Plagued by low-rise jeans, bad tans, far too obvious hair extensions, flip phones, and an obscene amount of layering tank tops the early 2000s brought us some of the most beloved reality TV. One of the first true reality TV shows, The Real World, aired on MTV on May 21st, 1992. The concept is simple: seven strangers from across America are put in a New York loft and recorded 24/7. In the first ten minutes of episode 1, season 1 we meet 19-year-old Julie and her family from Birmingham, Alabama. It is evident that Julie and her dad look at life very differently. He wants her to be a computer operator, Julie is leaving for New York City to find herself and hopefully a career as a dancer. The latter half of the ten minutes include everyone meeting each other for the first time. As most reality shows include in the first episode before everyone starts hooking up and hating each other. The Real World went on to grace TV screens for 33 seasons, until it was canceled in 2017.
Fast forward to the 21st-century reality TV is everywhere. We have never been closer to celebrities or fame or the lives of rich people. Before this age of reality TV, celebrities have been in our lives, on our TVs, our clothes, our magazines, our posters in our bedrooms. Not the other way around. Now we have a front-row seat to their personal lives. We see how they live through shows like MTV Cribs, which aired September 12 of 2000, and Real Housewives of Orange County, which premiered March 21st of 2006. We see if they could survive in the real world through Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s The Simple Life, aired on December 3rd, 2003. We see them find love, or pretend to find love through Flavor of Love, starring Grammy-nominated rapper Flavor Flav, which aired on January 1st of 2006. The parasocial relationship, the term coined for the one-sided relationships normal people have with public figures, in the middle of the 00s, has never been stronger or muddier, depending on how you view celebrities.
The simplicity of shows like The Real World, featuring average people who have been cut off from actual reality, had not been lost on the tracksuit-wearing generation. We see shows like The Bachelor, Big Brother, and Jersey Shore pop up onto our TVs. All of which are still around today and have even had spin-off shows. As much time and money we invest into our favorite celebrities and as much as we want to see them rough it in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas, thank you Paris and Nicole, or see their kitschy antique beach homes, thank you Pamela Anderson, I would argue that we want to see normal people more. We want to see people who have boring lives that work in gray office buildings, with no previous media experience before being thrown in front of an entire country and filmed 24/7. Celebrities who have an image to keep are not going to get extremely wasted and cheat on their significant other with a camera less than 3 feet away, at least not intentionally, but normal people will. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain. In the early 2000s from 2014 getting famous was, for the most part, a one-way path. If you wanted to be famous, without being a singer or an actor, you had to get on a TV show or be seen with famous people, a perfect example is Kim Kardashian’s friendship with Paris Hilton. All of that has changed now.
With the rise of social media and technology, you don’t need MTV, ABC, or Bravo to come into stardom. You can use YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and, more recently, TikTok. You can film your life and edit it however you want, a perk many early celebrities did not get. People use social media as a way to get to fame, real fame. Fame where these people from social media were in a room with people who rose to fame in a more traditional way, people like models, actors, and singers. We are seeing the intersection of modern celebrities with traditional celebrities at a majority of Hollywood events. Addison Rae and Emma Chamberlain were at the 2021 Met Gala, along with Rihanna and Timothée Chalamet. The power is now in the hands of average people, literally, it's in our phones.
Anybody can become a celebrity now. This coupled with the fact that there is way too much to watch is causing reality TV to meet its tragic demise. You do not even need to watch these shows to know what is going on. You have accounts like @realitysteve, who posts spoilers about upcoming The Bachelor episodes, and accounts that are completely dedicated to the on and off-air drama of certain reality shows, like @therealhousewiveszone. Both are on Instagram and both are accounts I follow avidly.
Social media has created a very weird cycle in reality TV. Say you’re a contestant on The Bachelor or The Bachelorette or Bachelor in Paradise. You make it to the top four, maybe you win, or maybe you just cause a lot of drama. With every episode, your followers go up. Once the show is over you do a couple of interviews, go to a couple of events. Then the next season airs a month or so later. You have about 11 to 13 weeks to make America love you. Then a month to capitalize on that small following you have created. But America can love you or they can love 29 other people. So you have to cause a scene, fight, stand out somehow because people want to see drama. Now imagine this multiplied by literally every single other reality show that airs in a year span. There is this mass production happening with reality show contestants. Producers, who famously love to stir the pot, and editors, who love to give some people “villain edits,” chew contestants up and spit them out. Now you have completely turned your life upside down, made yourself look ridiculous on national television, and for what. So you can have a solid 4-star podcast, like literally everybody else.
Ratings of popular reality shows are down, maybe it is because there are so many streaming services or the turnaround isn’t fast enough or maybe people are just bored. We no longer need to sit through a 48-minute episode to get the fix of drama that we all crave, we can just read a couple of Twitter threads. In a way, I think we’re all just 19-year-old Julie, looking for something in our TV that makes our lives feel bigger than they actually are.
I do not know if reality TV will ever bring us another Snooki, but I do that I will never stop tuning in or keeping up.
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