When it comes to trash TV, there are two types of men. A few months back, I met one of the first kind — the ones who open their heart to the complexities of unscripted television unapologetically, who dive in headfirst to the raw emotion, the heartache, the unbridled joy that comes from watching hysterical middle-aged women sometimes physically fight for views. At this friend’s house, he recommended we watch Below Deck, a show about horny yacht crews that spend weeks at sea serving millionaires and spend days off shagging their captain while blind drunk. Five episodes in and I was hooked. It’s a good thing the show has seven franchises to keep me going. Between the flagship Below Deck and Below Deck: Mediterranean alone, there are nearly 300 episodes.
Then there’s the other type of guy, the one who says things like, “I can feel myself losing brain cells,” when they catch even a glimpse of a Bravo trailer. He loiters around the living room when they hear the theme tune to The Bachelor or The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, never sitting to watch it (that’d be obvious) but always standing intently. Throughout, he’ll say things like, “How can you watch this crap?” but he’ll slip up with comments that make you realize he’s enthralled. “Does she really think that diamond is worth $2 million?” or “What on earth is Erika Jayne wearing?”
We unashamed consumers of reality TV are the happier ones, be we men or women. We binge seasons we’ve already seen 10 times and have group chats dedicated to different franchises. (I personally have three.) While reality TV ratings have always shown there to be a huge demand for this sort of thing, people have always been hesitant to admit the success of reality TV over the past several decades means anything for the culture and the people who love it, thinking of it as a guilty pleasure instead of a genre. When critics take note, it’s to scoff. And they’re right, of course, in part. It’s mindless crap! But any time millions of people love something and want to spend their time and attention and money on it, only very incurious or very stupid or very status-conscious cultural elites would insist they aren’t interested in why that is at all. Think of it like WWE or NASCAR, sports phenomena that are both as objectively important as they are objectively ignored.
That’s changing, somewhat. This past year, Bravo-bingers have been vindicated after reality TV plotlines dominated the headlines of serious publications, for example with coverage in the New York Times Magazine going to one particularly notable affair, later dubbed “Scandoval,” that became such a defining moment in pop culture that PR companies are now clueing up clients on what they call the “Scandoval Effect.” Scandoval, in hindsight, was nothing special. A longtime cast member of Vanderpump Rules, a reality show starring the staff of exclusive Hollywood restaurant SUR, cheated on his longtime girlfriend with another, younger cast member who, when caught out in the entanglement, changed her name from Raquel to Rachel and checked herself into a retreat for “mental health and trauma therapy.” Pretty standard stuff for Bravo. But the season wrapped up the year as the most-watched cable series of 2023, with 11.4 million viewers and two Emmy nominations.
It’s pretty clear that after years of critics giving up on the genre before diving in, Scandoval reminded the world that watching somebody else’s life collapse into disaster is an attractive option for how to spend a night. Self-implosion is certainly the reason that women, and the few men who admit it, tune in to Bravo and similar drama-mongering networks. Just this week, on the final episodes of season 12 of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Kyle Richards, the only housewife to survive all 12 seasons, announced her separation from her husband of nearly 30 years on screen. Not only was it announced on the show, but the whole thing was also explained to their four daughters for the first time in a room full of cameras. Normally I’d call bull, but the wailing cries of her children were certainly authentic. “This is sick,” my husband remarked. Finally, he was starting to understand the fascination: The main takeaway you want to get from any good reality TV is I am better than this, these people are monsters. And it’s that first clause that really counts.
Speaking of monsters, there’s one show I binge that I haven’t got any male friend on board with: 1000-Lb Best Friends is a show about four women battling obesity. And the show, which premiered in 2022, was so captivating that when my mother recently came to visit from Britain, after not seeing each other for nearly a year, we sat next to each other on the couch staring at these 500-pound women for two weeks straight, communicating only in disturbed looks when one of the women would run off from their personal training session to scoff on a sandwich or the occasional dry heave when one of the ladies would get naked. The show was so compelling that we ended up consoling each other in tears when it ended, and I still think about all four women daily.
With reflection, maybe there wouldn’t be so much hostility to reality TV if the reality TV-loving world thought a little harder about why men don’t open their hearts to reality TV: because they could never connect with anybody on screen enough to care about whether they lost the 40 pounds needed to quality for gastric band surgery, and they wouldn’t think twice about the intricate relationships between deck hand and captain when out at sea for a week in tense circumstances. Or, they can, but if we’re honest about gender differences, tracking the cues and names and expressions and tones that drive changes in interpersonal relationships is like straining a weak muscle for them, whereas it’s like flexing a strong one for most women. That’s probably where the scorn comes from, and that’s OK. Everything doesn’t have to be for everybody, and we’d all be a lot better off if the battle of the sexes could go back to being a conflict waged at the level of the rivalry between barroom pals who are Yankees and the Red Sox fans rather than between the Union and the Confederacy. (Not unrelatedly, the same sort of underlying differences that explain why men are less likely to gravitate to Bravo fare explain why a statistically greater number of men like the MLB or NFL.)
But still, we’re talking about mindless entertainment that makes you feel better about yourself here, and anyone can enjoy “reality” for what it is, if we’re at least honest about it.
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Kara Kennedy is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C.
