A Reality TV Hangover

How "Anything Goes" reality shows shaped my perspective

Television was central to my weekly schedule growing up but it was always hard finding something my family would watch together. There was a small section of the Venn diagram that represented what my family members wanted to see on screen. The most likely combination was that anything my sisters, my mum, or I wanted, Dad would not. Luckily, our favourite things to watch were late at night, long after Dad had fallen asleep in his chair.

Mum and I watched TV in two states: either dead silence or mocking the people on TV. I always preferred the latter. If we were in a mocking mood, it was likely while watching reality TV. Even though we watched the unscripted television, Mum would often admonish that there was “nothing good on”, meaning any sitcom from before I was born. What seemed like harmless trash had a more profound impact that lingers. I was consuming media designed to distort my relationship to my identity.

The rise of unscripted television is often incorrectly attributed to the 2007 writers’ strike. The number of new unscripted programs was driven by the desire to produce programming as cheaply as possible many of which were released before 2007. While the writers’ strike may have contributed to continuing the trend, it did not cause it. In her Vanity Fair article “Can We Really Blame Trump (and the Reality Boom) on the 2007 Writers Strike?” Emily St. James reveals that the strike is to blame for the continuation of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice (2004). After ratings declined, the network had nothing to replace it with, so they greenlit a seventh season. While it wasn’t the first to fall, this strike was likely at least one tile in the domino effect, leading to one of the most dangerous presidencies of our lifetime.

As the number of shows increased through the start of the 21st century, networks fought for attention, and the new shows became more extreme. The ‘social experiment’ format was founded and would come to age like milk left in the sun.

There’s Something About Miriam (2003) is the best example from this era. Six men vied for the affections of 21-year-old model Miriam Rivera and a £10,000 prize. The “something” was that Miriam was a trans woman and none of the contestants were told. At the end of the first season, the man who impressed Miriam, 23-year-old Mark Rooke, accepted the trip and the prize money after Miriam came out to him. Later, he changed his tune, banded together with six other contestants, and sued the network to stop the release of the show. Although they couldn’t stop the release of There’s Something About Miriam, the network paid the contestants an undisclosed sum. In his 2024 Guardian article, Michael Hogan reported that the producers sold the show to Miriam as a way to explore sexuality and gender. The show often used Miriam’s transness as the butt of a joke, and they never used she/her pronouns while discussing her, only referring to her as “the model”. In the final episode, when Miriam revealed that she was trans, production hired extra security because they expected the scene to become violent.

In 2021, From the Vaults producer Morgan M. Page told them. “It was a perfect crystallisation of the absurd idea that ‘representation’ in mainstream culture is by itself a form of liberation. We can be incredibly visible and utterly degraded.” Miriam died by suicide in 2019.

Playing It Straight (2004) was a dating show where 14 men courted Jackie Thomas. Seven of the men were straight, and seven were not. If one of the straight men was Jackie’s love interest by the end of the season, they would share $1 million. If the last man standing turned out to be gay, he would take home the entire prize. As a result of poor ratings, Fox pulled the show after four episodes. Fans of the show were outraged, wanting to know who Jackie chose, so Fox released it on their website as pay-per-view; later, syndication rights were sold. This wasn’t a show I watched with mum, but on the small TV that was affixed to my electric blue bedroom walls via a bracket. Even though I lived in a sleepout away from the main house, I would turn the TV down so no one would catch on. Between 2001 and 2004, I was coming to accept that I was gay, even though I hated the idea. As part of this I started consuming any show with a gay carachter, I craved something marginally hotter than my google image searches for “emo boys kissing” or “dicks”, however I was often left watching shows like Playing it Straight where queerness was nothing but a punchline.

Playing it Straight became the guide I used to hide my queerness. Because the contestants were suspicious of one another, they tried to find chinks in each other’s amour. One episode featured a scene where the men were trying to size each other up, and one contestant accused another of being gay because he was using a hairdryer. Later in my teenage years, my barber suggested I blow-dry my hair in the morning. I politely declined.

Anything that wasn’t queer was safe enough to watch in the lounge with Mum. The Swan (2004) was on Monday nights. A riff on Extreme Makeover, it invited women to undergo drastic surgeries and lifestyle changes to transform from ugly ducklings to beauties. The women had to compete in a beauty pageant at the end of the season to earn the title of ‘The Swan’. The hypothesis of this experiment wasn’t that beauty would make people happier; it was that people would be less sad when they weren’t ugly. It painted the women pre-transformation as unlucky but lovable. Mum and I often discussed whether we thought they looked better in their before pictures than they did after they had all their surgeries. Even though I agreed and we would laugh, I secretly wanted what was happening to them to happen to 14-year-old me.

In a 2025 interview with the LA Times, Rachel Love says she has no regrets about her time on the show. However, both Cindy Ingle and Tawnya Cooke told Vice in 2024 that during their episodes, they were pressured into surgeries that they didn’t want.

Contestants may have no regrets about participating in the show, but the cultural hangover that these shows have resulted in makes me regret watching them. One 2014 study that looked at the influences of reality TV on first-time cosmetic surgery patients showed that transformation shows damaged body image. Shows like Extreme Makeover, The Swan, and Bridalplasty (a show where brides-to-be competed for a makeover before their big day) often portray some of the recovery process but don’t accurately address the risks these surgeries have, especially when the surgeries are stacked together. Greg Comeoux, the personal trainer on The Swan, told Vice, “The biggest thing that would haunt me day in and day out was, ‘God, I don’t wanna be the one here that someone dies in my care.’

I don’t have a problem with people wanting to change their appearance, it’s a natural byproduct of a culture that centres thinness and whiteness as the beauty standard. The last time I saw a psychologist regularly, she asked me to stop going to the gym and eat something for lunch other than rice and tuna, and I told her never to bring it up again. Years later, I realised she was right and that instead of spending money trying to feel hot in a new body, I could invest that money into time with a psychologist so I could find the way my body is now hot. I changed my relationship with my queerness, and now it’s time to do the same with my body, but I resist that change because, while my sexuality can’t change, I could always be thinner.

The only time I haven’t been self-conscious about my weight was during the years when I was more concerned about my queerness. I often joke that it would be immediately recognisable if I won a large sum of money because I would be skinny with a new face. I still want The Swan treatment, something I may not have considered if I hadn’t spent all those nights with Mum, laughing at trash that turns out, was more harmful than we thought.