We Should All Know Less About Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard

Kristen Bell has been forced to lie low amid the promotion of the latest season of her acclaimed Netflix show, Nobody Wants This. That title has proven prophetic, as old domestic violence jokes from Bell and her husband, Dax Shepard, resurfaced and caused much controversy. It was yet another instance of the celebrity couple putting their feet in their mouths and making comments about their marriage that had the public wondering if everything is okay at home.

Obviously, I don’t think Bell and Shepard are spilling dark secrets of their private lives. These were tasteless jokes that landed with a thud for many obvious reasons. Everyone’s been in that situation where you think you’ve read the room and the mood suddenly changes for the worse. With Shepard and Bell, it’s happened on more than a few occasions, usually pertaining to wacky anecdotes they tell about their life as a shambolically married couple.

There was the time they documented their attempts to stay overnight at Boston Airport following a delayed flight, complete with hundreds of dollars’ worth of newly purchased blankets and pillows. Another time, Shepard talked about the time he filled up an expensive mattress topper with protein shake instead of water, causing their home to smell like ‘rotten garbage.’ They joined the inexplicably popular ‘we don’t bathe that often’ crowd, and once described having a blow-up argument so heated that Bell ‘blacked out’ and ended up crying about it for three days. The cause of this fight? Bell left a note for Shepard to fold some towels. No, really. As a friend once told me, ‘Everything I have learned about this couple has been against my will.’

Bell and Shepard have been together for 18 years, and they married in 2013. Bell is undeniably the bigger star, if only for Frozen and The Good Place, but also because she’s both Veronica Mars and the real Gossip Girl. Alongside Shepard, they’ve done a lot of good work talking about mental health destigmatization, and they helped to push for legislation in the state of California that protected the kids of celebrities from the paparazzi. Aside from working together in film and TV, Shepard and Bell have pushed themselves as a quirky and relatable kind of celeb power couple. They’re messy, with no verbal filter and an unpolished view of life. They’re the anti-Kimye or Brangelina in terms of image. It was cute for a while. The video of Bell reacting to Shepard gifting her a visit from a sloth is legendary for a reason. But we know how being ‘relatable’ works for anyone with more than seven figures in their bank account.

Shepard has a solid career as a comedic supporting player, but it was his podcast, Armchair Expert, that elevated him to the status of new-era star. In the oversaturated subgenre of celebrity interview podcasts, Armchair Expert earned a sturdy fanbase thanks to its combination of high-profile guests and Shepard’s easy-going vulnerability. He could get guests to open up (albeit never with questions beyond the classic softballs) and was himself candid about his addiction and mental health struggles. Well, that’s the pitch. At least for me, in practice, I find Armchair Expert to be a tough listen. Shepard frequently interrupts his guests for inane non-sequiturs. His assistant-slash-co-host Monica is a curious presence who is frequently a bigger hindrance to conversations than Shepard. Like many celebrity interview podcasts, many of these chats seem to have been conducted with little to no research. We all remember the Jonathan Van Ness shambles, as Shepard tried to play the ‘I’m just asking questions’ card to spew dog-whistles and make his amiable guest cry.

I’m obviously in the minority here, since Armchair Expert is a big hit and has made Shepard richer than any of his movie roles. Still, the issues with his pivot to celeb guru feel connected to the problems with those endlessly questionable cutesy anecdotes that leave us all wondering if he and Bell even like one another. When does radical honesty just become an undiluted mess? Hearing about two people having a fight so furious that one of them ‘blacked out,’ and that it was over a note about towels, is hard to spin as relatable. The flags are too red, and that’s what people ended up focusing on.

Authenticity is expensive and impossible to maintain. Many a celebrity, some far more beloved than Bell and Shepard, has struggled to maintain the public’s adoration by projecting an image of relatability and “I’m just like you” coziness. We’ve been told that this is what audiences want. They don’t desire divas and drama, preferring fart jokes and wacky anecdotes about eating pizza after the Oscars. It’s always entertaining when the next starlet of the moment has zero filter, tweets great one-liners, and talks about their Spotify playlist. But then the backlash arrives, and it is seldom late. All those adorkable qualities become irritating. The think-pieces wonder why we ever liked these people in the first place. We call them fake and claim those previously authentic details are a hideous act we always saw through. How many times have we been through this? This is not my beautiful power couple, this is not my beautiful relatable fave.

So, I don’t blame Bell and Shepard, two proud B-Listers who built their careers on next-door-neighbor friendliness, for thinking there’s an inexhaustible audience for their life stories and emotional vomit. There clearly was at one point in time. But every time I hear another of their stories, I think less about relatability than I do about something way darker. Humour can be pitch-black, but their jokes never land as such. It always feels like they’re going through something weird and want us to tell them it’s all okay. And that’s a crappy feeling as an outsider who just wants to watch The Good Place in peace. Sometimes, it’s okay to have a little mystique.