Reality TV is ubiquitous. I can not watch any of it.
How low will media execs go? They’re laughing all the way to the bank and we’re giving them a free ride there
The shows I see most frequently talked about on social media? Reality TV. Mostly the franchises on Bravo, plus streaming series like “Love Island” and “Traitors.”
I don’t watch any of them.
Not the “sit-around-and-pretend-we’re-friends” shows. Not the competition shows. Not the talent shows. Not the “we’re-pretending-our-jobs-are-a-soap-opera” shows. None of it appeals to me.
Which wasn’t always true.
Back in the day, I watched the shows churned out by MTV, starting with “The Real World” and then “Road Rules” and then “The Challenge.” But wait, then MTV combined all three into “Real World/Road Rules Challenge,” wherein these once very young cast members were now back, as fully grown adults, but still stuck in some sort of reality TV suspended animation, unable to move on with their lives and leave the hijinks of these shows behind. But they probably had mortgages by this point and here was a paycheck being dangled in front of them. Being a reality TV star perhaps was — is — their most bankable option.
I had curiosity about the reunion experiments called “The Real World Homecoming,” wherein Paramount (MTV’s parent company) brought back the casts of early seasons to … recreate the old magic three decades later?
I wrote about the New York version here, noting that it had the makings of either a “Gen-Xer’s nightmare or a fascinating opportunity for collective introspection.” Turns out, it was a third option: Entirely pointless.
But the Los Angeles version did give the world this Tami Roman meme:
That image has become divorced from its context but it’s worth backing up to remember that in this moment, she was informing her non-Black cast members that no, it was not OK for them to use the n-word.
What else. I watched the early seasons of “Project Runway” (which introduced the world to Tim Gunn, a lovely, lovely man) and “Top Chef.” I guess I tired of both after a few seasons. Bravo tried the same format but for visual artists, which resulted in a really strange but hilariously fascinating spin on the genre called “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.” That one came and went without much of a blip, but I watched!
Let’s not forget Bravo’s “Real Housewives of [insert location],” a constellation of shows I refer to as Sandbox Tantrums of the Damned, with their portraits of tacky excess and women thirsting for celebrity while trying (and failing) to outrun their anxieties about aging and status. The facade is always threatening to crumble.
It’s brightly lit and deeply stupid, but when your brain is tired, it’s also easy watching.
Then a switch flipped for me.
$40K on glam every month
In 2021, we watched as “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” cast member Erika Girardi (stage name Erika Jayne) started a new life separated from her husband, Tom Girardi.
Well, couples split up. So what?
A powerful and successful attorney in Los Angeles, Tom (now 86) was the source of her lavish lifestyle, which (she bragged on the show) included $40,000 a month on her glam squad alone.
When Erika originally joined the series, her husband appeared only occasionally but he was not one to smile wanly like the other husbands in the face of the women’s housewife shenanigans. He was a serious man who indulged his ridiculous wife, yes. But Erika made it clear to her castmates that they were all expected to behave and comportment themselves accordingly in his presence. There would be no snickering tolerated about the pair’s age gap, either. (Tom is 33 years older than Erika.) Theirs was a true marriage, or so we were told, not a transactional one. He had simply done very well for himself over the years — enough for them to fly private — thanks to his career as an attorney, and he showered his wife with all that disposable income.
The reality — the real reality — was a different story. In 2022, Tom Girardi was disbarred after he was accused of defrauding clients, followed by a 2024 court conviction, in which he was found guilty of stealing tens of millions of dollars from his clients.
In the spring, he was sentenced to an 87-month prison term.
“This self-proclaimed ‘champion of justice’ was nothing more than a thief and a liar who conned his vulnerable clients out of the millions of dollars,” is how the Department of Justice put it after Girardi’s conviction. He treated his law firm like a “Ponzi-scheme by providing a litany of lies for failure to pay clients.”
That’s Tom. Not Erika.
But the DOJ included this, as well (as had previous news reports):
Girardi also diverted tens of millions of dollars from his law firm’s operating account to pay illegitimate expenses, including more than $25 million to pay the expenses of EJ Global, a company formed by his wife related to her entertainment career, as well as spent millions of dollars of [his law firm’s] funds on private jet travel, jewelry, luxury cars, and exclusive golf and social clubs.
Some of his victims are profiled in “The Housewife and the Hustler,” an ABC News documentary that premiered on Hulu in 2021. They include a man who survived a gas line explosion at his home that left him with burns on 80-90% of his body. There are also the families and victims of the 2019 crash of Lion Air in Indonesia; literal orphans and widows. As their attorney, Girardi’s job was to win settlements for them. They saw little (or none) of that money.
The initial allegations against Tom played out on the 11th season of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” with Bravo (and the cast) treating it as yet another storyline. That’s when I said enough.
Here’s ABC legal correspondent Sunny Hostin in that Hulu documentary:
I just can’t imagine being a victim and watching any episode of ‘The Real Housewives’ and watching Erika Jayne go through her extensive shoe collection, her closet, her home, her private plane, going on trips and flaunting all of this wealth without wondering where it came from.
That’s not entertaining. Not to me. I’m not asserting moral superiority, I’m just saying this is what soured me on all of it — not just this show, but reality TV altogether. It feels too rancid, especially when the world around us is rancid enough.
Destructive or tangential
A friend randomly texted the other day: “Do you think Sean Duffy and Donald Trump count as definitive proof that reality TV is destructive or do you think that’s tangential?”
(Duffy was on the sixth season of “The Real World” when it was set in Boston and he married his castmate Rachel Campos; Trump starred in “The Apprentice.”)
The Daily Beast recently reported that Kristi Noem, the secretary of of Homeland Security, has been “working with the producer of ‘Duck Dynasty’ to pitch a reality TV show — titled ‘The American’ — where immigrants will compete in a string of challenges across the country ‘for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship.’”
To be clear, “working with a producer to pitch a show” is a long way from “this show exists.” The number of “in development” announcements that never advance any further is a lot. So take this news with a grain of salt.
Even so, the premise is blatantly offensive and cruel from an administration that has been tormenting and terrifying immigrants.
Also off-putting? Let’s take it back to Bravo and smirking misogyny of the network’s ringmaster Andy Cohen who, on his nightly talk show "What What Happens Live!," merrily grins as he strings up the Bravo’s roster of cast members like the willing TV piñatas they have become.
How low will network and streaming executives go? They’re laughing all the way to the bank; by watching, we’re giving them a free ride there.
I’m not throwing all of reality TV into the bin. I watched the first few seasons of “The Great British Bake Off” when it had its original hosts. Charming! It’s OK if you enjoy reality TV. I’m sure you can point me to shows where it doesn’t feel quite so gross. I believe you! I’m just not compelled to watch anymore.
But I do appreciate good, critical analysis. Time magazine’s Judy Berman has a piece about Bravo’s “The Valley,” which was supposed to be a “lighthearted reality soap about hard-partying Angelenos trying to finally grow up. Instead, it quickly devolved into an utterly joyless case study in heteropessimism.” Her piece isn’t snark. She takes the show seriously, and then takes it to task:
Only a sadist could enjoy watching real people inflict and endure such a litany of tortures. It’s particularly disturbing to see them normalized within the conventions of a TV format designed to escalate petty slights and rivalries into social wars so stupid, they’re funny."
Sarah Taber is an ex-farm worker and crop scientist and she recently posted about the Amazon series “Clarkson’s Farm,” or as she calls it: "Fool Who Can Afford Infinite Mistakes Does His Best To Commit All Of Them."
In it, UK presenter Jeremy Clarkson (best known for “Top Gear”) attempts to run a farm in the countryside: “With no previous farming experience, Jeremy contends with the worst farming weather in decades, disobedient animals, unresponsive crops, and an unexpected pandemic.”
Here’s Taber’s take on the show:
He's like every other rich guy who buys a farm, never stops to check if what he's doing is a good idea until it's too late. That shit's not cute [and] it has very real consequences.
The fact that he can fuck everything [up] & still break even is a testament to how much support structure there is to protect dumbass estate owners from their own mistakes.
This is more or less the best career path young people in UK agriculture have to look forward to. "If you get really lucky, a nice wealthy landowner might let you run their estate for them!" And they wonder why UK agriculture is in tatters & young people don't want anything to do with it.
P.S.: For context, about 70% of the UK's land is owned by 1% of its population. Those are banana republic numbers. At first I couldn't figure out why UK agriculture adopted this idiot as one of their own. Then I realized he really does belong : /
The person I trust most when it comes to reality TV is Andy Denhart, who founded and runs Reality Blurred, which offers a mix of reviews, recaps and legitimate reporting. Andy has a sincere appreciation for the genre, but a critical eye as well.
A lot of reality shows do not hold up in hindsight, including NBC’s weight-loss nightmare “The Biggest Loser,” which is given a re-examination on Netflix with “Fit for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser.”
In his review, Andy notes:
[The documentary] declares it’s going to “reveal the intense, damaging reality behind the success.”
Alas, it ends up doing the exact same thing as “The Biggest Loser” itself, and adds to Netflix’s pile of nonfiction that will serve as the definitive word about something important, yet ultimately fails on the most basic level.
The labor issues
Here’s another thing to consider: The working conditions on reality TV are frequently worrisome. People both behind the camera and in front deserve workplace protections as much as anyone else. We should care about that as viewers.
Every so often there are efforts to unionize, but so far nothing has materialized.
I talked with Andy about some of these issues in the Chicago Tribune:
Q: You use the word “exploitation” in your column. What are some of the abuses that a union could theoretically create guardrails to prevent?
A: For the crew especially, it’s a freelance business and the workers have very little protection. So a lot of times they just need a job and will accept certain unfair conditions, like working long hours without getting paid overtime. People feel like they’re being taken advantage of but they can’t push back because they’re relying on referrals to get their next job.
And I think for cast members, we’ve started to hear more of the horror stories recently. The “Love is Blind” lawsuit is a fascinating example. (Cast members claim they were denied water, plied with alcohol and underpaid.)
They’re talking about being locked in their hotel rooms, not only without contact with the outside world, but without certain basics. And the way the show is produced, it makes it look like they’re just hanging out in this nice house. It does not show them leaving the set, being driven to a hotel and being locked in there by producers — producers who presumably are on duty all night and have to monitor and make sure the cast members aren’t leaving and talking to each other.
The one show I do watch
There is actually one show I watch — I call it “unscripted” instead of “reality,” but tomato, tomahto — and that’s Showtime’s “Couples Therapy.”
Most reality shows stoke conflict, but “Couple Therapy” looks at what it means to do the opposite. It depicts real therapy, on camera, for two people in crisis. But the couples themselves are not the reason to watch. That would be Dr. Orna Guralnik. She is the one constant throughout; calm, attentive and probing. The energy she brings is kind and open, but also with a firm intention to get to the bottom of things. She’s very good at parsing what her clients are actually saying beneath their words.
Her goal is to help people understand why we react the way we do. Often these are patterns — maladaptive coping mechanisms — that took root in childhood. That doesn’t mean we have to cling to them as adults.
Her office is fake — it’s a set — but the lighting and earth-tone colors are soft and lived-in. It feels serene and cozy, a place where you could spread out on the couch and get lost in a book. Her dog, Nico, is always there to quietly greet the couples.
The idea of watching couples fight probably sounds stressful. It’s not. I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with any of these people, but I do have compassion for them. The show is surprisingly soothing and actually lowers my blood pressure. I think that’s because you realize conflict isn’t scary within a controlled setting. Orna never lets things spiral out of control, but steers that conflict into something productive, which is why the sessions don’t feel chaotic as a viewer (though they might for the clients). It’s really Orna’s presence — I’m calling her Orna because that’s what everyone on the show calls her, never the more formal Dr. Guralnik — that makes “Couples Therapy” worth watching.
The participants get Orna’s expertise for free, which is a lot cheaper than the $700 she usually charges for private sessions. They must really want to work things out, you think. There’s hopefully a sincerity there. But every so often, some of them exude lowkey reality TV agendas. This most recent season, a woman showed up each time in an assortment of sweatshirts with sleeves covered in sequins. It’s a distinctive look, so much so that my cynical side wondered if she had a line of sweatshirts she was covertly promoting. Or maybe she just likes sequins.
Every year, I’ll get an email from one of the couples — or a publicist they’ve hired — pitching an interview. I decline because they’re not the draw, Orna is, and it’s fascinating that they don’t understand this.
It’s always Orna. She leaves you feeling smarter about the human condition and optimistic about our ability to live alongside one another and not be miserable.
Also this week …
If you missed it, for the Tribune I wrote about MSNBC rebranding to MS NOW, when the dirty little secret is that the television industry itself has largely abandoned branding altogether.
From the column:
I’ll never understand why the television industry has abandoned the advantages of branding. I’d include TV theme songs, which are no longer standard, as part of that diminishment. Before streaming, audiences associated certain shows, even certain lineups, with specific networks. Must See TV was NBC’s Thursday nights. TGIF was ABC’s Friday nights. That distinctive identity helped viewers keep track of various shows, instead of facing a morass of undifferentiated content.
These days, if you mention a show title, chances are you’ll be asked: Where is that streaming? Nobody knows. Who can remember? Why should we, there’s no branding because TV series are disconnected from the brand of the streamer.
I spoke with branding expert Laurence Minsky who told me that a strong brand eliminates the need to expend the energy to make a choice. Why wouldn’t that appeal to streamers, since we’re inundated with nothing but choices? Because, he said, branding is hard.
It takes “vision, time, discipline, effort, and consistency. So, essentially, data and algorithms have replaced the need for branding in streaming.”