--- description: Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey's reality sensation, which premiered 20 years ago, laid the foundation for a generation of relatable content title: 'Newlyweds' Accidentally Invented Influencer Culture image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc9f73a225fb87be2/698a3f99b21a9cc9f8507822/newlyweds-reality-tv.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) ## Entertainment Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [Television](/tag/television/) ## Television Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # 20 Years Ago, _Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica_ Accidentally Invented Influencer Culture ## Video: Meet the People Orienteering to Improve Their Mind-Body Health [Watch (HLS stream): Meet the People Orienteering to Improve Their Mind-Body Health](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/5hrQlp7s.m3u8) (3:51)  _Published 2023-05-09. Generations ago, we used our brains to hunt, gather and find our way home. Today, GPS has eroded many of those skills, but science says using the navigational part of your brain is actually pretty important, and good for you. Enter orienteering, the sport of finding your way while getting a workout._ Aug 18, 2023 1:38 PM CUT  Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson Nick Lachey and Jessica SimpsonMTV/Everett Collection  by [Judy Berman](/author/judy-berman/)  ## Judy Berman Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close TV Critic Aug 18, 2023 1:38 PM CUT “Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish? I know it’s tuna, but it says _chicken… by the sea_. Is that stupid?” If you remember just one thing about _Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica_, the mid-2000s MTV reality sensation that chronicled the marriage of Jessica Simpson and 98 Degrees alum Nick Lachey, it’s probably this ridiculous string of sentences, uttered by Simpson as she curled up on the couch with a bowl of what was, of course, canned tuna fish. Appearing just three minutes into the series premiere, which aired on Aug. 19, 2003, the scene established the show as an unscripted variation on a classic sitcom dynamic. Like [Lucille Ball](https://time.com/5793549/lucille-ball-100-women-of-the-year/ "undefined") in hip-hugging denim, Simpson would play the ditzy wife to Lachey’s exasperated husband. After silently staring at his bride for a few dumbfounded beats, he grumbles: “You act like you’ve never had tuna before!” _Act_ was the operative word. If _Newlyweds_ harkened back to [_I Love Lucy_](https://time.com/6046897/i-love-lucy-little-ricky/ "undefined"), that was because Simpson’s father and then-manager Joe Simpson pitched it as precisely that. Over the past 20 years, and especially since the release of her [bracingly candid](https://time.com/5954152/celebrity-memoirs/ "undefined") 2020 memoir, [_Open Book_](https://time.com/collection/must-read-books-2020/5904295/open-book/ "undefined"), it’s become clear that Simpson was in on the dumb-blonde joke all along. As her recording career floundered, following a muddled sophomore album whose six-figure sales had disappointed in the wake of a double-platinum debut, the show was an opportunity to get her music back on MTV. It also gave her a chance to resolve an identity crisis exacerbated by the era’s surplus of gorgeous, young, female pop stars. With _Newlyweds_, she remade her image—and, in doing so, played a seminal role in the creation of what would come to be known as influencer culture. ### More From TIME [Reality TV](https://time.com/collection/reality-tv-most-influential-seasons/6199108/reality-tv-influence-on-world/ "undefined") as we know it today—a full-fledged industry, rather than the curiosity it was in the [early years of MTV’s _The Real World_](https://time.com/5943838/real-world-homecoming-review/ "undefined")—was still a burgeoning genre in 2003\. E!’s [_Keeping Up With the Kardashians_](https://time.com/collection/reality-tv-most-influential-seasons/6198513/keeping-up-with-the-kardashians/ "undefined") and Bravo’s [_Real Housewives_ franchise](https://time.com/5929741/real-housewives-beginners-guide/ "undefined") wouldn’t debut for a few more years. MTV’s unscripted answer to [_The O.C._](https://time.com/6295761/ben-mckenzie-crypto-easy-money-interview/ "undefined"), [_Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County_](https://time.com/3433652/laguna-beach-10-year-anniversary/ "undefined"), premiered in 2004; its more influential spin-off, [_The Hills_](https://time.com/collection/reality-tv-most-influential-seasons/6198473/the-hills/ "undefined"), followed in ’06\. _Newlyweds_ even predated Fox’s zeitgeisty [Paris Hilton](https://time.com/6087449/cooking-with-paris-review/ "undefined") vehicle [_The Simple Life_](https://time.com/collection/reality-tv-most-influential-seasons/6197762/the-simple-life/ "undefined")—which subjected the woman who’s often credited as the original influencer and her best pal [Nicole Richie](https://time.com/4544702/nicole-richie-past/ "undefined") to a litany of menial labors—by a few months. And it contained the seeds of all of the above shows, from the flighty lead to the SoCal glamor to the technically unscripted but heavily stage-managed plots. While they might also act or sing or play sports, reality stars, like the influencers who now occupy a similar cultural niche, are their own principal products. For Hilton, the brand was hot, spoiled airhead; [of course she knew what Walmart was](https://www.vice.com/en/article/53nvp3/paris-hilton-profile-2015-19-fragrances-and-counting-heiress "undefined"), but _The Simple Life_ got lots of mileage out of leading America to believe otherwise. Another gorgeous blonde with a flair for feigning ignorance, Simpson had already claimed the other side of that coin—the approachable, girl-next-door bombshell. _Newlyweds_ dressed the Texan minister’s daughter in velour track pants and logo T-shirts, while she lounged around her new Calabasas home with her new husband. In goofy golf outings and at restaurants where she balked at eating unfamiliar dishes, it squeezed humor out of her clumsy attempts at upper-crust living. If _The Simple Life_ was a 21st-century take on _Green Acres_, then _Newlyweds_ owed something to _The Beverly Hillbillies_. All of this was by design. As Simpson recalls in _Open Book_, she and Nick were “figuring out… how to create content for a kind of show that had never been done before.” In shaping _Newlyweds_ as a rom-com counterpart to MTV’s unscripted family-sitcom sendup [_The Osbournes_](https://time.com/collection/reality-tv-most-influential-seasons/6197760/the-osbournes/ "undefined"), “we made a plan to get back to the natural person that I was, the one that people could relate to.” That meant leaning into the innocence of a sheltered 22-year-old who had so famously waited until marriage to have sex for the first time. (Two decades later, the frequency with which Simpson’s virginity and Lachey’s, er, patience come up in the series can be jarring.) It also meant making the highly unnatural experience of being followed for months at a time by a reality-TV crew feel authentic. Hence the fixation on Simpson’s blunders, as well as all the burping, farting, and foul smells that punctuate the show. (Simpson, who’d faced pressure since her teen years to stay unnaturally thin, later blamed any gassiness on a “strict protein diet.”) Crude as it could be, _Newlyweds_ was resolutely old-fashioned when it came to gender roles. Most story lines hinged on moldy, essentialist _women are like this, men are like that_ comedy. Several episodes find Nick surrounded by scantily clad women while Jessica plays the jealous wife. In one such instance, she schemes to make him forget about his sexy backup dancers by purchasing some new lingerie—only to call him in a panic when she realizes she’s just spent $750 on two bra-and-panty sets. (_Women be shopping_, am I right?) While Nick takes the lead on home-improvement projects, Jessica makes fumbling attempts to cook and clean. The joke was supposed to be that teen stardom had spoiled Simpson. More likely, she was just as new to the domestic arts as most young adults living on their own for the first time. In that regard, it makes sense that viewers related to the semi-autobiographical characters she and Lachey played. As Simpson notes in _Open Book_, “Reality television knocked famous people off the pedestal. Girls felt like I had hung out with them in their living rooms, and so when they saw me, they ran up to hug me like we were girlfriends. Couples identified so strongly with us.” Relatability is, as we know even better now than we did in the early 2000s, powerful. The typical episode of _Newlyweds_ was dreadfully boring—two pretty people bickering over chores and running errands and repeatedly failing to cook dinner for themselves. Yet its particular brand of monotony presaged a form of entertainment that’s become wildly popular since Facebook started rolling out to college students in 2004, with Twitter, Instagram, and eventually TikTok on the horizon. If the past 20 years of social media have proven anything (beyond the self-evidently depressing realm of partisan politics), it’s that we as a culture have a bottomless appetite for curated depictions of how other people live. We pore over these photos and videos, and we allow them to influence the images of our own lifestyles that we curate for the same platforms. The lifestyle conjured by _Newlyweds_ would’ve been surprisingly achievable for many teen and 20-something viewers. Forget the constant air travel and the Simpson-Lacheys’ million-dollar starter home—an under-decorated expanse of beige and wrought iron that never looked all that appealing in the first place. Just by going about their mundane routines, the couple repped brands like Abercrombie & Fitch, General Motors, Planet Hollywood, and the Coca-Cola Company. A Gap Body shopping bag gets screen time in one episode; in another, a hungover Jessica chows down on Wendy’s with members of Nick’s family. Sure, there were glimpses of luxury. Hot-air balloon rides and anniversary dinners at Tavern on the Green, which Simpson has said were usually dreamed up by producers but framed on the show as Nick’s own ideas, injected periodic doses of aspirational romance into a marriage being slowly eroded by competition and surveillance. Jessica toted around a voluminous Speedy bag from Takashi Murakami’s colorful Louis Vuitton collection, which British _Vogue_ would later dub “[the defining fashion collaboration of the noughties](https://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/article/louis-vuitton-murakami "undefined").” But her obsession with that handbag—the way she dragged it along on a made-for-TV camping trip and squealed over the matching wallet and coin purse her family bestowed upon her as birthday presents—mirrored the attachment any regular girl might feel to the It accessory they’d scrimped and saved to purchase. Do you think Paris the Heiress would’ve been caught dead losing her mind over a designer purse? _Newlyweds_ was supposed to be selling the Simpson-Lacheys’ music. And to a certain extent, it did. Released the very same day that America watched her accidental Chicken of the Sea ad, Simpson’s third full-length, _In This Skin_, became the top-selling album of her career. Nick wasn’t quite so lucky. His solo debut—titled, er, _SoulO_—[peaked at No. 51](https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/jive-inks-nick-lachey-to-solo-deal-64502/ "undefined") on Billboard’s album chart. Maybe that disparity came down to a vast difference in quality between his record and hers. More likely, it was because Jessica so quickly became the show’s breakout star. Papa Joe surely understood that the series on which he’d modeled _Newlyweds_ wasn’t called _I Love Desi_. As wellness influencers using chiseled abs to hawk cleanses know all too well, when the product you’re _actually_ selling is yourself, you have to organize your entire life around maintaining the brand. As Simpson writes in _Open Book_, over the course of three seasons that aired through the winter of 2005, she and Lachey “slowly started acting out our parts even when cameras weren’t rolling. When we did appearances, we didn’t want to disappoint people by not doing the whole act. It didn’t feel wrong, because it was just exaggerated, idealized versions of ourselves. Heck, I wanted to be that happy.” A generation later, she reflects, “I see so many people performing their identities on social media, but I feel like I was a guinea pig for that.” She sure was. And one casualty of the experiment was her marriage. For all its artifice, the show accurately captured Nick’s increasing discomfort as his wife’s fame eclipsed his own. Paranoid that cameras and audio recording devices were hidden in their home even after the MTV crews had departed for good, the couple would leave the premises to argue. By the end of 2005, Simpson had filed for divorce. That same year, she blazed a trail that a generation of reality stars and influencers, from the [Kardashians](https://time.com/6167337/the-kardashians-hulu-product-placement/ "undefined") to [embattled Something Navy founder Arielle Charnas](https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2023/01/something-navy-arielle-charnas "undefined"), would follow, launching what would become a billion-dollar fashion brand. Selling affordably priced femininity in a wide range of sizes, the Jessica Simpson Collection thrived for years as its namesake’s recording career waned (and remains ubiquitous even after its [parent company’s Chapter 11 filing](https://time.com/6093952/sequential-brands-group-bankruptcy/ "undefined") in 2021). Yet Simpson was so busy maintaining the persona she’d perfected in _Newlyweds_ that it wasn’t until 2017 that she’d seek help for substance issues that dated back to the diet pills she’d started taking as a teenager pressured to appear perfect in the public eye. (Lachey, for his part, went all-in on television. Relationship reality remains his niche; he and current wife Vanessa Lachey are now the [increasingly controversial](https://time.com/6273356/love-is-blind-controversy/ "undefined") co-hosts of a suite of Netflix dating shows.) The real winner in the end? Well, maybe it was Chicken of the Sea, whose executives had probably never dared dream of the pop-culture relevance _Newlyweds_ brought them. The company capitalized on the exposure by hosting Simpson and Lachey at its San Diego headquarters in a [publicity stunt dutifully documented by MTV News](https://www.mtv.com/news/wnosvr/jessica-simpson-solves-age-old-mystery-chicken-of-the-sea-is-tuna "undefined"). The resulting article reads like pure 2020s #sponcon. “I will be a consumer forever,” Simpson reportedly proclaimed during the visit. “I will be, because normally I don't like fish, but it tastes so much like chicken.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6305866/newlyweds-jessica-simpson-20th-anniversary/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6305866/newlyweds-jessica-simpson-20th-anniversary/"},"headline":"20 Years Ago, Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica Accidentally Invented Influencer Culture","datePublished":"2023-08-18T13:38:55.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-24T16:17:37.532Z","description":"Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey's MTV reality sensation, which premiered 20 years ago, laid the foundation for a generation of relatable content.","url":"https://time.com/6305866/newlyweds-jessica-simpson-20th-anniversary/","keywords":["Television","culturepod"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Judy Berman","jobTitle":"TV Critic","url":"https://time.com/author/judy-berman/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/television/","name":"Television"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/6305866/newlyweds-jessica-simpson-20th-anniversary/","name":"20 Years Ago, Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica Accidentally Invented Influencer Culture"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Meet the People Orienteering to Improve Their Mind-Body Health","description":"Generations ago, we used our brains to hunt, gather and find our way home. 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