Reality Tv
Story Stream
The Biggest Opportunity of My Life December 03, 2024
This spring, I applied to compete on a British TV show. Having read accounts of reality TV casting, I was prepared for multiple grueling rounds of taped interviews. The first interview was a phone call, which lasted five minutes, and centered on my v...
The Deeper Meaning of Love Island USA August 26, 2024
Have you ever watched a TV show that got too big? Earlier this year I watched The OC for the first time, the 2003 hit soap opera that followed the familial lives of California millionaires and redefined the “teen drama” as something that the whole fa...
Culture Froze in the Biden Era. Is It Finally Heating Up? August 15, 2024
Mapping pop culture trends onto US political administrations is not an exact science. It's a game of vibes. But since the advent of television, there have been clear cycles of American culture that roughly line up with the president in charge at the ...
A Harsh Reality July 16, 2024
As a Zoomer who grew up glued to shows like Big Brother and Keeping Up With the Kardashians, it's hard to imagine a time that reality TV even tried to be ethical. Not that that matters to me. In fact, one of the reasons I most enjoy binge-watching Br...
Time to Face Reality July 04, 2024
EMILY NUSSBAUM, THE PULITZER-WINNING television critic and New Yorker staff writer, ends her well-researched, somewhat grueling book on the history of reality television, Cue the Sun!, with a reminder that critics have historically dismissed reality ...
Why Reality TV Survives and Survives July 02, 2024
Reality television has been a part of my life since adolescence, when I would hole up in my parents’ basement, flip on MTV, and religiously watch each new season of The Real World. Even back then, “reality” wasn’t a new genre; hybrid docudrama had ex...
The Last Inappropriate Man on Television June 04, 2024
Andy Cohen thinks about his cancellation a lot. What will it look like? When will it come? “It’s fascinating to me, the idea that you could say something and everything would be pulled away from you,” he says. It was a bright afternoon in May, and we...
'Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show' Goes Too Far May 08, 2024
On a day that began like any other, the unwitting star of The Truman Show saw something that changed his entire world. For a few, unnerving seconds, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) came face-to-face with his father—a man he believed to be dead....
The Rise and Fall of ABC’s ‘Golden Bachelor’ April 17, 2024
The first-ever Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner and his wife Theresa Nist announced on Good Morning America that they have mutually decided to “dissolve our marriage.” This many years into the storied ABC franchise, not much will surprise Bachelor Nation...
Are Autofiction and Reality TV the Same? March 05, 2024
What do the Real Housewives franchises have in common with Karl Ove Knausgård? According to the critic Anna Kornbluh, they both speak to our century’s dominant aesthetic: immediacy. What Kornbluh is referring to is the project of replicating reality ...
