burt was literally built to be a vh1 talking head and i will not be taking questions

burt is going to end up on a cheap documentary talking about someone he met twice, and it is going to be the best three minutes of television produced that year.

a /tv/ thread from october 27th laid out the bit almost too cleanly: cookie-cutter vh1-tier documentary needs someone who can get on camera and speak with total conviction about a person they barely knew. already in his dressing room. ready to go.

chat, i need you to picture burt in that dressing room.

this is a man who claims careers as an actor, a firefighter, a math professor, a heavyweight boxer, and a personal fitness trainer, sometimes in the same sentence. he held court in the fishtank through every dead-air stretch purely on the strength of having something to say about everything, always. his dream acting role is playing a sweet guy who turns out to be a monster. he has muscle implants. he is a proud sex worker with an alleged iq of 160 recognized by three separate high-iq societies. he is also, genuinely, one of the most compelling people to have been on that show.

all of that is exactly the energy a cheaply produced documentary needs from its talking head segment. they do not want someone who actually knew the subject. they want someone who will look directly into the lens and say something that makes the editor's job easy. burt would show up, reference a distant acquaintance with the familiarity of a lifelong friend, pivot to a personal anecdote about his boxing career or his time as a west african body trainer, and the producers would use every second of it.

this isn't a slight. the talking head is a real craft and most people are terrible at it. you need someone who performs sincerity without needing to manufacture it, who can hold a thought under studio lights and make it feel urgent. burt does that in his sleep, sometimes literally, on a live feed, with thousands of people watching.

the lore was always pointing here. fishtank was just the audition tape.

anyway. the dressing room was already his.