Better Than the Camp Deserves

Every January, a rotating cast of attention-hungry minor celebrities descends on a clearing in the Australian jungle to perform their inner psychopaths for a prime-time audience. The German version of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! runs on RTL and operates exactly as you’d expect: diminishing dignity in exchange for exposure, with occasional nudity as a bonus feature for the patient viewer.

Nicole Mieth—known to perhaps three ARD viewers and her immediate family from the long-running German soap Verbotene Liebe—chose the nudity route before the jungle even got a chance to break her. She did a shoot for Playboy, which is the kind of career move that suggests either genuine confidence or a publicist with a very specific playbook. I’d like to say I read the accompanying interview for journalistic reasons. I did not survive it intact. Not because of Nicole—she comes across as grounded and pretty funny—but because of interviewer Maximilian Reich, who responded to the news that she was no longer single with the word Schade. Just that. Schade. As if he’d been one correct answer away from throwing her over his shoulder in the Paris hotel room and making something of himself.

Nicole herself is a genuine outlier in that camp—no obvious surgical work, no performance of being unhinged for the cameras, no apparent need to claw her way back into relevance through manufactured conflict. She hasn’t said much yet, which at this stage of the season is almost a superpower. The photos, shot by Autumn Sonnichsen, are good. She looks like a person rather than a brand. That shouldn’t be remarkable, but here we are.