Catfish: Season 7, Part 2

Catfish has always been a wild ride – not necessarily because of the content, but because it should be scientifically impossible for one man to resemble every quality of a gas station so completely, and yet we have Nev Schulman. Every season, he manages to look a little bit more like the embodiment of crude oil, without ever quite going over the edge. It fits the show’s cringey and creepy aesthetic entirely – and with the second half of this season being even more bat shit off the rails as the first half, Nev has stopped fighting against his urges and gone full gas station. Without the perennially annoying Max to bounce off, Nev has had to guide an increasingly less famous cast of guest hosts through all the famous Catfish bullshit. Jim Carrey’s daughter makes an appearance, for some reason. But the show isn’t about the hosts. It’s about the demons that are catfishing across the United States, and the sometimes-demonic-sometimes-angelic victims that Nev purportedly cares about. And oh, the demons do not stop coming this season. There hasn’t yet been anything as creepy as the episode where a psychic catfishes a hurt young woman into thinking she’s communicating with her dead father… who murdered her mother… but there are a couple of episodes that come close to it. There’s nothing new under the sun on Catfish, but it doesn’t mean they don’t try to prove that statement wrong.

7/10: Do catfishers deserve rights? A hearty ‘maybe’