Max Joseph is making his way back to Catfish: The TV Show – if only for one special episode. Joseph’s longtime friend and collaborator Nev Schulman, who has co-hosted the MTV show with Kamie Crawford since 2018, opened up to PopCulture.com ahead of Tuesday’s Season 9 premiere about their “fun” reunion.
“I’m friends with Max. I was friends with him before, and I’ve been friends with him since. And every time I’m with him, we have so much fun,” Schulman told PopCulture of bringing Joseph back for an episode this season. “And I just forgot what it was like to have fun with him on the show, because all of the crew is also our friend, as is Max. So it really felt like a reunion for all of us.”
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He added, “And the story and the episode was really weird and wild, too. So it’s a lot of fun, and I think everyone’s going to love watching it.”
Schulman also teased that Season 9 of Catfish: The TV Show would chronicle the stories of “some of the most complicated and interesting people” he’s ever met, including “people who were coming to this relationship with very different past lives and baggage and experiences that really informed what they were bringing to the relationship and what they needed or were expecting out of it.”
“It opened my mind and heart to new things and realities, from fetishes to speech impediments to one girl who had previously been kidnapped and held as a sex slave,” he explained. “We really had a lot of drama on this season.”
After nine seasons of Catfish: The TV Show and his groundbreaking 2010 documentary, Schulman said he “no longer really [sees] the show as an episodic TV program” as much as he feels it “as an experience with new people in new places,” as “you can never duplicate human beings and the weird, wild ways that they’ll act or react to scenarios.”
“I’m there and I’m trying my best to be objective and guide these people, but I’m also just experiencing it with them for the first time and trying to figure out how I would feel and, ‘What would I do and what should I say?’” he continued of how he navigates these situations. “It’s just as real and awkward for me as it is for everybody else.”
Catfish: The TV Show premieres an all-new season on Tuesday, April 30 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on MTV.
