In spring of 2019, I met a man on Tinder, which was somewhat surprising given that I’d been wondering whether to swear off men entirely in the wake of my first, revelatory relationship with a woman. Now, that man and I live in a 2-bedroom apartment. We have a reclining armchair and a Subaru, a cat, and a brand-new baby. Things have a knack for turning out this way.
During those long evenings of 2020 when there was nothing to do but quarantine and drink, we started watching reality dating shows. First, it was the Japanese show Terrace House—not technically a dating show, I guess, but one in which the possibility of a kiss holds unimaginable tension even so. Next, we watched F***boy Island one hot summer while we were re-flooring our apartment but found we preferred Love Island. On our new—and then not so new—IKEA couch, we watched Love is Blind (the Netflix franchise hosted by Vanessa and Nick Lachey whose most interesting claim to fame is that he is the ex-husband of Jessica Simpson) as it expanded into The Ultimatum and then into Perfect Match, a truly deranged concept in which the hottest, most dramatic people from other reality dating shows are encouraged to sleep with each other.
While sick with Covid in a Warsaw Airbnb, we watched all of Jewish Matchmaking and a good bit of Love Never Lies: Poland. I thought it might help me learn the language, but it was the names I was most entranced by: Jędrzej, Bernadeta, Mateusz, like lovely whispers, a whole list of good names for our bi-cultural, bilingual child. Back home, I made my way through Hulu’s extensive archive of Married at First Sight and reported the best details back to my partner while he built furniture and trawled Facebook marketplace for used strollers.
Reality dating shows have leant many of our major transitions a predictable, recurrent form, yet they have also given us a good bit of content to chew over. We’re not particularly prone to meta-conversations about our relationship, but reality TV gives us a perfect mediator. We might be talking about Grant and Tayla from Love Island: Australia, but the subtext is all about us. Through dating shows, we’ve discovered that we have very similar tastes in women, though not necessarily in men. We’ve discussed our exes and our relationships with our parents, the prospect of marrying and having children, and how we would like to raise those children. We’ve discussed budgeting and financial priorities, and our perspectives on cheating and open relationships.
Learning about each other this way has reminded me that we can glean other things from didactic forms than what they profess to teach us. Take the novel, for instance. In the preface to Moll Flanders—first published in 1722 and widely considered to be one of the first novels—the author Daniel Defoe tells us that “the best use” can be “made even of the worst story.” “The moral” of the novel, he says, “will keep the reader serious, even where the story might incline [that reader] to be otherwise.” Bearing witness to depravity is not only acceptable, according to Defoe, but also morally beneficial. This is the premise on which many of the earliest novels rest, even those that are resolutely pornographic like John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. They purportedly show us what not to do; when we reach the end, we might be titillated but we should remain ultimately unstained, satisfied in the knowledge that we would never.
The inventors of NBC’s The Courtship seem to have had the parallels between the novel form and reality television explicitly in mind when they fashioned a show (loosely) based on the courtship rituals of Regency-era England, prompting the show’s eligible bachelorette to remark that she was ready “to find love like they did in the Jane Austen novels. Back then, everything meant so much more.” With Austen-like precision, the show lingers over every sidelong glance, uncharitable comment, and breach in manners. While the showrunners might claim they are inviting viewers along with cast members to enter into the endless fairy-tale of contemporary Austenalia, The Courtship actually prompts us, Mr. Knightley-like, to judge the contestants’ every social gaffe: “Emma, I had not thought it possible….It was badly done, indeed!” We become not so much participants in the romance as canny readers appreciating every slice and cut, as D. A. Miller would have it, of a style that spares no one.
Why is it that so many reality dating shows use formats that recall the courtship rituals of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels? Whether it’s by inviting family members to help decide on an eligible companion (The Courtship), using expert matchmakers to facilitate a meeting (Jewish Matchmaking; Married at First Sight), or asking contestants to communicate “blindly” at first through conversation on opposite sides of a wall and the occasional written missive (Love is Blind), the desire seems to be to produce plots that would be more at home in the Britain or America of previous centuries than this one.
Even the limited dating pool of shows like Love Island resembles the limits of a community like Austen’s Highbury more than it does the world of post-Y2K dating. In fact, contestants often cite such constraints as the reasons why they have volunteered to participate in the show, declaring that the endless choices and vapidity of modern dating haven’t been “working” for them. Love Island’s setting, in particular, is so hermetic and the stay in it so lengthy that contestants tend to refer to anything outside of the villa to which they are confined (in some resort-y location like Majorca) as “the real world”: as in, “I’d never tolerate this kind of behavior in the real world”; “I don’t know if we’ll make it out in the real world.” These restricted setups help to limit—and therefore, determine—the plot just like in an Austen novel, as Erin Spampinato has noted by way of Blakey Vermeule. They restrain setting, character, and action to a particular, enclosed context that is excellent for the production of compelling fictions.
In this way, reality television constructs its own “reality”: a miniature and controllable world in which something about human interaction can be observed. Perhaps this is why so many dating and relationship shows are billing themselves as “experiments” these days. Their pretense is not that they show us reality unfiltered. Rather, they set up the conditions for real outcomes to be observed, recorded, and displayed as evidence to an audience in support or rejection of a hypothesis. Such is the format of Love is Blind, whose hosts repeat at every opportunity the question, “Is love truly blind?” Married at First Sight (MAFS) does something similar by having “expert” relationship counselors match couples based on intensive survey responses. The couples then embark on an “experimental” marriage to see if they want to stay married. (Spoiler: mostly, they don’t.)
Love, as most of us know, rarely works like that. Moreover, the “experiments” seem designed to fail. Their failures, much more than their successes, show us something of human nature. It’s hard to watch those idealistic but mostly-doomed reality show couples without being reminded of Dorothea Brooke’s disappointments in George Eliot’s Middlemarch—or, in darker moments, Gwendolen Harleth’s unfortunate match in Daniel Deronda. Because the thing is, as much as we might want to convince ourselves that marital bliss is all we’re here for, it’s the absolute messes that hold our attention. George Eliot knew it, and so do today’s showrunners.
Yet although the shows often bill themselves as experiments, contestants don’t usually frame their participation this way. The idea of fate or destiny draws many of them in because shows like The Ultimatum and MAFS have no actual prize money attached. To find a viable spouse is to win. It’s difficult to go an entire episode—let alone a season—of any show without hearing some version of the phrase “everything happens for a reason.” While we could dismiss this as a tossed-off platitude (it is), I think it also betrays a belief in the workings of the plot. In a novel, everything does happen for a reason. And reality dating show contestants tend to be eager proponents of a similar worldview.
When everything happens for a reason, it’s easier to see yourself as a main character. While protagonists like Austen’s Lizzy Bennet or Anne Eliot might despise the idea that they’re the protagonists of their own novels, dating show contestants are usually invested with the self-awareness and the bravado of main-character energy. Like Regency heroines, they display varying degrees of success, but they are all scheming to some degree, complicit in the form in which they find themselves displayed. If they weren’t, they’d just walk off set, right?
The trouble is that some of the best protagonists try to do just that: walk off set. The cameras follow them, and the set is revealed to be inescapable. In those fraught moments that are (apparently) totally unscripted, when the show’s boundaries are tested yet still (conveniently) caught on camera, we’re reminded of the enclosed nature of “reality” television’s fictional worlds. A cameraperson rushes to catch the contestant’s “I can’t do this anymore” or “I’m done,” and it becomes clear that they are not in control of their decisions any more than we are. At these moments, only a good edit can save our heroes and heroines—just as, for Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or Clarissa in the 1700s, the only relief from continuous narration came in the form of a strategically-included blank page.
Reality show contestants are the celebrity characters of our day, and their participation in some of our most potent fictions should perhaps give us pause. Though not strictly a dating show, Vanderpump Rules’ 2023 “Scandoval” cheating drama continues to generate news stories, prompting spectators to torment the cast members by weighing in with moral outrage on all platforms. Particularly striking and tragic was the death of 22 year-old Hana Kimura, who received months of online vitriol leading up to her suicide after she appeared on Terrace House. In addition to Kimura, two members of Love Island’s cast, as well as its first host, have all died by suicide in recent years, enough to identify a disturbing trend. As Aja Romano has written for Vox, Kimura’s death destroyed “the conceit that none of the show’s stories were taking place in the real world, but rather an alternate version.” Realism, Romano’s comment suggests, becomes a problem when it is layered onto reality, when the boundaries between people and characters, lives and fictional plots, become blurred. In an apparent cry for help, Vanderpump’s Tom Sandoval has noted, “Everybody else is writing my story besides me.”
What does it mean when a real-life person can garner as much public praise and criticism as a fictional character, like Richardson’s Pamela did in the 1700s? What happens when the narrative is entirely coopted by others? This isn’t a problem unique to Terrace House or Love Island or Vanderpump Rules, insofar as all reality shows involve the participation of actual people. It’s the problem of a format that uses our most compelling fictions to fashion stories involving people whose lives continue offscreen, something that cast members are becoming more vocal about, as Emily Nussbaum recently chronicled in The New Yorker.
It’s also a problem of realism—of producing an alternate reality that resembles reality. Advocacy for cast rights has identified a core question for reality TV: should we understand cast members on reality shows as actors, or as the subjects of an attempt to document reality? For cast members themselves, the answer is often tied to the injustices they claim to have suffered while filming. “Cast Members Are People. NOT Live Props,” appears prominently on the website started by two former contestants on Love is Blind who formed an advocacy group that offers legal help and counseling to former castmates.
These conversations about cast members have made me think about novels differently, too. Is it right to relish a heroine’s terrible downfall just because she’s annoying? Surely she gets much worse than she deserves, and watching the process play out feels more than a little sadistic. This isn’t just a trend in early fiction, either. Did we love Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 gothic A Little Life because its protagonist Jude was treated rather like a “live prop” himself? Weren’t we curious to see just how far Yanagihara would go in making her protagonist suffer? For some, all that suffering is what made Yanagihara’s novel so good; for others, all that suffering constituted a fatal flaw. If we see reality TV shows as studies in humanity, if we can convince ourselves that they teach us something about human nature, then we may feel it is morally acceptable to partake in them. And that is, after all, what we want. If I had a dollar for every think piece that’s called reality TV “unhinged,” “problematic,” evidence of “glorified stupidity,” or a “dystopia of brutal and unapologetic superficiality,” I’d be able to afford a new stroller.
Despite the fact that we think reality dating shows are terrible, we keep watching them—just as fans and critics alike made it all the way through the 800-some pages of Yanagihara’s A Little Life. Novels prompt us to ask questions about what we like to consume and why, but they don’t provide us with easy answers. Neither does reality television. Perhaps only love can give us that kind of certainty.