Veritable Tantrum

The events described in this column took place in South Carolina in early 2026. The names of people and places have been changed. The rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

The backfiring exhausts and howling bachelorettes drowning Ocean Boulevard distract me, briefly, from the pain of my openly bleeding pinky toe. I crushed it while moving plywood on the set of our TV show earlier in the day so, as a respite from the claustrophobic white sneakers crucial to my typically mundane evening attire, I chose $10 paper-thin flip flops previously purchased at the Seashell Stop N’ Shop. The tequila sodas, combined with my biomechanically unsupportive sandals, start to add a bold ellipticality to my pacing. This makes my exposed maimed digit play bumper cars with the sidewalk and induces a velocity of gushing blood akin to the Congo River.

We ascend to the Copper Bar, a rooftop bar and restaurant overlooking the beach. The indoor bartender takes pity and chooses to grant me the lesser shame of patching myself up in the bathroom over the greater shame of removing me for being a health hazard. I ask if I can borrow an oversized Band Aid from her. I know her response before she says it: “As long as you give it back.” 

Upon returning from the bathroom the air of the outdoor bar covers me with salt and bombast. My mummified foot is invisible to the sea of collar-shirted Zoomers intently focused on ordering Red Bull Vodkas and stealing Zyn from each other. One hundred men, one personality. I’m tempted to ask one group if they were alive during 9/11, but they’re busy tripping the light fantastic in front of their friend’s shitty karaoke. I know, too, their answers will invariably disappoint. 

I finally approach the bar to order a consolation round for the three crewmembers I’ve abandoned for the last twenty minutes. The outdoor bartender clocks my fringe-guy aura right away. He says as he hands over the four tequila sodas, “You’re in the Dirty Myrtle now, city boy.”

I’m here from New York with a film crew composed of incredible craftspeople hailing from just about every other big city in the country. There is a mild ambivalence to this strange job in a strange land: I love making television, yet these travel renovation shows I’ve made in recent years are the apex of disposable “content.” They exist only in your dentist’s or doctor’s waiting room. They’re both fruitful to my career and fraudulent to my mind. 

But I absolutely adore the process despite the product. Film crews, by mere existence, suck the marrow out of the place they’re in. We not only pay you thousands of dollars so we can plug gargantuan lights into your outlets, eat potato chips on your couches, and let grown men use your bathrooms. We not only take your bedrooms and kitchens – the same ones where you conceived your children and packed their lunches on the first day of school – and turn them into the ersatz version of the home you envisioned in your dreams. We also devour the town at large: we drink the bars dry, hold up local traffic for a driving shot, order 200 hot dogs from a wildly unprepared local Costco, fend off angry neighbors.

There’s always been an outlaw spirit to the television industry. A shared mindset, an appreciation of the dark and adrenaline-jacked subculture we all participate in when we show up to set at 7:00 in the morning. We chain-vape, scream obscenities, get pissed off. We also uncover fleeting moments of fun and quietly acknowledge how crazy it is that we’ve conned so many people into letting us create the most popular and widely consumed art in the world. We are the island of misfit toys; we got into this business because interacting with normal people in a normal workplace is impossible or unattractive to us. 

So you could say South Myrtle Beach and our crew get on like a house on fire. 

—

The resort bar we all resent to call home is Vulture’s, an apt name in that its deep fried pickles and hazy IPAs pick apart the carrion that is my liver most nights. Despite our bodies dancing on the razor’s edge of a medical emergency each morning from the sodium intake, we nest there. We find comfort there. Drew, the manager and champion of our continued pursuit of cheap liquor centrally located in our brutally strange resort, somehow finds us humorous enough to not remove from the premises entirely. It’s men like him that jostle my personality’s most rigid, urbane aspects free from their cold, stiff shackles. Henry Kissinger probably gave some kind barman a tip once; even the most vile of overworked folk, maybe me, can find salvation at a high-top table. 

Understand that South Myrtle Beach is laden with charmingly sketchy lodges like ours. In my view, the area known as “South Myrtle” lives in the airport’s shadow, bounded by the 2nd Avenue Pier to the northeast and the intersection of South Ocean Boulevard and Route 17 to the south. It is a sun-soaked liminal space of Lynchian motels, creepy ice cream shoppes, and smoke-filled dives, some of which might just happen to serve the best fried shrimp wrap you’ll ever have. 

What it provides in greasy fun, though, it lacks in livability. It offers even less in modernity. The layout feels as if the urban planners seemed intent on keeping the economic engines – the rides, restaurants, and revelry – far away from this stretch, the way Robert Moses kept the Bronx from true progress. South Myrtle is inadvertently frozen in the kitschiest, grittiest aspects of the 1970s.

I work as a build coordinator on our TV show. If that sounds mundane, it’s because I love it so unconditionally I don’t care to make it sound interesting. Our team of six operates under the gregarious leadership of a build producer and executive producer, two humans whose wondrous balance of flintiness and humor have kept us apace through not one but three aggressive renovations. 

We deal with countless local trades, most of them kind and restless in equal measure: electricians, plumbers, flooring companies, drywallers. (Don’t even get me started on the criminals-turned-carpenters, hungover painters, horny tilers.) We also deal with contestants whose genuine wholesomeness is matched only by their penchant for changing designs on a whim. These adjustments, though casual to them, force my team to scramble every day, make frantic phone calls to subcontractors, get sign-offs on dozens of price estimates, update cascading trade schedules, relay these updates to frazzled field producers, and clock 20,000 steps a day moving among three houses to put out fires. These renos, mind you, must go from conception to completion in six impossible weeks.

This domino effect becomes as routine as morning coffee, and it makes our Seal Team Six inherently more valuable. The foundation of a seven-episode network show would collapse if each of us weren’t exceptional at adapting to the ever-shifting design and construction dynamics of three different homes. Not to mention that, because the six of us are your typical irony-poisoned television professionals, we manage to have a damn good time going to war every day. Even during the siege of Leningrad, people were still going to piano concerts. 

That’s the secret to loving this fickle, high-stakes industry: take the job seriously, don’t take yourself seriously. 

—

It’s funny how you notice the strangest things about a place right before you leave it. The concept of the “doorknob comment” in therapy indicates you’ve made a significant discovery just as you’re leaving a session; the same can be said for my last week in Myrtle Beach. Not that this place has been therapeutic whatsoever. I’ve also encountered more broken doors at this disarrayed resort over the last two months than I care to admit.  

The biggest revelation arrived two days before I left. As always happens after filming wraps, our disparate crew started dropping like flies, departing out of MYR back to LAX or LAS or whatever major production hub they hail from. A few of our boldest cameramen were even flying straight home, sleeping one night in their own beds, and getting right back on an 11-hour flight to Fiji to shoot Survivor. (Imagine going from two months of 70-hour weeks straight into the volcanic heat of the South Pacific without even so much as a moment to think. I, on the other hand, need an ice bath and swaddle after moving a C-stand into another room.) 

I was flying out on a Saturday. Our production coordinator and PA – roommates together during the run of the shoot, and thieves so thick they might as well be two kids stacked in a trenchcoat robbing a candy store – were flying out the Friday before. Those two proffered that the three of us and my build producer convene Thursday for Korean BBQ then hit the bars. A 70-lb piece of plywood had just squashed my toe like a cockroach. I was running on three hours of sleep. But hey, what’s the point of running a marathon at all if you don’t celebrate at the finish line? 

“You’re in the Dirty Myrtle now, city boy.”

There is no greater wake-up call to leave a bar right away than realizing you physically can’t fit any more empty plastic cups on your table. We skirt down the steps of the Copper Bar and, at my desperate and pestilent request, head around the corner to a small pub called Finnegan’s. I gravitate toward Irish pubs because they offer a low profile that’s largely vanished from modern hospitality culture. While soju cocktail haunts and freakout salad joints cost your firstborn child just to get a table, pubs were invented to be literal public houses for all. They’re homely, unassuming, cheap, underestimated. To me, the ideal pub – with its worn wood panels, lukewarm beer, and wide-ranging politics – represents a fierce aversion to an algorithmically informed existence. 

As we order a round of Guinnesses, the clock striking 2 a.m., I come to the revelation that South Myrtle Beach is exactly the kind of town I like. It is as subtle as a triangle player during the week, yet as subtle as a marching band on the weekends. It is trapped in a time far before social media took hold of youth culture and flung it out into the far reaches of the world. Walking around the West Village of Manhattan in springtime is seeing a million people looking cool and a million people not noticing; Myrtle is a million people looking however the fuck they want. This is something I – a washed 33-year-old Brooklynite clinging to any lingering semblance of style – find surprisingly refreshing.

A place’s people are who make a place powerful. Drew and the merciful Copper Bar bartender make South Myrtle Beach what it is, not the wasteland of melting motels along the strip. Again, it’s been surprisingly refreshing how the residents and workers welcomed us with more generosity than they had any reason to. The regional subcontractors that helped elevate three houses from seaside shanties to chic primetime stars giddily and eagerly dove into collaborating with us. If you’ve ever worked with tilers or HVAC guys, you know they are typically neither giddy nor eager. 

Traveling helps you see your regular life a little bit differently in this way. Interacting with a region’s weird food, establishments, vibes, identity – it reminds you to not feel boring or small in your own life back home.

Just promise me one thing: if you ever come down here, don’t overdo it on the hushpuppies. You’ll be shitting like a fire hydrant for 36 hours.