Noah Wyle is “Sexiest Man Alive 2026”: chicken portion significantly increased

Forget, no: Let's just try for a moment to move the Pelicot men and the Berlin serial rapist Frank S. out of the spotlight, which they are still far too rarely exposed to.

Let's try to somehow get the "extreme dehumanization" emanating from men - according to an investigator on Frank S.'s actions - out of our minds. Because how else could we approach the “Sexiest Man Alive” phenomenon today?

In other words, we can no longer write poems about the sweet moon without taking into account the fact that there are tons of human garbage flying through space up there. Masculinity is in crisis because it is itself this crisis. What does 55-year-old Californian Noah Wyle represent in this context?

At first I thought I didn't even know the man. I didn’t see “Emergency Room” – and if I did see George Clooney there – or “The Pitt”. It is no coincidence that there are two hospital series in which Wyle plays doctors, a professional group that in surveys ranks just behind fire department personnel and nursing staff.

But then I remembered a happy time I spent with one of my sons on the Steven Spielberg-produced series Falling Skies. A, Wikipedia is absolutely right, a “military science fiction television series” in which there is a lot of shooting at alien invaders.

Noah Wyle plays Tom Mason, a professor of American (revolutionary) history and a single father of three children, because of course the aliens murdered his wife. That's just how they are.

The whole spectacle in five seasons is, to speak with Karl Valentin, “huge nonsense” or lousy, militaristic, nationalistic rubbish; and yet serves permissible longings and can be eaten like a juicy McRib, which we say goodbye to at this point, as it will be removed from the McDonald's menu in Germany on October 28, 2026.

Maybe Noah Wyle as Tom Mason is a kind of McRib: warm-hearted, but also juicy and decisive when he needs to be. And when blood drips from his hands, it's just barbecue sauce with a smokey flavor anyway.

Like a McRib, there is a certain melancholy attached to Wyle/Mason, a memory of times when the professor could only deal theoretically with his nation's struggle for freedom and did not have to become a cold-blooded killer. A time when meat was still primarily pork and a burger roaster certainly didn't come up with the idea of ​​“expanding the chicken area,” as the McRib end is analyzed in the Standard newspaper.

And that is probably the flavor that leads us on the trail of the “Sexiest Man Alive 2026”: There is still a little pork in it, but the chicken content is significantly increased.

He is above all a doer, as a doctor and scientist and savior of the world, but he also has strong private, paternal aspects and can get along without a mother or wife/carer.

He's intellectually capable, but he's not a couch potato; he can also be quite practical. He can lead, but can also let go. It can save lives. And he can kill.

Which brings us back to the beginning. And for fundamental questions. What remains of masculinity? How can she even be sexy anymore? And that inevitably leads us to the question of the French philosopher Manon Garcia, who accompanied the Pelicot trial: How can we live with men and how men can live with themselves?