07: Study Notes

Contemporary reality TV is a scheme that Todd set up.

Feb 22, 2026

Thought of the week

I need to talk about reality TV.

It’s been a big week for reality TV and a terrible week for the cast of the shows. Tyra Banks and America’s Next Top Model are being ripped apart for terrorizing a decade of hopeful models. The men of Love is Blind are saying things like “nomadic dynamic” (that’s a big word for Elmo!) and insisting women need to do Pilates.

Internet discussions made me think about my relationship with reality TV, and why I feel so removed from something I always enjoyed.

This genre was never going to be, and definitely wasn’t pitched as, “great” TV. This worked out well for the production studios because the bar was so low, no one really expected the industry to turn into a cultural juggernaut.

In the beginning it was new and odd. Watching youth at spring break or strangers in a house. I couldn’t tell you what was compelling about it, but my money is on relatability. Was I a twenty-something in a major U.S. city, sharing my unhinged thoughts in a confessional? No, I was a teen in a suburb sharing unhinged thoughts in my diary. Lo mismo!

Then we got survivalist shows and become-the-next-icon shows. In this golden era, late ‘90s/early ‘00s, we got a decent list of celebrities out of these shows. Kelly Clarkson (American Idol), Jamie Chung (Real World: San Diego), and the world’s last boy band: One Direction (U.K. X Factor). This was still very much pre-social media. We still had to text, even worse: CALL to vote.

And then social media happened and reality TV went from a spectator sport to a content machine. At first, this was a gift!

Because it’s the internet, everything is documented. Because it’s reality TV, everything is performed. When you put those together, you get memeified, larger than life characters who cemented themselves as cultural royalty without even trying. I don’t think it’s a hyperbole to say that the internet, specifically reaction memes and gifs, would not be what it is today without New York (Tiffany Pollard) and Nene Leakes.

But once it became lucrative to make a living on social media, everything shifted. Reality TV veered less into the quotable, and into contestants who arrived not to be seen but to be followed.

We’ll never have another Toddddddd? Who is Todd?????, but we will have out-of-context snippets of strangers on an unclear show, stitched retweeted and dissected by someone on the internet (me). We’ll never have another “girl who didn’t go to Paris,” but we will have another edition of cast-member-to-influencer, cast-member-to-criminal or cast-member-to-podcast-host pipeline. Personalities and impact so fleeting I’ll forget about them in two scrolls. One day they’re in, the next day they’re out.

Yearning for a return to a simpler time where we found out what happens when people stop being polite, and

start

getting

real.