Reality Television in a Burning World

What does it all mean?

Welcome slurpy readers!

Thanks for embarking on this journey with me, as I attempt to impose structure on my writing practice and spitball ideas for my eventual opus in a low-impact, unstructured environment. Dizzying highs and devastating lows ahead, toot toot!

If you don’t already know, I’m Tara, a person who enjoys writing and lives in New York. You may know me as the @slurpy_comrade, from my woo woo radio show Mystical Sweeties, as the former online editor of Ladies of Leisure, or maybe you’re one of my 42 dedicated Twitter followers! I’m also a full time wage slave (using the term affectionately) at a mental health nonprofit, so this project is all about the #side#hustle#life, winky w bead of sweat.

For the first installment of Slurp, I’m deep diving into the crazy, messed up world of reality television.

Recently, as the world burns, I’ve been rabidly gorging more reality television than ever. Historically, I have not been an avid consumer, with little meaningful engagement with the genre since those heady, early seasons of Australian Big Brother, Popstars, and of course The Simple Life, since which there have been significant developments.

It started early in the pandemic, with Love is Blind, which I then scrambled to replace with the undeniably inferior Too Hot to Handle (would still recommend if you're looking to impose a narrative about spiritual growth onto your own forced pandemic celibacy: see this article I wrote for more deep takes), which led to Real Housewives of New York, followed by the inimitable Vanderpump Rules. If, like me, you slept on “the Pump” for the last seven years, the show follows Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member and restaurateur Lisa Vanderpump of West Hollywood hot spot SUR – that’s Sexy Unique Restaurant, to you! – and the interpersonal dramas of her shiny, fame hungry waitstaff. In the words of cast member Stassi Schroeder*, “The servers at SUR all want to be models, actors, writers and singers. Waiters at other Hollywood restaurants just want to be waiters at SUR!”

The central players of the Pump move through the world from a reactionary, base, animalistic place. Those who have made it into the inner sanctum of the central friendship group strive to maintain their proximity to the alpha characters, supremely threatened by any new servers they fear will upset the relevance they have eked out for themselves. The men are constantly getting “caught with their trousers down”, with the first two seasons featuring multiple cheating in Vegas on a modelling shoot plot twists.

Sam and a friend I roped into watching the show both reported that it made them feel anxious and a little nauseous. For me, it’s the great soothe. 

The Pump universe reminds me a lot of the way my friends and I behaved in our late teens and very early 20s, a heady time filled with complex and devastating love triangles, revenge plots culminating in throwing drinks on people at parties, and many a fake Herve Leger dress. Recently, procrastinating at work one day, I hit back on my own Facebook photos and found myself in 2008, a strange twilight zone where comment exchanges on group photos as follows are normal:

James: “omgggg Johnno is looking at Sarah’s boobs”

Sarah: “damn right he is hehe ;)” 

It was a disorientating but fascinating exercise.

At some point, like most people, I made a concerted effort to neutralize my more jealous and violent social urges, in the belief that they would ultimately lead to a loop of pain and sorrow. As a result, my life got a lot more boring and would no longer make for compelling reality television. 

While certainly not enlightened, moving through the world as a self-serving agent of chaos is not not fun, in its own debased way. Cheating, fighting and associated mayhem punctuate the tedium of life – a rupture from day to day drudgery that makes you feel ALIVE – which I suppose is part of why such behaviors are so common even when self-sabotaging and illogical. For me, reality television provides a portal into an alternate universe where deviant behaviors are normalized and celebrated. I look on, both smugly superior and in awe. Somewhere deep within the recesses of my soul I wish my birthdays were as iconic and action-packed as Stassi’s Vegas moment.

One of my favorite writers, Naomi Fry, speaks to this mixture of disgust and intrigue in this hilarious article about the thrill of dm’ing with Justin Bobby, washed up bad boy of The Hills:

You (me), the married, bespectacled Jewess writer in her late thirties, are simultaneously too good for someone like Justin Bobby and yet not quite good enough. It would be mortifying to consort with his type, but, hypothetically speaking, would you (me) ever get to have that chance in the first place?

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At this stage in the game we know that reality television is staged and manipulated: we’ve heard the confessional from the ex-Bachelor producer forced to drive contestants around eliciting tears with emotional manipulation, or if that failed, jalapenos. At the same time, it’s impossible for reality telly hopefuls to fully fake a personality, which is why the stars quickly emerge and the boring ones recede into the background. While the Pump cast members may be aspiring actors, the acting is unconvincing: it is painfully clear who is deeply insecure and who’s in control of the narrative. While the cast members may never “make it” in the cruel world of showbiz, over eight seasons of the show they become famous for being on reality television, thus achieving their dream of stardom. Meta!

While alcoholism, cheating, and brushes with the law are fairly par for the course, sometimes, greater tragedies permeate the carefully constructed worlds. In Season 7 of Vanderpump, Lisa’s brother dies by suicide, addressed onscreen with a brief piece to camera and some stilted, clearly highly edited exchanges with friends. On Season 11 of Real Housewives of New York, Bethenny Frankel’s boyfriend Dennis Shields dies from a drug overdose, and it is undeniably moving to see her grapple with the experience honestly on the show. Elliot Rodgers, the 22 year old who murdered six people before taking his own life in the 2014 Isla Vista massacre, wrote in his manifesto about his plans to kill his stepmother, Soumaya Akaaboune, a Moroccan actress who in 2013 appeared in Les Vraies Housewives, the French version of Real Housewives. Rodgers, whose father was a producer on The Hunger Games, was motivated to kill by his perceived inability to succeed in the money, status and sex obsessed Calabasas reality in which he grew up.

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On a lighter note, did you know that in 2005 second wave feminist writer Germaine Greer** went on British Celebrity Big Brother 3, desperate to invest the £40,000 appearance money in conservation efforts to save a large patch of Australian rainforest? She was forced to dress up as a slutty serving wench, among other humiliations, and left the show after just six days, declaring Big Brother akin to a “fascist prison”.

Of the ordeal, journalist Sarah Lyall wrote:

Contestants habitually complain about their experiences on reality television shows. It is one of the standard features of the entertainment, like groveling for meals or getting drunk and falling over. But the complaints are usually directed at the other participants. As one said about another in a past season, “If I had stayed in that house a minute longer, I would have murdered Les.”

What made the 65-year-old Ms. Greer's departure last week so riveting, by contrast, was that her attack was not a personal whining session, but a blistering cultural and literary critique of the show that revealed her as perhaps the only contestant who has ever actually read (or at least admitted reading) George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," where the whole notion of Big Brother was born.

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Any reality television historians in the slurpy community? I welcome your thoughts and learnings below! Until next time….

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*Stassi was recently fired from Vanderpump over an earlier racist incident against another cast member.

**Germaine Greer is transphobic and has said some bat shit stuff over the last few decades. I don’t know or endorse all her opinions.