Something has changed about the way we watch reality TV. This cluster aims to discuss some of those changes on a case-by-case basis. What we are left with is a diverse collection of essays taking different reality TV franchises as their objects: Hannah Link on F1: Drive to Survive and the centrality of charisma; Prabhnoor Kaur on Survivor: Borneo and the role of producers’ editing choices; Ronny Litvack-Katzman on Alone’s tap-out scenes and the echoes of the Victorian novel’s metafictional turn; Sarah Nolan on dating series’ use of science-fictionalized A.I. technology; Anandi Rao & Saumya Premchander on Indian Matchmaking and Hindu nationalism; Théo Evans on FBoy Island and its imbrication with neoliberal logics; Lesley Stevenson on Vanderpump Rules and the labor required of its cast members to produce ‘authentic’ reality TV; Corrine Collins on Love Island and its polarization of Black viewers; Avneet Sharma on Justin Trudeau’s use of homonationalist rhetoric in Canada’s Drag Race: Canada vs. the World; and Cassandra Luca on Selling Sunset and the competing archives of reality TV and social media.
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Avneet: Should I write an essay for our cluster on how Davina going to Burning Man, despite it being mentioned as a throwaway line to explain her absence in some of the episodes, has acquired its own lore on Twitter and Reddit
Cassandra: Why not
Avneet: “Davina’s at Burning Man”: Constructing the Missing Narrative of Selling Sunset’s Most Fringe Character
Avneet: It would be soooooo fun to write lmao
Cassandra: No you should….
[Some time later:]
Avneet: I feel like Romain is actually correct about the way sun bleaches wood
Avneet: I’m rewatching season 6 lmao
Cassandra: Sun DOES bleach wood
Cassandra: Season 6 was crazy
Cassandra: But then the whole show has moved from primarily selling houses to the agents wearing progressively weirder outfits while suffering from a lack of a proper villain
Avneet: I hate Chelsea’s Birkin bag… Also is it weird that I like Chrishell’s outfits on her Instagram so much more than her outfits on the show…
Cassandra: Well, Instagram is her personal platform, so I think she has, theoretically, more control over what she can wear or say (barring anything about the show that legally she’s not allowed to do). So she can probably pick stuff she likes more while off-camera.
Avneet: I also think these people self-producing their own brands reads so differently from the way the show presents them. This reminds me of how many RuPaul’s Drag Race queens are completely different on their socials than what was presented on the season itself. For example, Daya Betty as the villain on season 14 seemed vastly different from what people who knew her IRL (like Crystal Methyd) said about her. Fortunately I do think that the audience is becoming much more savvy about this kind of thing.
Cassandra: Which audience?
Cassandra: Because that’s what’s so interesting about this: there’s simultaneously the audience that merely watches, one ends up dissecting the show on Reddit, and another who follows along on Instagram to get “behind the scenes” looks at the lives of cast members—to say nothing of an audience that follows along on multiple platforms.
Avneet: I think the latter types of audiences are becoming much more significant, like people aren’t just watching shows, they’re also posting on Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, etc.
Cassandra: Yeah, and that’s what we see reciprocally with those cast members, too. They post stuff on their stories, they solicit feedback, they do AMA’s, they respond to comments, there are subtweets in their captions… Those spaces are where they clarify confusing plot lines on the show, where they say that the audience didn’t see an entire scene or don’t know the details behind the before and after.
Avneet: I’m used to reality TV being so diegetically sealed that it’s surprising to me how much fans can impact what happens on the show itself. When I watch a show I’m not just watching that show, I’m also watching companion YouTube series, checking to see what fans think on Reddit, voting in polls, seeing which person has the most new Instagram followers, and then watching YouTube retrospectives. I bet this is more common behavior than we think.
Cassandra: Yeah, I remember watching Tiger King at the very beginning of quarantine, along with everyone else, and Twitter was a really important place for people to collectively process the show, post theories, or even ask for simple plot clarification. I think this was not only because it was quarantine and many people had nothing else to do, but also because reality TV shows ask us to suspend some amount of disbelief while also totally buying into their (limited) premises.
Cassandra: Because people are fascinated with what constitutes “the real.” I myself googled Doc Antle’s farm to see if it actually existed, as well as the “real” story of Carole Baskin. Part of reality TV’s allure is that a lot of elements are recognizably “real”—of course American laws mean that you can get away with having “private zoos”—while also playing upon our love of the fantastical and the strange. In that context, what is “real” and what is not becomes a topic of conversation on social media and can lead to the proliferation of people creating theories, arguing in favor of a cast member, or identifying inconsistencies. I think people probably did this before social media exploded, but now it’s much more public, much easier for anyone to offer their opinion, and much more likely that social media will influence cast members’ behavior.
Avneet: Yes! I think the emphasis on “realness” is fascinating because it points to our tendency to consume reality TV while maintaining a(n arguably healthy) level of skepticism about it. We know these shows are heavily produced, we know that they are cut and edited to maximize story from the available footage, and production companies make decisions based on what they believe what audiences will respond well to—and what they will not.
Cassandra: It almost feels like there’s been a collapse of the boundaries between the forms, in the sense that reality TV still feels separate from “reality” but is now much closer to viewers. Social media has emboldened people to feel like they have a say in the plotlines: if you can communicate to a cast member and there exists a non-zero chance that that person will see the message or even respond, then that’s an exchange that didn’t really happen before.
Cassandra: But I think the implications of such a tight feedback loop between social media and reality TV (and its cast members) is not just more dialogue or theoretical community building. Cast members now have to deal with vitriol and spam, though they also stand to make a lot of money through branding. It’s good for someone’s brand to have more followers, to have more engagement (even if it’s hateful), to have direct dialogue, because now they can leverage both scripted “reality” and unscripted commentary on their own platforms.
Avneet: I think we’ve moved well past the Kardashian-era of reality TV where the figures we see on screen were more distant from the audience. The personalities we see emerging now are much more accessible and (dare I say) relatable. I think these new forms of engagement have led to some parasociality and overfamiliarity with the figures. This sometimes produces security risks but also helps them with their other endeavors (remember when I suggested we find a store that sells Emma Hernan’s empanadas?).
Avneet: I’m finding it hard to define what reality TV is doing now in broad strokes. And maybe attempting to is the problem. This category of entertainment has become so nebulous and expansive. The extratextual elements can sometimes feel more essential than the original text. I think that as scholars we tend to look at this as a problem: “How does social media problematize the reality TV form?”, as if we need to maintain the purity of the form. But I actually see these extratextual and subversive elements of reality TV spectatorship as expanding the boundaries of the form itself. I think reality TV analysis opens so many doors to discuss not just the shows themselves but our wider stances on gender, sexuality, race, neoliberalism, capitalism, media consumption, etc.
Cassandra: I mean, I think we can use incredibly broad adjectives to describe a lot of what’s put out: consumerist, lavish, “shallow,” prejudiced, deeply embedded in “mainstream” culture and attitudes. But there’s more to it than that, because one of the underlying questions that I feel like you’re getting at is, to use internet parlance, why does reality TV have such a chokehold on us? I think reality TV, while written about academically, is still frequently relegated to the dismissed status of “low culture,” when in fact, as a genre, it can reveal a lot about cultural production more broadly, to say nothing of political conditions.
Avneet: I think that’s exactly why we’re still having conversations about racism on The Bachelor, or why The Ultimatum’s attempt at a ‘queer-friendly’ season was still suspect. These formats are inherently wedded to pre-existing oppressive structures, which makes surface-level attempts to ‘diversify’ all the more interesting because they can easily backfire. However, these franchises need to respond to our current social and political climates in order to (because this is the goal of every reality TV show) maintain a viewership and make money. In that sense, I think social media has opened a lot of possibilities in both production and spectatorship.
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Cassandra Luca
Avneet Sharma