For a while there, it was beginning to look as if Netflix had cracked the formula when it came to live broadcasts. In May, The Roast of Tom Brady ended up making global headlines for a week. John Mulaney’s chaotic Everybody’s in LA acted as a way forward for the ailing late night talkshow format. Chestnut vs Kobayashi: Unfinished Beef managed to transform a 10-minute hotdog eating contest into something on the scale of the Rumble in the Jungle.
It was all looking so good. Then last night Netflix’s newest live offering single-handedly set all that progress back by a decade. Live From the Other Side With Tyler Henry, in which the titular Henry channelled the spirits of various dead people to a sofa-load of vaguely famous people. Never before has three quarters of an hour of celebrity clairvoyance felt more like six hours of celebrity clairvoyance.
Like me, you may not have come across Tyler Henry before. Henry is a purported medium who came to prominence when he appeared on an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, and made his reputation by claiming to be able to channel the spirits of dead celebrities like Brittany Murphy and Michael Jackson. In terms of looks and personality, he’s like a vaguely hellish cross between Justin Bieber and Ned Flanders from The Simpsons. Oh, and he sweats.
The sweat was referenced almost immediately in the first episode of Live From the Other Side – which takes place in what appears to be a disused furniture showroom – when Tyler touched his forehead and apologetically stated that he was “dewy from the afterlife.” Clutching his “handy dandy notebook”, upon which he scribbles as ordered by voices from beyond the grave, Henry set about linking his guests with all sorts of dead folk.
In retrospect, I might have been overcooking it a bit when I said that his guests were celebrities. They were someone from Selling Sunset and her friends, who include someone who sometimes co-presents an Oscars red carpet show and Dua Lipa’s hairdresser. Together they formed a small group of people ready to believe that Henry was the spirit of their dead families made flesh.
Now, you don’t have to be a curdled cynic to think that maybe – just maybe – Tyler Henry is a fraud. Anyone vaguely familiar with the techniques of cold-reading will find plenty to suggest that on show here. Again and again, Henry offers his guests vague personality types (‘I’ll bet your mom was a firecracker! I’ll bet she used to refuse help all the time! I’ll bet she was proud of you!’) and then homing in on what they were like via a process of elimination.
Sometimes the tactics are so transparent that they border on parody. One of the guests was plus-size and Black, and he asked if there was diabetes in her family. He asked the hairdresser if his mother was glamorous. In one instance, he saw that a guest had brought in one of her father’s drumsticks, and posited that maybe he was “cool”. If you are tuned in and ready to believe, then this is a clear sign that Henry has a connection to the other side. If not – and journalistic integrity prevents me from revealing my own feelings – then he’s a morally corrupt professional bullshitter who has made a fortune by tricking tears out of the recently bereaved.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that Henry is doing clairvoyance on the easiest possible setting. He specialises in celebrities, whose personal information is more readily available than a civilian’s would be. It took 30 seconds of half-hearted Googling to find out that the Selling Sunset woman’s parents both died of lung cancer, that the mother of the Oscars lady had had breast cancer (which led the Oscars lady to do public outreach on the disease) and that the hairdresser posts pictures of his (glamorous!) mother on Instagram literally all the time. You wouldn’t need to be clairvoyant to come up with something like this as a few minutes on Wikipedia would tell you what you need to know.
Now, obviously, even if this is all rubbish, you could still argue that Tyler Henry is performing an important task. He’s providing comfort to people with unresolved emotional issues, and helping them to leave the past behind. And that’s fine. But why televise it? Why let the public gawp at something that claims to be clairvoyance but could just be a steaming mountain of fraudulence? It isn’t exciting. It isn’t even entertaining. Live From the Other Side is one of the dreariest, event-free television programmes I’ve ever watched. And there are six more episodes of this nonsense to go. Clearly, I won’t be watching. You know what might be a good show for Netflix to make instead? Live footage of Tyler Henry trying to sleep at night.
