An email pops up on my phone in public view of a respectable acquaintance: Channel 4 is reminding me to finish watching an episode of Made in Chelsea. The ensuing blush is complicated – it’s not that I’m embarrassed at being revealed as a viewer of reality TV. It’s that I’m embarrassed by watching reality TV in 2016, when the genre is as knackered as a teen mom.
It is 10 years since The Hills first aired, an American reality show that was the first to mush the genre in with soap opera, thus inspiring shows like Channel 4’s Made in Chelsea, a programme I once looked forward to but that now I watch snatches of when I want to shout at a screen, that stalks me with needy emails and memories of the fun we once had.
What was at first a frothy, funny peephole into the heightened lives of overprivileged bell-ends is now, five years later, at best offensive (the narrative arc “boy cheats on girl, other girls turn on her” has been worn so thin it’s now more of a narrative slope), at worst deafeningly boring, all guilt no pleasure. Ten years. And it’s showing its age – after so long saturating the listings, reality TV has exhausted its tricks.
Last week Big Brother received the lowest viewing figures for a launch show ever, down 300,000 viewers from 2015, and 600,000 fewer than 2014. Netflix means we no longer watch telly when we’re told. And if we do find ourselves watching a reality show, not only have the twists and tricks become so predictable we can do a countdown to the big reveal, but the stars have been exposed and groomed to the extent that they’re indistinguishable from the film stars they were designed to funhouse-mirror. The genre has been voted out.
Reality TV: an amorphous term that’s always held itself in ironic quote marks. There is nothing real about these stories of destruction, transformation, sex in small spaces, beer.
As if to push in the final nail, the second series of UnReal has just landed on Amazon Prime, a drama set behind the scenes of a Bachelor-style show called Everlasting. Our heroine is a monster called Rachel Goldberg, a feminist producer whose responsibility is to manipulate bikini-clad contestants into performing the role required, whether “blacktivist” or “desperate MILF”. All this in a quest for the biggest humiliation of all: romance. Watching UnReal as a reality TV connoisseur is a bit like eating foie gras while viewing CCTV footage of geese being force-fed, a sweet dark sickness that returns when you next find yourself buried under a pile of Hobnob crumbs watching ITV2’s Love Island.
The last time I saw Big Brother the most distracting element was how odd it was to watch a room of people learn to live without their phones. And for the franchise to continue, for the genre to continue, the networks would surely prefer their audiences to do the same. Because for some people who have grown up in the shadow of reality TV, the obvious extension is to use their phones to create their own.
In Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle, politicians wear SeeChange cameras for “transparency”; everybody can see what they see, all the time. Periscope (the app bought by Twitter last year for $100m) has a similar aim, with users broadcasting their whole lives from their phones.
As well as candlelight vigils for victims of the Pulse nightclub atrocity, and continuous streams from a girl’s car as she chats to her 500,000 fans during traffic jams, there have been the inevitable horrors – a 19-year-old girl broadcast her suicide in a suburb of Paris; a pair of boys filmed themselves attacking somebody, and an 18-year-old streamed her friend being raped. The benefit of TV, it appears, is that all pain was controlled. That somebody was watching.
Reality TV taught us that the minutiae of a person’s life could be valuable. But rather than cash prizes, notoriety is the payoff. Millions of people watch YouTube stars who share their entire relationships, from first date to marriage proposal – they didn’t need to audition, they just needed a webcam. Ten years since the genre changed TV, it’s dying because it got too big – it seeped through the cracks in the screen and became our new reality.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
