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Where’s Nev Schulman When You Need Him?

By Emma Chance | TV | October 22, 2024 |

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Header Image Source: Getty Images

The hateriest among you will have noticed by now that I am a youth. (Or so they tell me—the way my bones crack every morning when I wake up says otherwise.) It is for this reason that I was not a Tegan and Sara fan when they were big. I have a 7-years-older sibling, however.

“Did you ever listen to Tegan and Sara?” I texted them the other day.

“I mean, yes as I was a queer college student in 2010,” they answered. Fair enough. I told them to watch the new Hulu documentary, Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara, which attempts to uncover the identity of someone who catfished Tegan and Sara fans over a number of years, posing as Tegan herself. Then I gave them the Hulu login for the 100th time because they’re incapable of writing things down, apparently. I know full well they will not actually sit down and watch it because they never watch anything I recommend, but it was worth a shot.

“We did have a friend who was ABSOLUTELY convinced they were talking to/in a long distance relationship with Tegan (def the catfish lol),” they said. I told them the #1 suspect introduced in the documentary lives in our hometown, Portland, Maine.

“Wtfffff do we know their name…?” my sibling asked because we both know they dated some sketchy suspects in the greater Portland area back in their day. I asked them if I could talk to the friend who was catfished and they said they’re not friends anymore, probably because they were one of those sketchy characters.

We don’t know their name; the doc simply refers to them as “Tara,” the origins of which I hope are obvious. Tara spoke to director Erin Lee Carr at first as someone who’d been victimized by the catfish, whom those involved in the doc referred to as “Fegan” (fake Tegan). But as more and more evidence pointed in Tara’s direction, Carr made the trip to Portland to visit them. They bailed on meeting Carr, though, and the doc ended with a confrontational Zoom call between the two of them and Tegan, which Tegan left convinced that Tara wasn’t the culprit.

Tara is clearly the culprit, and I can’t believe Erin Lee Carr herself left us hanging like that. Has she never seen an episode of MTV’s Catfish? Nev Schulman would have found out where Tara lived and banged down their door. If this were an episode of Catfish, Sara would have ended up being Fegan. There would have been many more shaky, handheld camera shots. This is not Catfish. No questions were answered.

Fanatical is streaming now on Hulu.