rant · moment 15 of 22
Instant Hotel and the Death of Shay Rezaie
from #263 - Family Business | The Tim Dillon Show · #263
5 min
Tim recounts loving the Australian reality show Instant Hotel, its trashy contestants, and the real-life death of former cast member Shay Rezaie, leading into a riff on the cold-blooded nature of reality TV producers.
- Tim recommends the first season of Instant Hotel for its cast of trashy, vindictive people who were rude to each other.
- Later seasons ruined the show by making it more positive instead of keeping the spite and classlessness.
- The appeal is watching uneducated snobs with no discernment critique each other's Airbnbs and decor.
- Australians only recently learned to use utensils and prefer eating meat with their hands because everything there can kill them.
- Australian descendants of criminals are bad criminals, unlike the successful criminals who settled in New York and the Hamptons.
- One of the Instant Hotel stars, a Persian woman named Shay Rezaie, killed herself, which for Tim confirms the show was real.
- Tim suspects Shay Rezaie's death was drug-related based on what he's heard from multiple sources.
- The problem with producing reality TV is that drug use was good for the show but bad for the people in it—you can't do both.
- Reality TV producers are often sociopaths and among the coldest people Tim has met, displaying the emotional distance of someone like Donald Rumsfeld.
- Instant Hotel remains a solid recommendation to Tim despite the tragedy.
Instant HotelShea Rezaireality televisionAlan PeggCupcake WarsMikey Jello