One thing about me that surprises of people who don’t know me very well is that I’m a pretty big fan of reality television. Even more surprisingly, perhaps, is the fact that I’m an especially big fan of a subset of reality television in which people compete to “find love”—almost always monogamous, heterosexual, good-looking love with other monogamous, heterosexual, good-looking people—under a series of bizarre, artificial, and non-sensical constraints.1 Shows that fall under this category include ongoing series like Love Island, Love is Blind, and The Ultimatum, as well as VH1 classics like Rock of Love, Flavor of Love, and I Love New York (each of which deserve to be enshrined as cultural landmarks of the 2000s). However, I am most devoted to the Bachelor and Bachelorette franchise.2
The premise of these shows is straightforward: a good-looking man (the Bachelor) or woman (the Bachelorette), is given the opportunity to find love among a group of 20-30 equally attractive and diverse contestants. The contestants try to prove desire and commitment to the Bachelor/ette through feats of strength, humiliation rituals, cross-promotional advertising events, and “cocktail parties.” For their efforts, the Bachelor/ette rewards the ones they like best with roses, and every episode, the contestants who do not receive roses are “eliminated” and forbidden from pursuing their relationship with the Bachelor or Bachelorette further (presumably by the show’s host).3 Eventually, the pool of contestants is narrowed down to a set of four, at which point the Bachelor/ette is required to meet the families of these relative strangers, then to three, where sex between the couples is permitted (only once! And only in the bizarrely named “Fantasy Suites”), and finally, to two, one of whom is chosen in an engagement ceremony. The engagements are rarely successful, but, sometimes, surprisingly, they are. In any case, what happens “after the final rose” is more or less irrelevant.
What I find particularly interesting about this show (and others like it) is not necessarily the highly artificial “search for love” that is presented as authentic and real (I’m not a child, after all—I know that love is rarely on the table), but the fact that despite the fact that I know none of it is real, I still find myself involved in the drama of the show and that, frankly, I enjoy it. There’s some part of me that is engaged in Brechtian distancing from what’s going on and that is constantly reminding me about the number of PAs on set, the lighting and costuming directors, the massive cameras that swoop in on every kiss, and so on, and another part of me that thinks that it was a fool’s move to approach the Bachelorette so aggressively at the cocktail party, or that a contestant’s parents truly don’t understand how love can blossom between two strangers. As such, I find myself very much like the wrestling fan who, despite knowing that all the fights are choreographed and all the conflict is artificial, still yells at the TV when the latest baby-face makes a heel turn.
And, indeed, for a long time I thought that the key to understanding reality television was a principle that is originally found in wrestling: kayfabe. Kayfabe, briefly put, is the practice in professional wrestling of presenting what is clearly staged as real, both on and off the stage. It involves engaging in a kind of bald-faced lie in which both the audience and the entertainers involved know that what is presented is staged, but in which the entertainers vehemently deny that it is. There is nothing malicious in this kind of lie, and, according to at least some people, “keeping” kayfabe allows the audience to more easily experience emotion.
But I’m not sure that that is the case. It is true that breaking kayfabe during a wrestling match would indeed decrease the intensity of the emotions experienced by the crowd, but this much is true for virtually every kind of entertainment that involves some shared pretense. If, for example, Christian Bale turned to the camera, broke the fourth wall, and said “by the way, I’m not really Batman” then it would be pretty difficult to get invested in what happens to him when he’s face to face with the Joker. But we don’t need Christian Bale to insist that he really is Batman when he goes on the Today Show, and his promotion of the film doesn’t detract from the experience of watching the film. Likewise, I venture to guess that it is only a very, very small minority whose experience in watching the film is ruined by being reminded that Bale isn’t really Batman after the film is over. Yet, when kayfabe is discussed, the assumption seems to be that when it comes to wrestling, acknowledging that these are people portraying characters put in highly artificial situations would somehow detract from the enjoyment. I don’t think this is the case and I’d be very sad to learn that someone’s experience in watching The Rock deliver the People’s Elbow against Hulk Hogan4 was ruined by being reminded that the two probably don’t hate each other and are just working together in a televised athletic production.
The same is true, I think, for reality television. In fact, it’s easy to show that maintaining kayfabe isn’t necessary for enjoyment because “Bachelor in Paradise” exists. For the uninitiated, this part of the Bachelor franchise completely does away with the pretense of the main series and just puts all the attractive people from past seasons on a beach together to couple up, drink, and have as much sex as they want to. The very same contestants who only two months ago were head-over-heels with the Bachelor or Bachelorette, who shed countless tears at their rejection, and who couldn’t have imagined a life without “their person” are seemingly doing perfectly fine and never even as much as mention any of the events that supposedly had such a profound and transformative experience on their lives. This would seem strange but if not for the fact that everyone—audience and contestants alike—are aware of the fact that the events of the main show are not meant to carry over into this show, and that what happened there wasn’t really real.
This is not to deny that there is quite a bit of kayfabe in these shows—after all, even in Paradise, nobody explicitly says “yeah, that was all for television” and they generally try to stay away from the fact that the franchise as a whole is primarily used as a way of generating Instagram followings. But I am skeptical that this shared practice of kayfabe is what makes the show engaging.
In any case, all this is to say that the role of kayfabe has been overstated as the key to understanding what’s entertaining about (this kind of) reality television. Instead, I want to suggest that what does is kayfabe’s familiar cousin: improvisation. In improvisation, actors are given a particular character to play in a particular setting and they do their best to produce believable (often humorous, but not necessarily), representations of their characters without a script. Both the audience and the players are explicitly aware that the situation that is being simulated is not reality, but, depending on the skills of the actors and the willingness of the audience, both are able to suspend that belief and experience what’s happening in the scene with genuine emotion.5
That much of this shared with reality television is obvious enough. However, what makes reality television different from standard improvisation is the fact that the contestants in reality television aren’t given their characters by either the audience or the producers, but are chosen by the contestants themselves. In some cases, the characters in question end up being stock characters—the bad-boy, the virgin, the manipulator, etc.—but in most cases, people play the character of themselves-in-the-situation-they’re-presented-with. Thus, when real person Michael M. meets the Bachelorette for the first time, he isn’t told “make sure when you meet her you act like a really self-centered bastard,” nor does he go into the situation as the actual Michael M. meeting some strange woman. Rather, he enters the situation as Michael-M-who-is-supposed-to-be-falling-in-love-with-whatever-woman-he-meets-outside-the-limo. Let’s call this character Michael*.
Michael M. and Michael* are not the same person, nor is Michael* necessarily an accurate and factual representation of what Michael M. would be like in the given situation. This becomes obvious when we consider a more extreme example. Suppose, for instance, that we told Michael M. that he was going to be in a simulated bank robbery and encouraged him to act in the same way that he thinks he would if he were really being robbed. In filming that, we see Michael M. behaving as he thinks he would behave were he being robbed. But behaving in that way may be very different from the way he would behave if he were really robbed. In the former case, he might act defiant, bold, and fearless; in the latter, he might be anxious, timid, and cowardly. Of course, there might be some overlap between how he would actually behave and how he thinks he would behave, but it would be naive to think that there is a one-to-one mapping between performance and reality. In the same sense, when we put Michael M. in the context of having to fall in love, what we’re seeing is really Michael M.’s own interpretation of what he thinks he acts like when he falls in love (or what he would look like if he were).
This doubling effect in which a real person plays a character of themselves is, I believe, the most interesting thing about reality television because it does two things. First, like other kinds of acting and improvisation, it can be entertaining depending on how skilled the players involved are at reading and adding to the scene that they find themselves participating in. Not everyone is good at improvisation, but when they are, it makes for good television because we can delight in the craft.
Second, because the characters on display are characters of real people played by the very same person being portrayed, it’s easy to blur the line between the character and the actor in a way that kayfabe attempts to do, but in which it can only do through a denial of the split between actor and character. With reality television, this denial isn’t necessary, but not because what is being presented is reality, but because the character is modeled on and performed by the actor. This, too, can be a source of delight.6
And third, and most interesting, I believe, is the fact that this kind of doubling can tell us something about how we, the audience, and society more broadly, understand the specific phenomenon in question. The thought is something like this: because the contestants on these shows are trying to play believable characters, they will often act in ways that they think the audience will understand. Thus, men who have to pretend to be in love will often play characters as jealous and possessive or ultra-competitive with other men because that’s how they think most people understand being in love. This is true regardless of whether that is how they actually act when they are in love (as mentioned, they may not even know how they act in such situations). Once we realize this, we are able to create the critical space to enjoy the work, but to also understand that we are part of a society in which these behaviors make sense (or don’t!). From there, we can take a critical stance towards these factors themselves (why, for example, does it ‘make sense’ that every contestant mention how important it is that the Bachelor/ette is close to his or her parents? Never in my life have I thought it important that a potential romantic partner of mine be close to her mom—it’s fine if they are, but like…who cares!?)
Okay, so, how should you watch reality television? The answer is already patently clear. If you don’t already like reality television, but find yourself having to watch it for whatever reason, my (unsurprising) recommendation is that you start thinking of the show (whatever it might be) as one long improvisational acting exercise and evaluate it as such. Are the characters convincing being made up convincing? Are they working with everything they have at their disposal? Can the actors read the scene? Do they know how to elevate the action? Are they able to follow the set rules of the scene while subverting them? And so on. You can also start paying attention to the kind of characters that are being presented and why they contestants (and producers) are choosing to present themselves in such a way. What does it tell us about us that they are doing this? Chances are that if you already like reality television you do this to some extent, but if not, maybe this can add a bit to your enjoyment.
A notable exception to this was The Ultimatum: Queer Love, which involved exclusively lesbian couples and which I have no doubt set back queer people a generation.
Although, I should say that I watch the spinoffs too, including the sometimes deeply depressing and condescending Golden Bachelor and the doomed Listen to Your Heart. The latter of which involved show producers unsuccessfully trying to lean into the fact that many of the show’s contestants appeared on television primarily to promote their music and acting careers by requiring that the show’s winning couple also be musically compatible. It was a horrible failure that is perhaps worth remembering only for the fact that one of the “prizes” that the couples could win on the show was a “date” at a Guitar Center after it had closed for the day. Rad.
What precise means of enforcing the rules of the show there are, are beyond my knowledge. But, I suppose, it might also be the case that just as you don’t have to make sure that people who used to work together don’t continue working together after one of them has been fired, so there’s no need to make sure that people who used to “date” on this show break contact after one of them has been eliminated.
Yes, I know they don’t overlap. Get over it.
Just as with wrestling and other kinds of entertainment, the improvisors don’t explicitly state that they’re not really who they pretend to be, but it is not a requirement that they keep up the pretense once the scene is over.
For some reason, humans really delight in recursion. I do too. Not sure why, but I guess I should read “Goedel, Escher, Bach”