Media

Why reality TV has been the tonic we need in lockdown 3.0 | Reality TV


“Are you still watching?” asks Netflix, entirely unnecessarily. Yes, of course I’m still watching. I started the day with a group of incredibly wealthy frenemies in Bling Empire, and there’s no way I’m walking away until I find out what Kevin and Kane have discovered about Kim, the Kylie Jenner-lookalike DJ, and her biological father. Malcolm Gladwell claimed that dedicating 10,000 hours to any practice would make a person an expert in that subject; in which case, by this third lockdown, I like many others will be well on my way to completing a PhD in reality TV.

There were high hopes the first time round that we might perhaps write the next Booker prize-winning novel, but those delusions have thankfully passed. Now, our only task is simply to make it through each day, and for me, the petty dramas of reality TV help fill the tedious hours ahead. While real life is paused, these semi-scripted reality shows are the ultimate in escapism, as well as allowing me to cathartically scream into the ether when the dramatic music hits and a would-be revelation is cut off for yet another ad break.

Married at First Sight Australia – the sixth series now being shown on E4 – might be a late spin-off of an older Danish show, but it has hit its stride for this particular outing down under. It’s genuinely impossible to turn off. We’re now 20 years on since the creation of reality TV, and any pretence that a show that marries off complete strangers is a social experiment is quite rightly laughable. Still, as a result, it means the characters are now acutely aware of the pantomime stage they’ve stepped up on to.

The “brutally honest” (and that’s putting it politely) Ines happily casts herself as the arch-villain of the series. She stops at nothing to pursue Sam, another woman’s husband, while treating her eyebrow-pierced spouse, Bronson, disdainfully one moment, then demanding the next: “Would you root me?” From the toe-curling scenes where Ines and Sam convince themselves of a deep connection with each other (“Do you like olives?” “I like, literally love olives” “Do you really? No way!”) through to their doing of the deed, I haven’t been this hooked on the truth coming out since The Undoing.

With nothing to talk about in our lives apart from the pandemic, conversations with friends and family quickly descend into silence. Life has been drained of any juicy content, and there’s a huge gossip-shaped hole in my daily existence. But reality TV has stepped in to fill the void as my WhatsApp groups pop once again for Bling Empire and Married At First Sight Australia. For my late-to-the-party friends who are only just catching up on Selling Sunset or Below Deck, I’m more than happy to revisit fond memories and get into granular discussions about the shows.

I recently interviewed a psychologist, Dr Sally Farley from the University of Baltimore, who explained that gossip has an important evolutionary function for us to understand social structures: “Gossip serves to keep us abreast of your social network. We all need to know where we fall in relation to others, and it’s the mechanism by which you’re learning information about other people. It’s something that cements and bonds human relationships.”

We have, and always will be, obsessed with discussing other people, and herein lies the genius of reality TV: we’re watching people talk about people talking about people. Instead of any actual news about our social circles, it’s only natural that we should turn to its next nearest replacement – strangers who aren’t quite real but then again aren’t too far removed from that cousin who once auditioned for The Only Way is Essex.

While some people are hunkering down with classic box sets such as The Sopranos or The Wire, I’m revisiting vintage reality. In Faking It, Channel 4’s excellent early noughties Pygmalion-esque show, contestants are trained to try to pass for somebody worlds away from their own identity. A cellist is transformed into a hard house DJ, a priest becomes a used-car salesman and the world’s squarest lawyer morphs into a garage MC. It’s a charming time-hop into a very different era when reality TV really could claim to be a social experiment, rather than a platform to launch Instagram’s hottest new influencer.

It’s a genre that has spanned decades, and if lockdown is set to carry on into the summer, there is always the never-ending Real Housewives franchise to begin with. Then Laguna Beach, followed up with the sequels, The Hills and The City. Dip into Catfish, Wife Swap, Don’t Tell The Bride, and then the earlier seasons of Geordie Shore, all of which should take you neatly up to the final ever series of the reality powerhouse, Keeping Up With The Kardashians, due out later this year.

By this point, life may start to take a more recognisable form. The time will no longer be there for eight-hour binges about life onboard a luxury yacht, or whether an estate agent managed to sell a $75m house. The events we see on screen will finally shift back into our lived reality, complete with mini-dramas and micro-aggressions of our own to deal with.

At the moment, reality TV reminds us – somewhat nostalgically – that there was and will be a life beyond the pandemic. Would I commit to marrying a stranger on national TV? Absolutely not, but I will fight for the right for anyone who decides that’s what a post-Covid future looks like for them – and obviously, I’ll happily tune in to watch it.



READ SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.