Daniel is a freelance writer and the reason Startefacts has a standing opinion on The Traitors.
He joined the site in 2023 after a few years of writing about local government, which turned out to be solid preparation for Real Housewives reunions: the same amount of shouting, but here you're allowed to say who was lying.
His beat is unscripted television in all its forms — Survivor, Big Brother, Love Is Blind, Below Deck, the entire Bravo ecosystem, and whichever true-crime docuseries Netflix has just put at number one. He has watched every season of Survivor, including the ones nobody defends, keeps a spreadsheet ranking the winners that he refuses to publish, and has a firm rule about finishing the episode before opening Reddit. He has broken that rule exactly twice and regretted it both times.
He also covers the game shows nobody files under reality TV until Wheel of Fortune changes a rule that hasn't moved since 1975, or Jeopardy announces a new host and half the country has feelings about it. He has been to one BravoCon. He came back with a tote bag, no voice, and a new respect for people who do that three days in a row.
When something is trending because "fans are furious," Daniel goes and counts the fans. When a show is "cancelled," he waits for the network to say so. When a reality star "breaks silence," he reads the whole caption, including the part after the ellipsis.
Lady Gaga had a daughter in June and nobody knew until a birth certificate surfaced
The date is 9 June, the time is 11:19 at night, the hospital is Cedars-Sinai and the name is Rose Bean Polansky. All four facts come from a birth certificate that surfaced on Thursday, because neither parent has said a word in the hundred days since.
The child actor from Role Models was sentenced to 30 months over a stolen gun found at 104 mph
The gun was stolen, the car was doing 104 in a 70 zone, and the man in it had three convictions that already barred him from touching a firearm. That is how a child actor from Fred Claus and Role Models ended up with a federal sentence in Iowa.
Netflix handed its new Monster season to an actress with two screen credits
Ella Beatty is 26, left Juilliard in 2022 and had been on screen exactly twice before Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan handed her eight episodes and the first female lead the anthology has had. Her parents are Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, and that is the smaller half of the story.
Millie Bobby Brown's second adoption was reported by everyone except Millie Bobby Brown
One outlet had a source. Everyone else had that outlet. Six hours after the first report that Millie Bobby Brown and Jake Bongiovi have adopted a second child, neither of them has said a word about it — which is precisely what they promised a year ago.
Halle Berry, Meg Ryan and Regina King will decide which short film Chanel pays to make
Tribeca and Chanel announced the jury for the eleventh Through Her Lens on Thursday: Meg Ryan, Halle Berry, Regina King, Autumn Durald Arkapaw and Ella Rubin. They decide which pitch gets a fully funded short film — and three of them have directed a feature themselves.
Sarah Paulson plays a woman executed in 2002 in Netflix's Monster season set in 1892
The Lizzie Borden season landed on Thursday with a second woman inside it: Sarah Paulson as Aileen Wuornos, in scenes set decades after the murder trial. Wuornos was executed in Florida in 2002, and there is already a film called Monster about her — the one that won Charlize Theron an Oscar.
Debby Ryan says her fifth concussion took six months out of her life, and some things never came back
Ryan told a YouTube food show that a brain injury took six months out of her life and six more in neurological rehab, and that some things never came back. The episode went up on Monday. It took about 51 hours for anyone to notice what was in it.
Peter Max, the artist America credits for the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, has died at 88
The psychedelic pop artist died on Thursday, and the first thing the internet did was connect him to a Beatles cartoon he had nothing to do with. He spent much of his life encouraging that, and the man who actually drew it has been dead since 2009.
Netflix's Monster returned with the one subject in four seasons that a jury acquitted
Ian Brennan's anthology has spent four seasons on men the courts convicted. This one is about a woman a jury let go in 1893 — and the show's own synopsis says she did it anyway. The first reviews arrived an hour apart and could not agree on what they had watched.
Jessica Chastain joins Netflix's Yale fertility series — the case where three quarters of the painkiller turned out to be saline
Netflix named a third star on Wednesday for the series it is making about the Yale fertility clinic, and the casting is the easy part. The case underneath it is documented in a federal court file, and the numbers in that file are worse than the logline suggests.
