Morning. Busy one today: a new crop of Mouseketeers, Kelly Clarkson roasting NBC from a Vegas stage, FIFA’s halftime show turning into a full blown football scandal, Harry facing a $67 million question in two weeks, and Christopher Nolan quietly benefiting from outrage doing his own marketing.
Before we dive in, congratulations to Michele Filon, our competition winner, who takes home a copy of Jo Piazza's new novel, The Parisian Heist, for answering the question: Which real woman, celebrity or otherwise, do you think deserves more credit than she gets? Piazza's novel weaves a modern-day art heist together with the true story of Jo van Gogh-Bonger, Vincent van Gogh's sister-in-law, who inherited his then-worthless paintings and spent decades building his fame, a role history rarely credited to her. Readers also suggested Yoko Ono, Courtney Love, Angelina Jolie, Meg Ryan, and Annette Bening. Jo chose Michele's answer, Artemisia Gentileschi, whose paintings were long attributed to male contemporaries before being rediscovered and correctly credited, an erasure that closely mirrors Jo van Gogh-Bonger's own story.
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Disney Is Betting There’s Another Britney Spears Somewhere in A New Cast
The Mickey Mouse Club in the 90s, Credit: Disney
Disney+ has ordered a pilot to reboot The Mickey Mouse Club, its fourth revival of a franchise that first launched in 1955 and, through its most famous 1989 to 1996 run, discovered Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Ryan Gosling and Keri Russell before any of them were famous. The new cast, eleven performers aged 13 to 16, including Camp Rock 3 alums Hudson Stone, Casey Trotter and Brooklynn Pitts, was announced this week, with production starting this month in Los Angeles. Disney describes it as a “showcase for today’s most talented young performers, where music, innovation, and self-expression take center stage.” The project comes from Fulwell Entertainment, the company behind Hulu’s The Kardashians.
Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: No format in television history has a stranger hit rate at manufacturing superstars than a room full of kids doing choreography in matching ears, and Disney knows it, hence the fourth attempt in seventy years. The name alone gets people through the door. Whether it can still make anyone want to watch what happens next is the actual experiment, not whether Disney can find talent, but whether a legacy show can still hold attention in a world where every teenager already has their own platform. If you read this newsletter regularly, you’ll know how I feel about the dangers of child stardom, the machine that built Britney also broke plenty of people on the way. This version has two things going for it that the old ones didn’t. The cast skews older, and if it really isn’t shaping up to be a daily show, that alone might spare these kids the all consuming grind that defined the franchise the first time around.
The 6 Reasons Carole Radziwill Might Be Able to Save Real Housewives of New York
The Season 16 Cast of RHONY With Carole Radziwill In The Center, Credit: Bravo
RHONY has struggled for years after a messed up pandemic season and a “clear the deck” new cast. This week's trailer for the next season has generated a renewed interest in the show not seen in a long time. All because of one woman. Carole Radziwill's return suggests the network thinks it found a workaround, and here's why it might just work.
The Kennedy connection has never been more relevant thanks to Love Story, the series about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and Carole doesn't seem scared to lean into her own marriage to John-John's best friend and cousin.
She's coming back as a full-time Housewife, not just a "friend of," which tells you Bravo, and her old pal Andy Cohen, with whom she recently reconciled after a public feud, sees a real storyline in her rather than a nostalgia cameo.
Speaking of Housewife nostalgia, it's having a massive moment right now. Vicki Gunvalson, one of the original Housewives from RHOC's very first season in 2006, just returned to Orange County for its 20th season, and that same OG energy is exactly what's driving Bravo's biggest wins, with Carole standing as one of RHONY's own veteran members.
It's also a timely reintroduction. Many of her old cast mates are currently filming The Golden Life, an E! spinoff about their new lives in Palm Beach, which hands RHONY some free, built-in competition and marketing against its own alumni.
The Epstein and Maxwell questions teased in the trailer are a genuine curveball, since her old New York social world once overlapped with people who are radioactive now and bring headlines with them.
She knows how to play the game these days, with no early season hesitation, just sharp, ready made soundbites.
Kelly Clarkson Jokes About the Double Standard Running Her Own Show
Five months after announcing The Kelly Clarkson Show will end after seven seasons, Kelly Clarkson joked onstage at her July 17 Las Vegas residency opener, "I would get fired by NBC, but I don't work there anymore," comparing network HR culture to life on tour at 19. Then she flipped the joke, admitting staff actually dreaded having her in HR training, not because she broke rules, but because she'd stop the class with earnest questions until people asked for sessions without her.
Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Daytime television runs on a tighter rulebook than music, and Clarkson clocking that says something about how small she had to make herself to fit a network slot. I know a version of this myself. After nearly thirty years inside other people's mastheads, building Celebrity Intelligence on my own has been its own way of walking off the tour bus.
Jelly Roll’s Daughter Reignites Divorce Speculation
Screenshot of Bailee Ann DeFord’s TikTok from June, Credit: TikTok
Bailee Ann DeFord, Jelly Roll’s 18-year-old daughter from his relationship with ex Felicia Beckwith, hinted during an expletive-filled TikTok Live on July 19 that the real story behind her father’s divorce from Bunnie Xo hasn’t come out yet. “Y’all have no fucking idea what happened, and wait ‘til y’all find out,” she said. “I promise y’all, the view of what y’all have of not only the situation, but their relationship and the internet in totality is about to fucking crumble the day that I open my mouth.” She was clear on one point, insisting “nobody cheated. Period,” while warning people to stop coming for her father’s name. Jelly Roll and Bunnie Xo, who split after nearly a decade of marriage and finalized their divorce in June, had publicly maintained the split was amicable, with Bunnie set to keep their Tennessee dream house and a settlement that reportedly includes a clause barring either from speaking negatively about the other to the media.
Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: This divorce had genuinely gone quiet, amicable framing, a settlement, both exes moving on in public without incident. Then one TikTok Live from an eighteen year old with zero specifics and a whole lot of implication, and suddenly it’s the biggest story in the cycle again because ambiguity is more powerful than information in this world of armchair detectives . Bailee didn’t reveal a single fact but just that a fact exists, somewhere, and left a Bunnie Xo shaped hole for the entire internet to fill in themselves. After working in entertainment journalism for 30 years you realize a confirmed detail closes a story but a withheld one reopens it, bigger than before, because now everyone’s imagining a worse version than whatever’s actually true.
Was The World Cup Half Time Show “An Abomination”?
Madonna at the FIFA World Cup Final Halftime Show, Credit: FIFA’s YouTube
FIFA’s first-ever World Cup final halftime show became the tournament’s loudest talking point for all the wrong reasons. Promised at around 20 minutes, the break stretched to 27 minutes and 19 seconds, with Madonna, Shakira, BTS, Justin Bieber and the Muppets performing while Messi and the rest of Argentina and Spain sat cooling down at MetLife Stadium. Independent chief football writer Miguel Delaney called it an “anti-football abomination” on X, and former A-League player Stefan Mauk flagged the injury risk of that long a cooldown. Not everyone hated it. Plenty of casual viewers said online it beat any Super Bowl show in memory.
Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: This is the oldest fight in entertainment, tradition versus spectacle, and it splits almost perfectly along who was already a fan of what. American sports culture treats a captive global audience as an opportunity. Soccer culture treats the match itself as the whole event, no intermission required. FIFA proved you can book a five-star halftime lineup and still lose the room, because for purists those extra 12 minutes weren’t a bonus but an uninvited delay.
27 minutes of Madonna, Shakira, BTS, Beiber and the Muppets at a World Cup final. Verdict?
Two stories below get the full breakdown, and are for subscribers only:
The $67 million question: Prince Harry called a High Court judge's verdict a "whitewash." Two weeks from now, that same judge decides who pays nearly $70 million in legal costs. Palace sources say the reaction inside the walls wasn't annoyance, it was alarm, over language they say attacked the entire judicial system, not just one ruling. Below: the specific legal rule that could turn one word into an eight figure mistake, and why Harry's own history suggests he may have walked into this one with his eyes open.
The exact same outrage, two very different outcomes: Snow White absorbed months of backlash and lost Disney an estimated $170 million. The Odyssey absorbed nine separate controversies, arguably worse ones, and opened to $124 million domestic anyway. Below: the actual list of everything the internet was furious about, Musk included, and the one variable that decided whether the fury became free marketing or a very expensive lesson.
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