Why Are Adults So Interested in the Love Lives of Teen TikTok Stars Charli D’Amelio and Lil Huddy?

When MTV’s The Real World debuted, arguably the first reality TV show, it was met with a general sense of bewilderment, but critics were eventually forced to admit that watching a “soap opera documentary” about twenty-somethings thrown together and seeing how they manage to get along and open themselves up to each other is pretty interesting.

Of course, the thing that made The Real World a household name was season three whose cast included future DC Comics writer Judd Winick, his future wife Pam Ling, AIDS education activist Pedro Zamora and some dipshit who called himself Puck. There were some other people, too, like a chubby girl and I think a guy in a cowboy hat, but no one cares even a little bit about them. The show was suddenly something different, appointment television full of fights, romance and the last days of the tragically short life of Pedro Zamora, who only lived to be 22.

This is when reality TV began to be scripted in the same way wrestling is scripted. MTV knew what they were doing when they cast Pedro Zamora, an openly-gay Cuban AIDS educator along with David Rainey, a racist, homophobic piece of s**t. I get why people watched it, because I was one of those people. It was crafted to be enthralling from the ground up.

But none of that explains why adult human beings are obsessed with the love lives of TikTok users Charli D’Amelio and Lil Huddy, or why someone would call themselves Lil Huddy.

These two are like, vaguely famous TikTok users who are also in high school having the kind of dumb teenage fight we all had when dating in high school and grown-ass adults are weighing in on it and taking sides and cancelling one of them? This s**t was in New York Magazine, are you fucking kidding me?

I’ll give you a brief rundown of what happened: two teenagers kind of dated and broke up and one of them (Hudson, or “Lil Huddy”) kissed another girl and the other (D’Amelio) got mad about it. It’s literally just teenagers being dumb teenagers, but on Twitter instead of in study hall.

Do you need to know who any of those people are? Hell no. So why do you care?

Now I can’t prove this, but I think this is all just as produced as The Real World. All these kids live in mansions together where they make content for TikTok. It’s kind of like Silicon Valley only with people who have seen a boob in their life. The point of Hype House isn’t that it makes it easier to make videos, it’s that having 20 teenagers living together means they’re going to hook up with each other and fight each other and create drama and that drama is the content.

It’s just really strange that anyone but high school kids care.