When Being Relatable Fails Miserably: T.J. Holmes and Amy Robach Edition

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | January 25, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | January 25, 2024 |

After losing their jobs on morning TV when their affair was revealed, hosts T.J. Holmes and Amy Robach are trying to re-establish themselves in the media as a romantic ideal with a down-to-earth realness at their core. Their podcast, Amy & T.J., is their first foray back into the public eye after Good Morning America sacked them. They’re united, ruthlessly honest, and ready to fire back at the haters.

Mostly, what the show has done is leave everyone feeling kind of tired and in need of less knowledge about both Holmes and Robach. The pair have been very open about their relationship troubles, their frequent disagreements, and issues with alcohol. The initial curiosity piqued by the podcast wore off quickly for listeners, and it quickly began to feel like nobody was tuning into Amy & T.J. earnestly. Robach and Holmes fell foul of something that seems to come for all celebrities: the relatability conundrum.

Relatability is a trap, for celebrities and normies alike. It’s a poorly defined concept with constantly moving goalposts that seems designed largely to insult easy targets or engage in casual classism. There are undoubtedly universal ideas and qualities of life the vast majority of us have dealt with, but when we discuss a relatable celebrity or their failure to be so, it’s seldom within those confines. We don’t criticize them for not dealing with grief or loneliness right: we get mad at them for talking about the weirdness of being recognizable and monied. It’s no mystery why: sometimes, it’s just bloody exhausting to watch someone with millions in the bank and a team of nannies on the payroll talk about the wacky adventures of parenting.

Being relatable is often confused with being candid. A kind of radical honesty that encourages you to reveal every aspect of your life is seen as a way to show common ground with others. There’s some merit to this idea. Openness about one’s earnings or dealings with mental health can helpfully destigmatize taboo topics. But it takes very little for sharing a cutesy anecdote to veer into a case of verbal diarrhoea. Consider Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell, whose stories of their highly normal marriage and family life start innocuously enough before swinging into territory so uncomfortable that you cannot help but wonder if they’re doing okay.

I understand Robach and Holmes’ conundrum. They lost their high-paying jobs because of their affair, falling victim to the archaic morality demands of traditional American media. Whether or not you approve of infidelity, it is pretty telling that cheating seems to merit a more rigorous punishment from corporate overlords than accusations of sexual misconduct or on-air bigotry disguised as ‘opinion pieces.’ And for a while, people did seem to be on Robach and Holmes’ side, or at least the ideal version of their story where their undeniable chemistry lit up the screen. It gets a lot harder to bolster that support when you have hurt spouses and children on the side, and that’s before things went full Shania Twain with their respective exes pairing up.

So, how do you capitalize on the infamy and start over, all whilst positioning yourself as a major media power couple? When in doubt, start a podcast. This is what we do nowadays. It’s probably the most relatable part of the entire endeavour. The story here is also Robach and Holmes, whether they like it or not, and it seems that they feel they have something to prove. They have to show that they’re completely in love and that the end justified the means. And now look at how they’re going through all the same problems that every other couple does. Sure, it’s an easy selling point: A look behind the headlines that reveals the universality of relationships. The problem is that I think they greatly overestimated how many people would want to know the nitty-gritty of their lives.

Demanding to know everything about a celebrity, or indeed any human being, never ends well. You discover stuff about them that damages your fantasy. Their politics might be super messy or outright dangerous. They’re seldom as intellectual or creative as you imagine them to be. Overall, the mystique that is paramount to celebrity takes so little to be punctured beyond repair. I think what most people actually desire is the highly curated and not-at-all-authentic version of realness, akin to the days of the Golden Age of Hollywood when fan magazines included articles on celebrities dictated by their studios. That system is obviously its own mess of control, misogyny, racism, and labour abuses, but its echoes can still be heard throughout entertainment in 2024. You set someone up like this and they’ll fall at some point. Even if you don’t play the game, you’re still bound to its rules. Nobody set up Holmes or Robach as bastions of family values, but you pay the price anyway, and trying to spin yourself out of that hole with relatability simply won’t work.

While celebrity trends come and go, the desire for relatability prevails. Sure, it doesn’t exactly gel with TikTok hauls or Barbra Streisand’s basement mall, but even the most outlandish figure has to retain some familiar core to endure as a public figure. Real Housewives’ emotions have to feel authentic amid the manicured drama or else there’s nothing to care about beyond a puppet show. Those influencers with seventeen Stanley cups represent a near-primal desire among us to have nice things and have our lives improved by them. You fall in love with your co-worker and have to deal with the scorn, perhaps the most relatable kind because everyone knows that cheating sucks and has a lot of opinions on it. It’s not that Robach and Holmes’ mission is misguided, but that the methods are always going to be unsatisfying in execution. Audiences may generally believe they want to know everything about a celebrity, but in the long term, we desire to know less about one another. If only that were compatible with podcasting.