MTV Catfish Host Nev Schulman Reveals His Reason For Throwing Kidd Cole's Phone In The Water
Nev Schulman is the creator of MTV's "Catfish" — or is that just who he wants us to think he is? As Schulman knows all too well, you can't be too careful. But assuming that Nev Schulman is who he says he is, consider that he must be under a decent amount of pressure as the face and brains behind the massively successful MTV reality series. He's credited as appearing on 156 episodes — that's almost twice as many episodes than there were of the original "Star Trek," and William Shatner didn't have to worry about his girlfriend secretly being a 53-year-old man every week. The stress has got to be enormous.
Perhaps that, fans might postulate, was why Schulman finally snapped during the fourth episode of Season 3 of "Catfish." Maybe that, they might well suspect, was why he grabbed Kidd Cole's cell phone and threw it in the river.
Conjecture is all well and good, but when it comes to yeeting an early-2010s mobile device into a magical underwater kingdom, viewers deserve concrete explanations. Thank goodness, therefore, that Schulman took to Reddit in the summer of 2014 to explain his phone-chuckery.
Why Kidd Cole's phone sleeps with the catfishes
Schulman's retrospective on the incident came in June 2014, when a Reddit AMA allowed a fan the opportunity to ask why the television producer drowned Cole's phone and, more importantly, whether he would ever do it again.
"I don't think that I would do something like that again," Schulman responded. "That kid just really got to me, and particularly the disrespect that he showed all of us by choosing to engage with his phone and rudely ignore what we were saying to him."
But the problems don't stop with one young man's perceived lack of regard for his betters at MTV. "Smartphone culture and the amount of time in which everybody now looks down at their phones instead of engaging with other human beings is something that I find very upsetting," Schulman continued, "and I just felt like doing something about it."
Vigilante justice is ugly business, and it's good to hear that Schulman has reconsidered his old phone-throwing ways, even if the stunt regularly lands the episode in question on lists of the best entries in "Catfish" history. What remains a mystery, however, is how anyone clocked as a candidate for a show about people finding love on the internet could possibly be so intrigued by their phone.