Megan Mullally is very good at Tinder. Yes, the Megan Mullally who, with Nick Offerman, makes up the best couple in the history of love, and let us hope that is never not so. But she is also the Megan Mullally who participated in something called a Tinder Takeover, and for that we are just as #blessed. The Vanity Fair video, from December, is making the rounds this week because of Will & Grace’s return to TV, which is how the work chat room I’m glued to all day noticed it. In the video, which is part of a series, Mullally commandeers a stranger’s Tinder account and narrates her swiping and messaging decisions. (You get to see Mullally ask a young man if he scrapbooks, and when he says nope, tell him to fuck off.) Amy Schumer has made one of these, too. Billy Eichner has done it. Just this week, Nick Kroll made one.
These videos are great, but they raise an important question: Is there anyone left on Tinder who isn’t doing a bit? Tinder is supposed to be for falling in love, or barring that, getting some, but it is hard to do either of those things when Megan Mullally is ruthlessly catfishing you. And it’s not just celebrities lurking behind unassuming Tinder profiles: There’s also the scourge of journalists (the worst) using the service to try some hacky experiment and then write a first-person stunt piece about it. To wit:
- “I Tried to Do Tinder Like a Guy”
- “I Let My Friend Control My Tinder—Here’s What I Learned”
- “10 Women Tested How Heavier Makeup Affected Their Tinder Matches”
- “I Let Siri Respond to Men on Tinder and They Still Wanted to Bone”
- “I Let My Best Friend Take Control Of My Tinder and This Is What Happened …”
- “I Matched on Tinder With the Most Hated Man in America. This Is What Happened Next.”
- “I Created Four Tinder Accounts to Find Out Which Version of Myself People Liked Best”
Excuse me. Anyone who’s seen the seminal film How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (everyone) knows that it’s cruel to play with people’s hearts this way. Whether you’re conducting research for your fictional job at a fake version of a glossy women’s magazine, making a video for a real glossy magazine’s website, or writing a piece for Vice, other people are investing real feelings, and someone could get hurt. On the one hand, I love watching Mullally pull the puppet strings of someone else’s Tinder, but on the other other hand, she is robbing people of the chance to find true love. Perhaps we need a new Tinder where people can live out their fantasies of either taking over someone else’s account or having theirs taken over themselves? Otherwise, one day soon, a celebrity is going to do one of these Tinder Takeovers and run into a fellow celebrity who is also doing a Tinder Takeover on the other end. And then they’ll laugh from their Hollywood manses about those normals and their Tinders—but what about the poor saps whose accounts have been taken over? They’re left alone, demoralized, and no closer to love, just another casualty of some celebrity’s publicity tour. It’s enough to make you reactivate your OkCupid account.
