The Tea — May 16, 2026

Today's theme: the gap between who celebrities think they are and who the public has decided they are — and that gap has consequences whether you're a Defense Secretary quoting Pulp Fiction at the Pentagon, an actor who can't sell a tour ticket in his own country, or a rapper trying to borrow someone else's breakup to make his album chart. Reality keeps outrunning satire, and the people most committed to managing their image are the ones generating the most evidence against it.

• Iceman, Maid of Honour, and Habibti (Drake): 43 songs dropped Friday across three simultaneous albums, with apparent shots at Rihanna, A$AP Rocky, and Kendrick Lamar.
• Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War (John Krasinski / Michael Kelly): feature film extension of the four-season streaming series, currently in promotional rollout.
• Propeller One-Way Night Coach (John Travolta): directorial debut premiered at Cannes; festival surprised him with an honorary Palme d'Or.
• Grey (Kiefer Sutherland): fourth studio album arrives May 29 — now with no U.S. tour attached to support it.

Colin Jost stopped by The Tonight Show Thursday and admitted that the SNL writers' room pitched a cold open in which his Pete Hegseth would deliver the fake Ezekiel 25:17 monologue Samuel L. Jackson recites before shooting a guy in Pulp Fiction — and the room shot it down for being too implausible. "I was like, 'Would it be funny if Hegseth just did that Bible verse that they have in Pulp Fiction?'" Jost recalled, per HuffPost. Then in April, Hegseth gave a prayer at a Pentagon service that did exactly that, citing the "Sandy 1" Combat Search and Rescue mission in Iran, per Variety. The Pentagon defended the remarks, saying Hegseth understood the prayer was inspired by the film but also reflected the actual biblical passage, per Yahoo.

What changes if this becomes the dominant narrative: political satire's whole economy depends on exaggeration as a moat, and that moat is gone. What failure looks like: writers' rooms quietly start greenlighting the absurd pitches because the news cycle has trained them that the bar has moved. Watch whether SNL uses its Season 51 finale to revisit the bit Hegseth already performed for them.

Most celebrities, when the tour isn't selling, blame "scheduling conflicts." Kiefer Sutherland announced Friday that he's scrapping the U.S. leg of his Love Will Bring You Home Tour because of "very low ticket sales." "I don't think it's fair to the people who have bought tickets, or the venues, to play to half empty houses," he wrote in the statement Just Jared and E! News carried. The U.S. leg would have been his first stateside tour in nearly a decade, with stops planned in Patchogue, Boston, Charlotte, Nashville, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, per Yahoo. His fourth album, Grey, still arrives May 29.

There's a darker undertone: Sutherland was arrested in January after an altercation with a ride-share driver in Hollywood, booked on suspicion of making felony criminal threats and released on $50,000 bail, per TheWrap. Nobody is officially connecting that to the empty rooms — but nobody has to. What this signals: the actor-with-a-music-side-project economy may have genuinely collapsed. Watch which legacy names pivot to festival slots or co-headline pairings instead of attempting full U.S. legs in the next 12 months.

Drake released 43 songs Friday across Iceman, Maid of Honour, and Habibti, with E! News reporting the tracklist seemingly calls out Rihanna, A$AP Rocky, and Kendrick Lamar, among others. Forty-three songs in a day is not a rollout — it's a denial-of-service attack on the discourse. Flood the algorithm, dominate the queue, make engagement involuntary.

What changes if Iceman debuts at #1 next week: every major label starts pressuring artists with rollout fatigue to triple their output, and the album-as-event model takes another structural hit. What failure looks like: 43 songs land, none chart in the top 20, and the volume strategy gets quietly retired as something only Drake's catalog math can sustain. The Rihanna/Rocky angle is the one to watch — a happy couple with a baby is a target with serious public-sympathy downside.

Per E! News, Colbert's last week on The Late Show will include Jon Stewart, Steven Spielberg, David Byrne, and Bruce Springsteen, with the May 18 episode billed as "The Worst of The Late Show" and the May 21 finale guest being held back for suspense. The cancellation has never felt purely procedural no matter how often Paramount insists it was, and a guest list this loaded turns the goodbye into a loyalty test.

What changes if Colbert names CBS or Skydance directly Thursday night: Paramount inherits a press cycle it cannot deflect, and other former late-night hosts get cover to escalate their own grievances. What failure (for the network) looks like: a gracious sendoff that lets the finance story stay the official story. The signal is what Stewart says, not what Colbert does.

Lil Tjay posted (and deleted) screenshots of DMs with Gigi Alayah — Kai Cenat's ex — to Instagram Wednesday night, most of them roughly five years old, with one dated May 12, per HotNewHipHop and Music Times. His new project They Just Ain't You has struggled on streaming, and observers have noted the timing isn't subtle. Cenat — one of Twitch's biggest streamers, who has stepped back from livestreaming to focus on his Vivet fashion brand — has not responded.

What changes if Cenat keeps ignoring it: silence becomes the loudest commentary, and Tjay's curated five-year DM archive starts reading as evidence of someone who's been waiting years to use it. What success for Tjay would look like: a Cenat clapback that drives streams. He isn't getting one. Posting private DMs to promote a struggling album tends to age the way you'd expect.

A Defense Secretary delivering a Tarantino monologue at the Pentagon, an actor playing to imaginary half-empty rooms in Phoenix, and a rapper curating five-year-old DMs at midnight to sell an album nobody asked for. The unifying theory of May 16 is that everyone is now their own worst SNL sketch, and the writers' room got there first but couldn't quite believe it. More Monday.

Forward this to the friend who's been waiting all week for the Panettiere book to drop.