Hello and welcome to another edition of the Guide. Gwilym is away, so this week and next I’ll be filling in with your dose of pop culture talking points, recommendations and reader picks.
We begin with the news that Netflix’s hit series Selling Sunset returns for a fifth season later next month (22 April to be precise). Set in the backstabbing world of big-money real estate brokers in LA, the show has steadily become a word-of-mouth smash since it launched in 2019. Fans (myself included) rejoiced at the announcement, and the chance to finally see Jason and Chrishell’s romance (showmance?) unfold on screen. But in 2022, is reality TV less “guilty pleasure” and more “toxic trash fire”?
Is it all too real?
Reality TV has long run the gamut from quasi-documentaries to more structured (and scripted) series. The genre now takes in everything from Bake Off to Love Is Blind, every week bringing a new show claiming to offer a peek into someone’s dating life/workplace drama, or some kind of improbable competition (see: Netflix latest, Is It Cake?). Reality TV is everywhere, and everything – which is one of the reasons it’s increasingly in the line of fire. After all, the more ubiquitous something is, the more controversy you’re likely to find.
In recent years, Love Island has become something of a bete noire for both viewers and regulators, tarnished by accusations of racism and the deaths of contestants, and former host Caroline Flack, by suicide. Earlier this month, Channel 4’s series Death on Daytime put the Jeremy Kyle Show under the microscope, using the death of a former participant to make wider points about the insalubrious culture behind the scenes of the talkshow (accusations refuted by ITV). Meanwhile, last year a study from Central Michigan University in the US found that watching reality shows that showed aggression and violence could lead to an increase in these behaviours among viewers (what is called “relational aggression”).
Or not real enough?
All this seems to stand in stark contrast with shows like Selling Sunset, which, though nominally about bitching and backbiting among the glamorous Oppenheim Group team, goes down as smoothly as a complimentary glass of champagne at a mega-mansion viewing. Selling Sunset got me – and many others besides – through lockdown after lockdown, in part because of how low-stakes its “high stakes” really were.
For those who haven’t seen it yet, Selling Sunset is a sort-of-real-life rehash of every mean girl-themed American high school movie, mixed with a never-ending supply of house porn and presided over by identikit blond women (and a few identikit brunette women) who say “oh my god” in varying intonations, depending on the magnitude of the drama. A giant bell is rung every time the group makes a sale (poor neighbours). It is soapy, it is ridiculous and … come to think of it, maybe a little toxic. As the show’s de facto villain, Christine Quinn is presented as the root cause of much of the unrest – unrest that is, of course, integral to the format of the show, and thus to Netflix’s success. But there are plenty of other pot-stirrers in the picture, feeding information to one another in highly edited scenes that are the convention of post-2010s reality shows. Plus: they’re at work. This isn’t normal workplace behaviour we’re seeing, right?!
The harsh reality
Selling Sunset and its ilk – among them the many iterations of the Real Housewives franchise – probably do affect some viewers negatively. They are, largely, as shallow as a puddle, and full of bullying behaviour, which often seems more suited to a playground than an office. And yet they remain utterly compelling, facilitating the parasocial interaction that has become a convention of often lonely pandemic times. Reality TV is a deeply troubled medium, and one that is undergoing something of a reckoning (see the podcast Harsh Reality, about the misguided reality series There’s Something About Miriam, which antagonised its trans participant).
However, it’s important to make a distinction between the reality shows that truly harm us and the ones that are merely uncanny versions of the mad world we already live in. In the age of TikTok and Insta ubiquity, we’re all reality stars to some degree. At least on Selling Sunset, unlike in real life, there’s someone standing just out of shot waiting to shout “cut” before the messiest drama begins.
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