Whelp. It’s time to pour one out for our favorite messy internet time capsule. MTV just pulled the plug on Catfish, so there will be no more porch confrontations, “I just knew something was off” moments, or team scream moments as Nev Schulman does a reverse-image search of someone’s third-cousin-twice-removed’s Facebook selfies from four years ago. I don’t always like messy TV, but when that’s the thing I want, Catfish was my go-to.
If you’re just now learning what you’ll be missing, Catfish was (sob) a spinoff of the 2010 documentary and premiered in 2012 on MTV. The show arrived just in time for meme culture to really take off, making it an instant hit. It was everyone’s favorite guilty pleasure show that you watched while cramming for midterms and trying to feel less shitty about getting ghosted last weekend. If the almost 300 episodes taught us anything, it’s that if your long-distance boo says the camera on their phone is broken for a solid six months? You’ve been dating a stock photo.
MTV announced that they’ll be ghosting Catfish for good after almost a decade of digital heartbreak. There’s still hope, though. The producers are free to shop the show around, which means there’s a chance it’ll pop up on Hulu, Netflix, or whichever streaming service needs to appeal to mess-loving viewers the most.
The undisputed face of Catfish, Nev Schulman, wrote a prosaic thank-you on Instagram. He made sure to acknowledge the producers, the fans, and the ever-revolving door of guest hosts… except for one. Devotees noticed that Nev’s heartfelt post left out Kamie Crawford, who co-hosted for several seasons before peacing out in 2024. Given the rumors that tension between Crawford and Schulman are the real reason behind the show getting the axe, I find that just a titch suspicious. Also, incredibly appropriate, given everything the show was about.
Reminder: this might not be goodbye forever. We live in the golden age of content recycling, and Catfish could easily find a second life. Netflix could drop it right between a murder documentary and the next season of Love Is Blind. Amazon could call dibs and have a field day (they have all of our receipts anyway). Or it could reinvent itself on TikTok, which is basically a catfish’s favorite platform.
The unique recipe behind Catfish is going to be next to impossible to replicate. Max Joseph, Kamie, the entire carousel of guest hosts, really. It was part detective show, part soap opera, and part digital-age PSA. It gave us confrontations on front lawns, people pretending (badly) to be rappers, and the occasional plot twist where the catfish was actually surprisingly hot. Was it lowbrow entertainment? Sure. But I do not care, and neither did the more than 400,000 viewers who tuned in weekly for the mess.
So Catfish is officially off MTV’s menu, and some of us are mourning like it’s our favorite trashy ex turned anecdote. Unreliable and messy, but ultimately unforgettable — something we loved more than we should. Until it shows up on a new platform, we’ll just have to get our drama fix the old-fashioned way: reading the comments on Nextdoor.
