It’s the 21st century gladiatorial arena: How reality TV has changed our world

Its aim was to make six contestants, several of whom are openly racist, experience empathy by dropping them in Somalia and Syria, so that they could retrace the frightening journey undertaken by those seeking asylum in the UK. Including, says the programme makers, “the terror of small boat crossings”. Gamified forced migration for our entertainment.

On Amazon, a 26-year-old YouTuber with a private fortune of $500m, Jimmy Donaldson, aka Mr Beast, has spliced The Hunger Games and Squid Game (both fictional) into the real-life Beast Games. A thousand people compete to win $5m. 

He has taken the idea of K-drama’s Squid Game — that making poor people debase themselves for money is a bad thing — and decided that no, actually, it’s a great idea. It clocked up 50m viewers in 25 days, even as The  Guardian described it as “one of the most undignified spectacles ever shown on TV”. Poverty and inequality gamified for our entertainment.

Reality TV has gamified much of our lives over the past 25 years, and beamed it back to us as entertainment — dating, dieting, dining, dancing, baking, sewing, cooking, singing, modelling, decorating, camping, repairing, parenting, entrepreneuring, and eating kangaroo anus in a jungle. 

To keep us engaged, there’s added backstabbing, lying, faking, conniving, cheating, colluding, crying, shagging, scheming, oversharing, showing off, and storming out. It’s the 21st century equivalent of the Roman gladiatorial arena.

Since its initial water-cooler cultural event 25 years ago — the first UK version of Big Brother — reality TV has changed not just our television viewing, but our wider world. 

From 15 Warholian minutes of fame snatched by individuals plucked from an endless harvest of new contestants falling over each other to take part, all the way to the White House, savvier participants have harnessed the instant visibility afforded by reality television and used it to their advantage. 

Occasionally bigly. Yugely. ( The Apprentice, according to Emily Nussbaum, author of Here Comes The Sun!, a history of American reality TV “made him [Trump] president”).

Celebrity Big Brother returned this week, this time on ITV. It’s all a long way from the innocent days of Nasty Nick on the first Big Brother in 2000. 

It was like nothing we’d experienced before — and more importantly, like nothing that virgin crop of participants had experienced before either, hence the uncontrived authenticity of that first season, which made Nasty Nick seem like such a villain for attempting to manipulate his housemates. 

Originally created in 1997 by Dutch media boss John de Mol, Big Brother’s ‘golden age’ with Davina McCall lasted a decade (2000-2010) before it moved to Channel 5 until 2018; after a four-year hiatus, it reappeared on ITV.

From those early days of Craig the lovely builder and Anna the lovely ex-nun to the cutthroat theatrics of current reality TV — via everyone from Sharon and Ozzy to kountless Kardashians — the reality TV gameshow/playoff formula has had us hypnotised from the start.

 It made somebodies out of nobodies — we all knew Jade Goody — and elevated presenters like Claudia Winkleman, Alan Cumming, Ru Paul, Tyra Banks, Davina McCall, etc, to household names. It even turned participants into presenters — Rylan, Stacey Solomon, Alison Hammond. 

But in order to keep us watching, it had to keep upping the stakes: more peril, more extreme behaviour, more car crash viewing. (Not all reality TV, obviously — the nearest Bake Off comes to car crash viewing is when someone’s genoise sponge fails to rise.)

Eight out of 10 American adults watch reality shows. Irish research from 2019 found that 38% of us watch them, with women (49%) being twice as likely as men (27%) to tune in, despite 78% of Irish adults believing that it’s not great for our mental health. And despite women being its main audience, 59% of women think reality TV relationships are faked, compared with 38% of men.

“Reality TV tends to be a very female-coded genre,” says Danielle J Lindmann, professor of sociology at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, and author of True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us. “Women are more likely than men to watch these shows, and women are more often featured on the shows.

“Reality TV also tends to traffic in archetypes and stereotypes — that’s its bread and butter — and gendered stereotypes are no exception. All sorts of stereotypes about women percolate within the genre — that they’re dumb, that they’re catty, that they’re materialistic. The list goes on and on.

“And then there’s the stereotyping that happens at different intersections of gender, race, and class — for example, the Black woman who is quick to anger, or the working-class woman who lacks impulse control. White men, on the other hand, tend to be portrayed as powerful, sane, capable people with expertise — think about shows like The Apprentice, or all of the talent shows with the caustic male judges. 

“Again, however, that changes a bit when we look at it intersectionally. There are specific stereotypes of gay men, for instance, and Black men that pop up repeatedly on these shows — stereotypes of gay men as catty, dramatic, and hypersexualised, and stereotypes of the ‘angry Black man’.”

Programmers love reality television because unlike scripted drama using hired professionals, it’s cheap and easy to make. Its tools are an unending supply of keen amateurs — the general public — combined with a form of editing known as the Frankenbite. This is an edited snippet, often from contestant ‘confessionals’ or ‘testimonials’ (think Big Brother’s Diary Room) which strips nuance and splices together disparate strands that allows the editor to manufacture a story. In reality TV, the edit is everything.

Since the turn of the century, reality TV has developed a plethora of sub-genres, from the questionably lurid — Sex Change Hospital (2007) to Steve Austin’s Broken Skull Challenge (2014) — to the deadly dull (anything involving airports). 

Docu-soaps have elevated the profiles of those who may have otherwise remained niche — many of us are familiar with the participants of Made in Chelsea, The Only Way Is Essex, Geordie Shore, and Housewives in various locations from Beverly Hills to Dubai, as well as people like Alan Sugar, Simon Cowell, Trinny Woodhall, etc.

The structured-reality docusoap — which began in 2002 with The Anna Nicole Show, and the chaotically unstructured The Osbournes (which made for genuinely hilarious viewing) — remains dominated by The Kardashians, themselves emerging from a reality court case starring their dad defending the late OJ Simpson. 

This reality offshoot has, over the years, attracted a variety of second-tier celebs keen to up their visibility, with varying degrees of success; Tommy Lee, Britney and her then-husband Kevin, Gene Simmons, Snoop Dogg. Katie Price and her dependents became a sub-genre all of their own.

Not every idea has aged well. Supersize vs Superskinny (2002), Wife Swap (2002), Supernanny (2004), Brat Camp (2005) and Ladette to Lady (2005) — none would pass muster in today’s cultural environment. 

A lot of reality TV relies on cruelty, from the talent-search genre where contestants are ridiculed, to the reality play-offs which pit contestants against each other: Traitors, I’m A Celebrity…, Love Island, Big Brother, Dragon’s Den, Survivor, etc.

It’s not all blood-thirsty savagery, however, as the huge popularity of benign anaesthesia like Bake Off and Strictly/Dancing with the Stars demonstrates. We like our reality TV to be uplifting too. 

And occasionally nerdy — historical recreations like The 1940s House (2001), Victorian Farm and Edwardian Farm (2009, 2010) suggest gentler pursuits than, say, MILF Manor (2023 — where 40-60 year old women are set up with each other’s sons) or I Survived The Zombie Apocalypse (2015). Like Tinder, there’s something for everyone.

Aside from the usual arguments that reality TV coarsens culture as it dumbs us down, its most serious side effect (besides launching Trump as a politician) is its suicide rate, estimated by 2022 at 38 participants, the youngest an 11-year-old girl in India. Contestants from The Bachelor, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, The Voice, Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares have all died by suicide, as did presenter Caroline Flack. Contestants have described post traumatic stress disorder, depression and self-harming after appearing on shows.

Critic Emily Nussbaum describes how actually it’s the reality stars of their own shows, like The Kardashians, who experience the least problematic work conditions. “The faker a show is, the more ethical it is,” Nussbaum told a US interviewer. “The people who’ve agreed to be reality stars and ‘play’ themselves, those shows might have their own ethical problems, but they’re not ‘real’ in the same way.”

These participants are also protected by their own vast wealth, unlike participants in less glitzy shows. And while awareness around duty of care and the psychological wellbeing of contestants has improved, non-professional reality contestants are still the most expendable and lowest status.

In 2023, tabloids reported that Love Island contestants were being paid £250 a week, despite the show making its broadcasters millions. None of this seems to diminish either the individual’s desire to participate, or the audience’s desire to watch. And like heroin, we need to keep upping the dose to get the same hit. How long before actual fights to the death are broadcast for our entertainment?