Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Thirst With Shay Mitchell’ on Max, Where Shay Mitchell Drinks Her Way Around The World

In Max‘s new travel series Thirst With Shay Mitchell, the Canadian actress and entrepreneur takes viewers on a trip around the world to explore beautiful sights and taste local beverages. As she explains, one of her passions in life is to share a toast, so as she travels through locales like Peru, Colombia, and Argentina to imbibe specialty drinks and explore the landscapes. As a TV personality, Mitchell is charming and charismatic, but as a travel host, she’s skittish about trying more than a few things, which tends to gets in the way of the show’s success.

THIRST WITH SHAY MITCHELL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shay Mitchell gets off a train and explains that she’s about to head to Machu Picchu in Peru.

The Gist: Shay Mitchell is best known for her acting work on shows like Pretty Little Liars and You, but as she explained in a recent Instagram post the two things she loves the most are “travel and sharing a toast” and thanks to her enthusiasm for those things, Thirst was born. Mitchell is the owner of a travel accessories brand as well as a tequila seltzer, “So it’s safe to say I love travel and a good drink,” she explains.

In the first episode, Mitchell and a local guide travel around Peru, near the base of Machu Picchu, but as she says, while most tourists to that area are curious about the spiritual aspects of the mountain region, she’s here solely for the drinks.

While most of the show is based around alcohol, with visits to distilleries that produce locally-made spirits that rely on sugar, herbs, and other ingredients, Mitchell also seeks out non-alcoholic beverages that are significant to the ares she visits, including visiting local Incans who prepare her coca tea, a sacred beverage made with the same plant that cocaine is derived from. But unlike some travel show hosts, Mitchell is not 100% down for anything. Though she sips the coca tea, she’s completely distracted by the fact that her Incan hosts live with dozens of domesticated guinea pigs, and she can’t keep her rodent-phobia at bay, becoming distracted as she’s learning about the ritual of the tea. Later when she learns that locals eat the guinea pigs as a delicacy, she does about a half-dozen takes to the camera to express her dismay that, as the guest of honor, she will have to eat the animals.

Mitchell might be channeling what we all would be feeling if we were surrounded by rodents or asked to eat one, but for a show purporting to be about embracing other cultures and learning from them, it’s frustrating to watch her so ill at ease so early on in the show.

Mitchell may enjoy a toast, but she isn’t really a drink expert, so while a lot of her voiceovers explain what we’re watching in detail, most of her commentary about the drinks she consumes are just her riffing. After tasting a drink called an emoliente, she explains, “It’s like, thicc. T-H-I-C-C.” At another location, she sidebars with producers to ask if the drink she’s about to consume contains spit. She’s assured that “that’s another drink”called masato that she won’t have to consume. It seems like a weird question, until I Googled it and learned that masato is an ancient drink made by a human chewing cassava and using the chewed cassava to brew the drink. None of this was explained on the show, and it might have been helpful if they had mentioned some of that so it wouldn’t seem so… random?

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? There have been other travelogues that focus on traditional beverages of the world, including The Travel Channel’s Booze Traveler, and most of Anthony Bourdain’s travel shows like Parts Unknown and No Reservations (he definitely made food the center of most of his visits around the world, but drinks factored in just as much).

Our Take: As a vehicle for Shay Mitchell fans to get to know the actress and businesswoman, Thirst delivers. Mitchell is a bubbly and curious personality, she seems to really feel a passion for travel, and she has an Instagrammable wardrobe that’s an important part of the show. In the first episode, she gets changed into a cuter, more breathable outfit after declaring the first one too warm for the weather in Peru – a logical decision, but one that could have been made off-camera. Instead, we watch her team help her decide which shoes to wear and they shield her from view as she changes in a van. While TV hosts need to inject their shows with their own unique personalities, choices like these make the show feel less about the place and more about the person showing it to us.

As a travel show though, Thirst is less successful. While we’re privy to some beautiful sights and unique beverages, Mitchell is a wary traveler in some ways. She admits that while she’s a drinker, she’s not an adventurous eater, and doesn’t seem thrilled to try weird stuff. And she’s also terrified of many of the aspects of her adventure, mostly having to do with animals. She spends most of the first episode avoiding the guinea pigs that many of her guests keep in their homes (to her credit, she does reluctantly eat a bite of one when it’s offered to her at a special meal in her honor) and she quits part of the way through a horseback riding segment in Argentina because she doesn’t like horses. While her fears are valid, as part of a travel show, my wish would have been to schedule for activities she might be more enthusiastic about, as these fairly regular freakouts don’t seem like they serve her mission of embracing local cultures.

Not all travel shows have a mission to educate us with cultural deep dives: Conan O’Brien Must Go and Eugene Levy’s The Reluctant Traveler are examples of people who are just having fun and doing their schtick in a new place. But Thirst seems to want to be a little deeper than that, and that’s where it struggles, because the subject matter simply gets overshadowed by Mitchell herself.

While Mitchell certainly shows admiration and respect for the places she visits, much of the show feels off the cuff, and Mitchell seems unpolished. The show fares best when Mitchell speaks with locals and actually learns about the local customs, like when she meets a wine farmer who makes his drinks out of a potato-like tuber, or when she gets drinks with the former Miss Peru, Natalie Vertiz, but in the end, this feels like Mitchell went out and filmed a show without doing a ton of prep work to thoughtfully process and react to what she’s learning.

Parting Shot: “I secretly came here searching for instant spirituality, but what I learned instead was, you can’t life hack what’s sacred, you have to surrender to it,” Mitchell says over a montage of places she visited in Peru. She then reveals where her next episode will take her, Cartagena, Colombia.

Performance Worth Watching: This is Mitchell’s show, and though she visits with a rotating cast of locals, interpreters, and other personalities, the entire thing has her imprint on it.

Memorable Dialogue: “This is so beautiful, where’s my phone at?” Mitchell says when she’s given a ceviche cocktail at a bar in Cusco, Peru. The show’s format leans heavily into influencer culture – the social media handles of every guest who appears on the show is displayed, and Mitchell’s vibe, aesthetic, and commentary feels more influenced by social media than anything else, so of course she’d need a pic to show off what she’s eating.

Our Call: Shay Mitchell has over 32 million Instagram followers; if you’re one of them and you’re a fan of her personality, you’ll probably want to STREAM IT. If you’re not an existing fan, I think you can safely pass.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.