Two beautiful rising pop stars, madly in love — on paper, a perfect hit. Put them in a fishbowl with the world watching — their own MTV reality show called Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica — and they were an endlessly entertaining odd couple. Until they weren’t.

Twenty years after Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey’s divorce became a pop culture earthquake — which made headlines on Dec. 16, 2005 — Newlyweds still looms large as one of reality TV’s most revealing experiments.

The series debuted in August 2003, shortly after Lachey, the 98 Degrees heartthrob from Cincinnati, married Simpson, the purity-ring-wearing pop princess from Texas, to document their first year of marriage. It became an overnight hit, catapulting them both — especially Simpson — into megastardom and delivering indelible moments like the infamous “Chicken of the Sea.”

As the series extended to three seasons — audiences couldn’t look away from her burps and his exasperated reactions as they lounged in their living room — it also highlighted the couple's differences. In March 2005, the show ended, and by the end of the year, their marriage did too.

Looking back, producers say Newlyweds captured an unusual intimacy for its time — from offscreen chaos to moments that became cultural touchstones. Those moments live on in memes, news stories and the enduring fascination with early reality TV, which was unscripted and raw in ways today’s shows like Real Housewives, Mormon Wives and The Kardashians are not.

The Osbournes inspired a reality TV gold rush

After MTV's The Osbournes — which offered a window into Ozzy and Sharon's hilarious home life — became a runaway success in 2002, networks rushed to give practically every star their own reality show.

“I remember getting calls out of the woodwork with agents saying, ‘I've got this family. They’re really funny,’” Newlyweds and Osbournes executive producer Greg Johnston tells Yahoo. “But I couldn't do another family-type show. I thought, ‘It can't live up to what we did. I don't want to even attempt it.’”

Newlyweds — pitched to market B-level pop stars Simpson and Lachey’s music — got the greenlight because it offered something a little different.

“It was a young pop culture couple who were getting married,” Johnston says. “For me, the story of a couple in their first year of marriage was very interesting. I hadn’t seen that. Plus, they hadn’t lived together before. I thought that would [interest viewers], whether they were celebrities or not.”

The show also came with built-in interest in Simpson’s nuptials, fueled by widespread reporting that she was a virgin saving herself for marriage. While that scrutiny feels uncomfortable in hindsight, Simpson recently reflected on it, saying it “was just something that I talked about,” and added that she had always been open about her life.

“She was young,” Johnston says of Simpson, who was 22 when she married Lachey, seven years her senior. “She was very naive. [The Simpsons] had a very tight-knit family. She was a performer, but she was in this bubble.”

Viewers watched her struggle trying to do her laundry, cook and clean for the first time. Her forte — in addition to singing, because her third album, In This Skin, blew up when Newlyweds premiered — was more shopping and designer handbags.

“He was sort of the opposite — the macho dude from working-class Cincinnati,” Johnston says of Lachey. “I remember saying, ‘Are you getting movers [to haul his belongings to the couple’s Calabasas, Calif., house when they moved in] and he's like, ‘No, [my brother] Drew and I are going to do it.’”

He adds, “There was this little bit of the odd couple” vibe.

The birth of 'the Chicken of the Sea'

Todd Stevens was brought in as the on-set producer for Newlyweds. He has the distinction of being the guy who was there when Sharon Osbourne infamously threw a ham over the fence during a dispute with the neighbors on The Osbournes — leading to the police being called. Stevens was also there for Simpson’s tuna confusion.

“That was day one of being in the house,” Stevens tells Yahoo.

Production began with shooting trips with Simpson and Lachey. Then they set up at the pair’s new home, mounting cameras throughout the house. One camera was positioned behind the TV and recorded the couple — on their L-shaped couch — when they watched it.

“It was probably 9 o'clock at night, and we were sitting around thinking: They’re just making dinner. It's been a long day. [Should we go home?]” Stevens says. “We decided we’d just watch. Then she made the tuna, sat down and when she said that — asking, “Is this chicken or is this fish?” — we looked at each other like: What?! And the look on Nick’s face was just priceless.”

He adds, “That was the moment when I was like: This is going to be good.”

Johnston said he had no idea the couple would be funny. The show didn’t hinge on humor — the goal was to capture the realities of newlywed life.

“Todd called and said, ‘Hey, did you see the thing where Jessica … is not sure if it's chicken or tuna?’” Johnston remembers. “We ended up moving it up to the first episode.”

To Johnston, Newlyweds “was a little bit of I Love Lucy” meets a modern Honeymooners, though totally unscripted. They only had a calendar of what the couple had coming up, and they’d tag along.

“The first season is always the best because [the subjects] are not as self-aware,” Johnston says. “They haven't watched themselves on TV. They haven't had critics comment on what they're doing. Simpson really was that way in the first season.”

All that changed when Simpson exploded into stardom after a solo Rolling Stone cover in November 2003. According to her 2020 memoir, Open Book, that caused tension with Lachey. And as the spotlight was now focused on her, Simpson seemed to adopt a ditzy blonde role.

“In Season 2, she did try to lean into it a little bit,” Johnston says. “There were times if we sniffed it, we would go like, let's not include that. It feels like she’s trying.”

But at the start, Stevens says, Simpson was purely herself — including when she asked if chicken wings were buffalo meat.

“We were there from nine in the morning till midnight — six days a week,” Stevens says. “So you better be able to be yourself [for it to work].” And Simpson “was kind of airy, but it never felt contrived — and I mean we were as close as you could get.”

When the cameras stopped rolling

The examination of the newlyweds’ first year of marriage enjoyed three seasons, thanks to strong ratings.

By the summer of 2004, both were pursuing busy careers outside the show, which often pulled them in different directions. Simpson career got a huge boost after she was cast as Daisy Duke in the Dukes of Hazzard remake, filmed in New Orleans that year. In her memoir, she revealed that during production, she began an intense affair with her costar Johnny Knoxville, as Lachey seemed to spend most of his free time on trips with his friends.

The Newlyweds crew captured some peripheral moments in New Orleans, including Lachey recording solo music in the studio before, in Stevens's words, “everything went south.”

In the final season, “they were leading separate lives,” says Johnston. “It was like pulling teeth to film them. They didn't want to be filmed. They were doing their own things. We were just like: OK, I think we're done, because they don't want to do this anymore, and who knows what's going on in the relationship. We didn't want to become paparazzi chasing them down.’”

Stevens says he had no idea things would fall apart for the couple.

“When you do these shows, you drink the Kool-Aid,” he says. “There was no reason why I thought [their marriage] wouldn't work out, except the fact that it just blew up so big. I remember being chased by eight paparazzi cars [in the show’s second season]. It just got progressively worse. You've got people in Jessica's ear — her family. You’ve got people in Nick’s ear. Then the tabloids.”

However, looking back, the signs were there.

“You can see in the show them kind of moving away from each other,” Stevens says. “It's just unfortunate because you wonder: Would that have happened if there was no show? Would they have lasted? I think they were just too young.”

The enduring appeal of Newlyweds

By the time the show ended in March 2005, Simpson and Lachey were constantly denying that they were divorcing, as the tabloids constantly tried to link them to other people. Reports surfaced in October that a divorce was coming, and they officially announced their separation over Thanksgiving weekend. Simpson filed for divorce in December, and the marriage was legally over in June 2006.

Lachey and Simpson have both talked a lot about the show and their split through the years. In her memoir, Simpson wrote that the show wasn’t good for their marriage. She said they stopped getting along early on as her star rose. She was working nonstop to pay off their wedding and the mortgage on their mansion. Rumors about third parties didn’t help. Neither did watching the show and seeing her then husband rolling his eyes at her.

Lachey has also had his say. In an interview last year, he referred to having scars from his first marriage. In June, he said he cried when Newlyweds wrapped for good because he was so bonded with the crew.

“Listen, I'm just happy that everything worked out for both of them,” Stevens says. “He's got three kids now and is happily married [to Vanessa Minnillo], and Jessica’s got her three kids [with Eric Johnson, from whom she is separated]. Both seem to have come out well. Everything works out great in the end.”

This year, Simpson released her first album in 15 years. Lachey and 98 Degrees also put out a new album, and he hosts Netflix’s Love Is Blind with Minnillo.

Both producers later worked with Lachey on reality specials, while Johnston also produced Simpson’s sister Ashlee Simpson’s reality show. Today, with reality TV mostly in the rearview mirror, they marvel at how Newlyweds and The Osbournes continue to be a talking point 20 years later — and how they find new fans along the way through clips being shared on TikTok and memes.

“Just yesterday … a young woman was like, ‘You did Newlyweds?! That was my jam,’” says Johnston. “Her eyes lit up. ‘What's Jessica like? How about Nick?’”

Stevens adds, “Back then, you truly had no idea what was going to happen. Today’s reality shows have 22-page scripts. It just doesn’t feel real — because it’s not.”