The writer, who probably lives in a perfectly nice apartment in Brooklyn but still complains about the entitled bourgeoisie, wrote an article about how our times are best reflected in the bewildering, if not troubling, churning of briefly surging cultural fads so intense and so fleeting that they cannot even be gathered into something as amorphic and ephemeral as a zeitgeist.

He went on to say that Brilliance is at its core an unconscious parody of its predecessors and itself.

He’s missing the fact that it’s not unconscious. Brilliance is an over-the-top primetime soap opera made for the streaming era. It’s like Dallas or Dynasty, but intentionally camp. Devon once described it as Succession for the gay community.

The show plotlines include amnesia, resurrections, family secrets, love triangles, and—apparently next season—an evil twin.

An evil, problematically thin twin.

But people have been obsessed with the show. It’s like the world all of a sudden got sick of cool shows, great writing, and nuance. It’s all the drink-throwing and opulence of Real Housewives without the tricky real-world ramifications. It’s all the betrayal and twists you want out of Shakespeare, but without the labor of Elizabethan English.

And I’m the lead villain. Daphne Gwenn, the new-money bitch everyone loves to hate.

The show is a sparkling, champagne-fueled, high-drama shitshow that everyone has watched, even if just to stay in the conversation. But ever since the New Yorker article, the headlines have started to get more critical.

Perhaps in part because of the article that predicted it, the phenomenon of the show must have a time limit. And after what Devon told me, maybe my success does too. I mean Love Is Blind? That’s not even Love Island.

I mean. Of course it can’t last forever. Nothing in Hollywood does. Famously.

My mind reels back to a summer when I was a teenager, the sound of old jazz and the smell of kettle corn.

For a while, she had said. I’d be famous for a while.

Lisa does not stop reading mean comments from internet trolls for the rest of the drive, even once the car is parked in the driveway. I say the driveway because no matter how much I actually live here, it still feels like Grayson’s house. Not ours. Not mine. His, and I live here.

As we climb out of the back seat, she tells me that someone thinks I look like I am my own Madame Tussauds wax figure, and that’s when I lose it.

“Lisa Michele,” I say, rounding on her and raising my voice to a firm, angry-mom level. “My dude. You have got to shut the fuck up.”

She blinks several times, her fresh eyelash extensions flapping. “Wow. That is so not professional.”

“I can’t—” I look beyond her and see that a gardener is filming us, and leave without another word.