Requiem for Reality: Why I Stopped Watching Reality TV
The genre is dying, but it stopped being reality a long time ago.
Hop in the way-back machine and watch this interview with Andrew Jenks from 13 years ago…reality TV is just different now…
Last month, The New York Times published a piece called “Reality TV Confronts a Harsh TV Reality” and I clicked on it because I had to.
The numbers are bad. Like, really bad. The number of unscripted series in the U.S. has dropped by a third since 2022. HGTV went from 78 shows to 35 (which hurt); MTV just axed Jersey Shore Family Vacation AND Catfish (which hurt extra bad); and, Food Network has cut its output in half.
An era is quietly vanishing, the Times says.
And I’m sitting here like...yeah. I know. I left years ago.
I Used to Be a Reality TV Person
Not casually. I was IN it. I had opinions. I had group chats dedicated to episode breakdowns. I knew elimination orders before they aired because I was on the spoiler subreddits like a deranged little gremlin.
I grew up in the original Bachelor and Bachelorette era, back when the contestants seemed like actual people who wandered onto a TV set actually looking for love, not aspiring influencers who showed up with a content strategy and a character arc we could anticipate within the first interview.
I watched Love Island when it was still just a UK thing. When they let people smoke cigarettes on the terrace. When the drama was messy, chaotic, human, and unhinged in a way that made you go “oh no” out loud to your television.
Back when The Real World was seven strangers in a house and that was genuinely the whole premise. Back when Survivor felt dangerous and Richard Hatch winning naked felt like a national event we all had to process together. Back when Big Brother was a weird social experiment and not a game theory seminar for people who’ve memorized every previous season. Back when Jersey Shore was three seasons of Snooki getting arrested and nobody had a skincare line yet.
Back when confessionals were actual confessions, not scripted monologues where you could literally hear the producer coaxing the question in the background. You felt the human in it because you had been there one way or another. Maybe not Snooki getting arrested on the Jersey Shore, but the sheer human candor in what she was doing and a camera just happened to catch it.
That’s what made it work. Not the drama itself, but the recognition of it.
The sorority girl watching in her dorm room recognized herself in the petty arguments and the crying in bathrooms. The housewife folding laundry at 10pm recognized herself in the exhaustion and the sharp comments that came out wrong. The husband who said he wasn’t interested but somehow migrated from the kitchen to the couch and stayed for five episodes, he found genuine interest in it, even if he wouldn’t admit it.
Because we were watching versions of ourselves, unfiltered and unpolished and messy in all the ways we are when we think nobody’s paying attention. Reality TV held up a mirror. And for a while, we actually wanted to look.
So What Happened?
I mean, personally? I got older. I stopped wanting to watch utter chaos at the end of a day of my own sort of chaos.
But more importantly, and I think we all know this even if we don’t want to say it out loud, the shows got fake.
Like, really fake. Unwatchably fake.
At some point, everyone on screen figured out they were on a show and could land sponsorships and influencer deals after. And once that happened, the whole thing collapsed. Now everyone’s playing a character. Everyone’s angling for the edit. Everyone has a publicist and a podcast deal waiting and they’re not here to find love, they’re here to pivot to hosting gigs. They have coaches training them before they go on. Nothing is authentic anymore.
Along the way reality television became scripted.
And I didn’t sign up to watch a soap opera with worse acting and lower stakes. I signed up for the chaos of watching real humans make unhinged decisions on camera. Watching someone fall in love, or have a complete meltdown at a rose ceremony, and knowing that was a reaction only a human being could muster up.
Now? I can see the seams. I can feel the producer in the room. I recognize the villain they’re trying to create before it’s been established. I can practically hear someone whispering “say that again but angrier” off-camera.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And then you’re just watching bad improv.
The mirror stopped reflecting anything real. So I stopped looking.
The Money Thing
The Times gets into the economics: cable is cratering, budgets are slashed, every company has been bought and sold and bought again until nobody knows who owns what anymore.
One producer quoted in the piece said “Everything’s contracting, and there are no new shows right now” which is both extremely bleak and also like... yeah. We can tell.
So let’s talk numbers, because they paint the story for us. In the 2009-10 TV season, reality shows made up about a third of all viewership among the top 50 programs. By 2022-23, that number had dropped to 12 percent. American Idol peaked in Season 5 with 30.6 million average viewers per episode. The Season 2 finale—Ruben versus Clay, a genuine cultural event—drew 38.1 million people. Today the show averages around 7 million. That’s a 75 percent decline from its peak.
I’m not naive. I was a network news producer. I am well aware nothing is ever fully as it seems. There were always story editors and frankenbites and producers stirring the pot. But there used to be room for real moments to happen. Now the budgets are so tight and the pressure for viral clips is so intense that everything has to be a MOMENT. Every episode needs a TikTok-ready meltdown. There’s no space for slow burns or weird tangents or anything that can’t be turned into a 30-second clip with subtitles.
So every show starts to feel the same. Same beats. Same confessional cadence. Same “shocking twist” you saw coming three episodes ago because they’ve been foreshadowing it like it’s a Marvel movie.
What’s Even Left?
The Times mentions the survivors: The Traitors, Love Island USA, Survivor, the Housewives extended universe that will outlive us all.
And fine. The Traitors is actually great. It’s got real stakes and Alan Cumming doing whatever Alan Cumming is doing in that castle. My group chat is still gushing about the show and truthfully, we’d all watch Alan Cumming do anything. Survivor somehow still works after 47 seasons, which genuinely feels like it should be studied by scientists.
But these are the exceptions. The mid-tier shows, the weird cable experiments, the stuff you’d stumble onto at 2am and get inexplicably invested in, that’s all disappearing. And what’s replacing it? YouTube. TikTok. Influencers cutting out the middleman entirely.
The Times mentions Yolanda Hadid is doing a home design show on YouTube now instead of HGTV and I’m sure it’ll be fine but it’s not the same. It’s not the unhinged energy of seven strangers in a house who didn’t know what they were signing up for.
It’s just content now. We’re all just making content.
(I say, writing content about content. The irony is not lost on me.)
The Real World Walked So MrBeast Could Run
But here’s the argument that still matters: reality TV didn’t die. It migrated.
The format, ordinary people, competitions, eliminations, confessionals, the voyeuristic thrill of watching strangers do strange things, that’s all still here. It just moved platforms. The Real World and Road Rules Challenge walked so MrBeast could run.
MrBeast has 475 million YouTube subscribers and growing. A single video can pull 150 million views in its first week. His “Squid Game in Real Life” video has been watched 750 million times—more views than the actual Squid Game on Netflix. When he launched Beast Games on Amazon Prime, it hit 50 million viewers in 25 days and became their most-watched unscripted series ever.
The same impulse that made us watch seven strangers in a house in 1992 now makes us watch 1,000 contestants compete for $5 million in a warehouse. The difference is who controls the pipeline. No network executives. No advertisers to please. No middle-aged men in suits deciding what the narrative should be. (Sorry not sorry.) Just the creator and the algorithm.
That’s the trade-off we made. We wanted authenticity, so we fled to platforms where anyone could post anything. But “anyone can post anything” doesn’t mean it’s real. It just means we traded one kind of produced content for another, except now the production is invisible because the creator IS the network.
I don’t think YouTube killed reality TV. I think reality TV taught an entire generation how to perform for cameras, and then gave them the tools to cut out the middleman. And we clicked. We watched. We validated.
I Miss When It Was Messy
But if you choose to read anything in this article, let it be this.
I know reality TV was never really real. We all know that.
But it used to FEEL real. There was something raw about it. Even when it was clearly edited to within an inch of its life, there were moments that felt genuinely human. Genuinely surprising. Moments where you turned to your friend in your high school living room, wide eyes and mouth gaping, and said “did that just really happen?” because you believed it. I look back at those moments fondly. And yes, time has changed but my high school friends and I still reminisce on Season 18 of The Bachelor, when Juan Pablo broke our brains as the most unhinged Bachelor to ever exist.
Because that’s what we lost. The belief. The trust that what we were seeing had some kernel of truth in it. The sense that these were people, not characters. That their joy was real and their heartbreak was real and their bad decisions at 2am were the same bad decisions we’d made or almost made or secretly wanted to make.
I don’t believe any of it anymore. I watch five minutes and I can feel the inauthenticity. I can feel the content strategy. I can feel seventeen people in a room deciding what the narrative is before anyone even starts talking.
I’m not saying the old stuff was perfect. Some of those early shows were exploitative as f***. The genre has grown up in some ways that matter.
But it lost something too. The chaos. The surprise. The feeling that you were watching actual humans being actual disasters.
Because we’ve all been disasters, whether we like it or not. Real recognizes real.
Now I know exactly what’s going to happen. And I’d rather just not.
The Verdict
Reality TV isn’t dead. The Housewives will be filming until the sun explodes and Bravo will find a way to monetize the apocalypse.
But the version I grew up with? The version that felt like you were peeking behind a curtain into something you weren’t supposed to see, something you understood because you’d been there?
That’s been gone for a while.
The ratings are just finally catching up.
— Tara
Tara Ruff is an Emmy-winning journalist and founder of Purpose Public Relations. She writes stories for a living—and about them for fun. Ok, TV is part of the Sree’s Sunday Note family of newsletters.