Kristen Stewart’s queer ghost hunting reality show mocked as “actively harmful”

Last week, Hulu premiered all eight episodes of Living for the Dead, a reality series co-created and narrated by out actor Kristen Stewart. The show follows a group of queer ghost hunters as they travel around the U.S. ostensibly helping people deal with hauntings, both paranormal and personal.

On the one hand, the show is just another silly reality series in the vein of so many paranormal-investigation-type “docuseries” that have come before it. But as the hosts of Slate’s “Outward” point out on the podcast’s most recent episode, Living for the Dead is kind of problematic in some very interesting ways.

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While “Outward” hosts Christina Cauterucci, Jules Gill-Peterson, and Bryan Lowder all conceded that the show could be enjoyed as ridiculous camp, Cauterucci criticized Living for the Dead for mashing up elements of Netflix’s Queer Eye with the ghost hunter formula.

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“I found the whole thing to be such a shallow imitation of Queer Eye, where they’re trying to recreate the sort of like queer zingery and queer effect of the show Queer Eye, and the chemistry of the five people and how they’re nominally there to do one thing, but they’re actually there to help the people heal themselves,” she explained. “I think it’s actively harmful, what this show is doing to both viewers and the people they’re interacting with.”

Lowder also compared the show to HBO’s We’re Here, which finds three RuPaul’s Drag Race alums traveling to small towns to help both LGBTQ+ and straight residents become their most authentic selves through drag. The Living for the Dead cast “try so haphazardly to do that, and to me it’s one of the funnier parts, actually, because it’s so bad, so badly done and ridiculous,” Lowder said. “There’s this turn at the end of all the episodes that I watch to kind of live your truth, be vulnerable sort of queer therapy speak as a solution to the hauntings, which doesn’t make any sense.”

Cauterucci and Gil-Peterson went even deeper with their criticism of that broader concept. Cauterucci noted two instances in the series in which the show’s tarot reader, Ken Boggle, prescribes things like juniper berries and crystals to help people with very real, concrete problems. In one episode, she explained, Boggle attributes what sounds like a woman’s boyfriend’s anger management issues to an evil spirit that has attached itself to him.

“It feels like they’re encountering people’s real problems and real trauma in the vein of a Queer Eye or something and, like, shoehorning them into a demon-shaped box, which is part of the harm that I feel,” Cauterucci said.

Gil-Peterson noted that both Living for the Dead and Queer Eye share a common problem in their representation of LGBTQ+ people. “I feel like the show’s thesis is queer people have profound empathy to the point where they might be able to heal ghosts,” she explained. “And it is this kind of thing that you don’t even want to think about that for more than five seconds because it’s actually a pretty demeaning reduction of queer people to being this kind of cultural prop.”

“This idea that queer people are basically supplements or Band-Aids for the rest of the world, that because we’ve been so wronged, we can go around and fix people’s lives or help save small businesses… it’s so cringeworthy.”

Cauterucci also noted an episode in which several cast members recklessly likened the oppression LGBTQ+ people face to attitudes toward people who claim to have paranormal or psychic abilities. “I also am imagining people watching it and thinking, yeah, ‘they’re right… being queer is just like having a paranormal gift,’” she said. “I don’t want a straight person to watch this and come away thinking that all queer people feel this way.”