your kitchen? Second, is there anything less relatable than a family whose conflict is, how do I tell my daughter she can’t go to Harvard because we did too good a job raising her?”
He continued: “And finally, please don’t be worried that Harvard’s going to corrupt your daughter’s mind. Be worried that if she goes there, like every other Harvard grad, she’s never gonna shut the fuck up about it. One of this show’s writers went to Harvard and guess how I know that? Exactly. I don’t know where any of the others went.”
Oliver then said that it’s no surprise that “hardly anyone” seems to have watched the show, based on the number of viewers available on YouTube. It also received very little promotion.
“I don’t really give a shit if Sean Duffy and his wife want to become the next Duggars or Jon and Kate [Gosselin] or Alec and Hilaria Baldwin,” Oliver said, citing other families who’ve starred in reality TV shows. “What’s concerning is them doing it on the back of the Department of Transportation because it feels ethically dubious on so many levels, which may be why at this point everyone involved in The Great American Road Trip seems like they’d rather just sweep it under the rug.”
He continued: “[H]aving watched all three hours of this god-awful show, from gender reveals to the Duffys renewing their vows for no clear reason, it feels less like the country’s been taken on a road trip by Sean Duffy and a lot more like we’ve all been taken for a fucking ride.”