Duffy Family Reality Show Savaged by Brutal Reviews

Politics admin August 23, 2026 0 Comments

Duffy Family Reality Show Savaged by Brutal Reviews

The reviews are in for Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s “The Great American Road Trip,” and they’re horrible.

The Duffy family’s long-awaited series, which features Duffy, his wife, Fox & Friends weekend co-host Rachel Campos Duffy, and several of his nine children embarking on a noncontinuous trip across the United States, has seen very low views online, and now it’s getting even worse reviews.

While companies that Duffy’s department oversees shelled out hundreds of thousands to fund the reality show on the transportation secretary’s family road trip, The New Yorker’s Jon Allsop gave a brutal take on the series suggesting it may not have been worth it.

“If his show makes a compelling case for anything, it’s less screen time,” Allsop wrote.

Allsop said he was confused by the series as “the show, as a whole, never seems to figure out whether it is primarily travel or reality, or whether the scenery or the people should be the star.”

“The creators could have done more to bring out the gorgeous landscapes that the Duffys visited; they could, at least, have fed us some dumb challenges, with alcohol or not. Ultimately, I came away with no idea who the show is supposed to be for, although, if its paltry early view count is any guide, the answer might be ‘no one,’” he wrote.

“‘The Great American Road Trip’ certainly had me wondering whether the point was to promote American travel or Duffy himself,” he added.

Allsop points to one moment in the show in which Duffy speaks with his daughter, Paloma, about her college options.

While Harvard is on Paloma’s radar, Duffy, a graduate of St. Mary’s College of Minnesota, which boasts a 92 percent acceptance rate, proclaims that the Ivy League institution has “professionalized, figuring out how they can take good, young girls like you, and I think corrupt their minds.”

Rachel also offers some of her own advice, saying she always told her children, “My job isn’t to get you into Harvard—it’s to get you into heaven.”

To the Harvard bashing, Allsop sarcastically wrote, “By this point, I was getting a little worried about the separation of church and state. Then I remembered, with relief, that the series was funded by corporate sponsors.”

Allsop also highlights how the project was funded by private donors, including industry groups that Duffy’s department oversees, like Boeing and Toyota, which each shelled out $1 million. Other sponsors include United Airlines, Shell, Royal Caribbean, Enterprise, and Lyft.

Allsop makes note of the blatant product placement on display in “a trip to Charleston, with a detour to a Boeing plant; a trip to Texas, with a detour to a CRH subsidiary; a trip to Arizona, with a ride in a Waymo.”

Each episode starts with a lengthy disclaimer explaining that the reality show was paid for by sponsors and was not made with taxpayer dollars, even though it has been uploaded to the Transportation Department’s official YouTube channel.

Overall, Allsop has very little good to say about the Duffys’ show.

He wrote: “Ironically, given his impeccable credentials, Duffy’s show didn’t come close: to the extent that it trades in ‘authenticity,’ it is of the performative, Americana-drenched variety that the word has come to signify in politics, despite bearing little relationship to what’s real; nor does the show serve up any conflict.”

The New York Times’ James Poniewozik gave the show a similarly brutal assessment, describing it as “a soft-focus family album with a faint whiff of advertising.”

“But what, or who, is being pitched? Toyota and Boeing? The Trump administration? Duffy himself, who might have other political destinations on his mental road map?” he wrote.

Ultimately, he said, the series is “mostly about watching a Cabinet member Kardashianize his family while vacationing on the corporate dime, as the price of gas and nearly everything else has skyrocketed.”