Latest news with #TheSnake
San Francisco Chronicle
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Former Bay Area mayor is now a reality TV contestant: ‘You look like you sell vapes'
East Bay politician John Bauters has left the political stage to enter a new kind of spotlight. The former three-time Emeryville mayor is currently a contestant on the new Fox reality competition show 'The Snake,' which pits players 'in various persuasive professions' against each other in a ruthless game of deception, according to a statement. The winner will receive $100,000. Bauters joined the competition during its fourth episode, which aired on Tuesday, July 8, surprising the other contestants who had been on the show since it premiered on June 10. 'I'm a politician and I'm pretty sure that I'm going to have to use some ingenuity and some of the skills I've picked up along the way in politics to make sure I win,' Bauters said during a monologue portion of Tuesday's episode. 'You know, you don't survive in politics without knowing how to read people. I read them like a book.' Comedian Jim Jefferies, who hosts the show, revealed Bauters to the other players while they were having a dinner party. The Bay Area resident emerged for a large crate, much to the dismay of the other contestants, who were not excited to see yet another opponent stand between them and the prize money. 'Go home!' one yelled at him. 'You look like you sell vapes,' another said. 'No, I'm here for a while. But you might go home,' he said with a smirk. Bauters recently lost the election for the Alameda County Board of Supervisors District 5 seat to Nikki Fortunato Bas in November, and previously served on the Emeryville City Council for two terms from 2016 to 2024, in addition to his mayoral tenure. His fellow contestants on 'The Snake' have all been selected because of their social occupations — from bounty hunting to OnlyFans content creation — which equip them with the persuasion and manipulation skills needed to succeed on the show. Every week, players compete in a challenge, and the winner earns the title of 'the snake,' gaining control of a saving ceremony during which players take turns selecting one other person to protect from elimination.
CairoScene
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
Backstage: Lana Lubany at Nawafiz Festival
Ahead of her debut show at this year's Nawafiz Festival in Utrecht, Palestinian-American star Lana Lubany shared with us her feelings about singing in Arabic and finding belonging through live music. Jun 24, 2025 Lana Lubany is a UK-based Palestinian-American singer-songwriter who first catapulted to pop stardom back in 2023 with her single 'The Snake', an English/Arabic hybrid song that clocked nearly seven million Spotify streams and propelled her to the forefront of the region's avant-pop scene. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Rosalia and Billie Eilish, Lana's bona fide style is as bold as it is vulnerable, blending contemplative bilingual lyrics with traditional Middle Eastern melodies and a modern self-directed electronic production. As a third-culture kid, or as she puts it, 'an in-betweener', Lana's music mirrors her identity - restlessly navigating the spaces between cultures, languages and the feeling of belonging. Ahead of her debut performance in the Netherlands, at this year's Nawafiz Festival in Utrecht, we caught up with Lana backstage. She shared what performing live means to hear as a third-culture artist, how it helps her realise her music into existence, and why singing in Arabic remains her rawest, most exposed form of expression. Watch the full interview below:
Chicago Tribune
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Detective from Naperville competes on new Fox reality TV show: ‘It was wild'
Derek North has long harbored unfinished business on the television screen. Now, he's seeing those aspirations through — one nationally aired episode at a time. North, a Naperville resident and detective with the Downers Grove Police Department, is a contestant on 'The Snake,' a new FOX-TV reality competition show. Hosted by comedian Jim Jefferies, the series is a test of social survival, the network says. 'Man, it was wild,' North said in an interview. 'It was wild.' The cornerstone of the series is that instead of eliminating contestants like your typical competition show, who stays and who goes is determined through something called a 'saving ceremony,' where contestants save one another until one person is left unpicked and goes home. The idea is contestants need to work to win each other's favor to stay in the game. The catch? The cast is composed of contestants who work in various persuasive professions. Contestants include an ex-con, a pastor, a lawyer, a poker player and Naperville's own, North. 'The Snake' premiered last week with 15 contestants. North successfully made it through the first saving ceremony and was poised to return screens this week. New episodes air at 8 p.m. Tuesdays and are available to stream on Hulu. North, who spoke last week while sitting down for coffee in downtown Naperville, couldn't say how he fared in the competition overall but called the experience 'incredible.' It's also been a long time coming, he said. North, 39, grew up about 45 minutes south of Naperville in Manhattan. He went to high school in New Lenox and college in Indiana, where he majored in media arts production and minored in theater. After graduating, he moved home before setting out to California to shoot a movie called '1313: Giant Killer Bees!' From there, he stuck around the Golden State to pursue acting, he said. While he auditioned for different roles, North landed a job at Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood. He'd meet celebrities there, he said. His most memorable interaction was with Keanu Reeves, of 'The Matrix' and 'John Wick,' he said. But then his father suffered a spinal stroke, North said. Needing a gig to help support his family back home, he turned to reality TV. The pursuit, however, was a difficult one. He'd audition and have projects 'almost take off' but not quite go all the way, he said. Eventually, he moved back to Illinois to be closer to family. When he did, he left the reality TV world behind, he said. He changed careers, trained to become a police officer, married and started a family. 'I found the love of my life, I found my wife,' North said. They have a 1-year-old daughter. Then, out of nowhere, North was contacted by a producer from one of the reality shows he previously auditioned for that hadn't moved forward, he said. 'They were like, 'Hey, we're making this new show. We're wondering if you'd be interested in trying out for it,'' North said. 'I asked them to send me the details because I'm having a great life here (in Naperville).' When he looked at what the show was about, North knew the opportunity was the one he had been waiting for. He recalled thinking to himself, 'I can win that.' '(Reality TV) was totally off my radar,' he said. 'I left that, you know? But I'm competitive. And I had unfinished business. I always had that in me.' North went through more than a dozen auditions and interviews before getting cast on 'The Snake,' he said. Once he knew he'd be a contestant, North said he prepared by watching episodes of reality shows that he thought 'The Snake' might be similar to, including 'Survivor,' 'The Traitors' and 'Fear Factor.' Since the show premiered on June 10, 'it's been really cool,' North said. Looking ahead, he teased that the rest of the season is 'going to be a lot of fun,' he said. Apart from official results, North said competing on 'The Snake' showed him that 'if things don't work at one point in your life, that's not the end of it.' 'For this to come so much later in my life after I was working so hard for so long, sometimes you just got to trust the ride,' he said. 'That's just life.'
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lie, cheat, steal, repeat: will the Traitors knockoffs ever cease?
This is a punt, but Fox might have started to commission new shows via the power of online thesauruses. Take its new reality show The Snake. It's a game of secrets and betrayal, of feigning one emotion to gain trust while you stab your new friends in the back. In other words, it's basically The Traitors. I don't know whether any of you have ever searched Merriam Webster for synonyms of 'traitor', but 'snake' is literally second on the list. And this laziness is indicative of the show itself, which is such a painfully halfhearted retread of The Traitors that it ends up being exhausting to watch. Hosted by Jim Jeffries, presenting in the style of a drunk guy shouting through his letterbox at 3am, The Snake gathers contestants from the most easily stereotyped professions – detective, ex-con, pastor, Onlyfans model – and has them connive at each other until only one remains. The runtime of the first episode is almost exclusively given over to letting these people describe exactly how unpleasant they are. Subsequent episodes involve gross-out challenges, like drinking meat smoothies or being relatively close to some insects, so in that regard a direct comparison to The Traitors is slightly unfair, because it's actually ripping off The Traitors and Fear Factor in equal measure. But perhaps this isn't such a surprise, because at the moment you could wade through television blindfolded and stumble into any number of shows that desperately want to be The Traitors. Maybe you saw Netflix's Million Dollar Secret, which was a version of The Traitors set in a luxury hotel. Or Netflix's The Trust, which was a version of The Traitors hosted by someone from CNN. Or maybe you saw the USA Network's Snake in the Grass, or ITV's The Fortune Hotel. Perhaps you even accidentally found yourself watching Amazon's 007: Road to a Million, which was a version of The Traitors explicitly designed to make you feel depressed about the future of James Bond. None of these shows are shy about their inspiration. They are all about people encouraged to screw over their peers for a quick buck. But the problem is that, as a format, The Traitors is unbeatable. It is beautifully simplistic. People move into a castle. Some of them have to secretly undermine everything. Everyone goes crazy with paranoia. That's it. It's bulletproof. A monkey could understand it. But the networks can't just produce a straight remake of The Traitors, because that would be cheating. And so every new iteration has to add some new element, a gimmicky format point that differentiates it just enough to be legally distinct. With The Fortune Hotel it was a sunny location. With The Snake it's adding too many unnecessary insects. But this sort of tinkering can easily overwhelm a format. In the UK, ITV recently produced a Traitors knock-off called Genius Game that was so absurdly convoluted – every episode was full of endless tedious explanations about bags and tokens and codes and zombies and garnets – that it quickly felt like the worst kind of hungover Boxing Day board game imaginable, the kind where everyone gives up halfway through and just ends up eating Twiglets in silence. It was like watching The Traitors, but a version of The Traitors that had been loaded with so much superfluous paraphernalia that its ankles shattered under the weight. And, true, television has always done this. We've already lived through the Pop Idol phase, where civilians were alternately encouraged to either sing or cry on command. And then there was the Love Island phase, where we found ourselves inundated with an infinite number of nimrods copping off in villas. The Great British Bake Off formula has been variously transposed to sewing, pottery, dressmaking, glassblowing, flower arranging and, probably before long, bereavement counselling. Now it is the turn of The Traitors. A year or two from now another show will get its time in the test tube. That said, maybe The Traitors deserves this fleet of copyists. After all, The Traitors is not a new idea. It's based on Mafia, a game devised in the halls of Moscow State University in the 1980s. It's also incredibly similar to the board game Secret Hitler, not to mention a 2004 BBC show that was literally called Traitor and ran for five episodes in 2004. Even so, The Traitors stands as the perfect refinement of the idea; it is thrilling and accessible in equal measure. None of its copycats have even come close to replicating it. Still, the night is young, and there are still 41 perfectly unused synonyms for 'traitor' left in the thesaurus. Coming soon: The Rat (The Traitors but organised crime), The Quisling (The Traitors but wartime Scandinavia) or The Stool Pigeon (The Traitors but everyone eats cold chicken bones out of bins).
Axios
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Richmond attorney competes on Fox's "The Snake"
Local attorney Amanda Short is one of 15 contestants on " The Snake," a new reality show that debuted this week on Fox. Why it matters: Short is competing to be named the final "Snake" ... and take home $100,000. State of play: The show pits (pun intended) 15 "master manipulators" against each other in what Fox describes as a "social survival of the fittest." Each week, the contestants must form alliances and figure out their competitors' true motivations to survive the "saving ceremony." "It's not about who wants you gone, but who is willing to save you," according to the network. To execute the premise, Fox rounded up a group of people from .... er, diverse professions. Short is " The Lawyer" and is, in fact, an associate attorney at Richmond firm Moran Reeves and Conn. She's up against an Indianapolis Colts cheerleader, a Miami-based OnlyFans creator, an Oklahoma City bounty hunter, a Florida cop, a pastor from California and a half dozen others that may or may not include a bull rider. And only one of them can be "The Snake."
