Reese Witherspoon is unstoppable. She’s an Oscar-winning actor. She’s an Emmy-winning producer. She makes films. She makes TV. She does podcasts. She has a book club. But it was all leading up this moment. Because now Reese Witherspoon has her own VOD channel.
It’s been announced that Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine production company is launching its own subscription channel on DirecTV. From next week – and this is true – subscribers will be able to watch weekly episodes of Shine On with Reese, a show where Witherspoon celebrates successful women like Dolly Parton, Pink and Glennon Doyle. Then, in September, this will be joined by Master the Mess, a decluttering lifestyle comedy show that Witherspoon won’t actually appear in herself. If you’re a Reese Witherspoon fanatic – a real fanatic, a huge fanatic, a tattoo-a-picture-of-her-face-on-your-thigh fanatic – you won’t want to miss this. But if you’re not, you probably will.
Why a decluttering show? Well, perhaps it’s because Reese Witherspoon needs to declutter herself of some of the almighty hubris that caused her to create the channel in the first place. I have nothing against Reese Witherspoon, other than a slightly bizarre junket anecdote where she reportedly banned everyone from asking her about the death of Osama bin Laden, but on paper this looks like the king of all vanity projects.
There’s a lot to unpack here. First there’s the assumption that people will watch anything you happen to be involved with. Then there’s the assumption that this extends to the sort of cheaply made unscripted filler television that you might find yourself watching on a flight if you’ve seen all the films and are bored of French-Canadian hidden camera prank shows. Last, there’s the assumption that people will actually pay $35 a month to watch it (after $10 a month for the first three). Not as part of a comprehensive package of all her best work, or for any of the big HBO, Hulu and Apple shows she recently signed up to produce (there’s a vague suggestion that original scripted content could appear at some point). No, they’ll be paying the equivalent of multiple Netflix subscriptions for an interview show, a programme about tidying up and “original short form content and select film library content”. The brass balls on the woman are astonishing.
It was all going so well, too. The best thing Reese Witherspoon ever did was become a producer. Not only did it cause her to wrestle back some of the control you invariably concede as an actor-for-hire, but her taste has been little short of impeccable. With Wild, she played a knotty and uncompromising character that single-handedly changed the direction of her career. With Big Little Lies, she entered the realm of prestige TV and actually improved it. With Gone Girl, she was smart enough not to cast herself in the lead. Last year she optioned Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, a book so rapturously adored that any adaption is guaranteed to rake in money. Even Legally Blonde 3, a terrible idea which is really happening, should make its money back without breaking a sweat.
And now this. It’s hard to reconcile such a faultless body of work with this cheap subscription fluff. Perhaps the answer lies in her podcast and book club. Perhaps Reese Witherspoon wants a lifestyle empire. Perhaps she just really wants to be Oprah.
The problem is that Oprah had decades of experience. By the time she launched the OWN network, she’d established her brand with a 25-year-old talkshow, books, magazines and a radio station. If she’d gone straight from The Color Purple to Dr Oz, you’d be confused, too. This is essentially what Witherspoon has done with the Hello Sunshine channel, and maybe that’s why it feels so jarring.
If it goes wrong, at least Witherspoon can console herself with the knowledge that this won’t be the first celebrity lifestyle vanity project to go down in flames. Blake Lively’s Preserve brand barely lasted a year. The Duchess of Sussex junked The Tig as soon as a better offer came along. Tori Spelling’s ediTORIal lifestyle blog was such an afterthought that it doesn’t even appear on her Wikipedia page.
However, the world underestimates Reese Witherspoon at its own risk. Every other venture she’s ever tried – yes, including her lifestyle brand – has been hammered into a success one way or another, so it would be silly to expect her subscription channel to fail. In fact, if it does become a success, we can expect other celebrities to start subscription channels of their own. Which is great, because I’d totally pay to watch The Rock present a bakery show.
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