How have older reality tv shows aged?
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If you're a reality TV show junkie like me, then you probably know your survivors from your bachelors and your top models from your real housewives. Those franchises have been stirring controversy for years, and now there's a new show in the mix, Beast Games. It comes from the YouTuber MrBeast.

1,000 contestants battled in physical, mental, and social challenges for $5 million. Now, some of these contestants have complained that they didn't receive enough food and that they endured, in their words, emotional distress. Now, Mr. Beast, writing on social media, he said that these claims are blown out of proportion. It's not exactly surprising that scandal is surrounding another reality TV show.

After all, controversy and reality TV, they go together like a real housewife and lip filler, and let's just say not everything ages well. So on today's episode, we're going behind the scenes of reality TV. We're going to speak to an academic and author who focuses on reality TV, and we're going to speak to some former contestants. I'm William Lee Adams, and this is What in the World from the BBC World Service. You got the fashion news.

All right, here to shake up your reality is Danielle Lindeman. She is a professor at Lehigh University in the United States. Danielle, hi. Hi, thanks for having me on. In the beginning, God created the earth, and then someone came along and they invented reality TV. Could you tell us, what's the genesis of reality TV?

Yeah, that's such a good question. There's sort of some contention around that. So some people will pinpoint its roots in documentary. Others will point to the dating shows and quiz shows of the 1950s and 1960s as kind of the root of reality TV. A lot of people will point to MTV's The Real World, which started airing in the early 1990s.

That was really the first show that introduced us to a lot of the conventions of reality TV that we see today. Most people would agree that Survivor was the show that just changed everything because it was on network TV. Everybody was watching that first season of Survivor and it paid for itself in advertisements before it even aired. So this was the first kind of

of what a juggernaut reality television could be and how popular it could be. And so many of the shows that you just named, you know, The Real World on MTV, they also had Laguna Beach, The Hills, and of course Survivor. There's sort of a soap opera element to all of them where the smallest slight can be blown up into this huge drama element.

I'm curious, from the network perspective, was there a practical reason that these shows were considered successful? You know, beyond earning money, was it easy to make? Yeah, you know, so I mean, one of the reasons reality TV exists and has endured is because of that kind of cost benefit, right? Reality TV shows generally are pretty cheap to produce.

Oftentimes you don't have to pay the people who appear on them, although sometimes you do. You don't have to build sets sometimes. Oftentimes the crews are not paid union wages, so they can be very quick and cheap to produce. And then they have a huge audience. A lot of people are consuming them. You know, when we talk about university, the academy, people say one of the benefits is you meet people who are not like you.

on America's Next Top Model. You had Robin, a conservative Christian who did not want to pose nude. And then you had Elise, an atheist who was happy to pose nude. And then conflict kind of unfurled from there. Do you see a benefit in bringing together people from completely different worlds, even if the motive is to create conflict?

I mean, people often look at, you know, the dark side of reality TV and how problematic it can be. And that's absolutely valid. But I think we can look at some of the good that reality TV has done as well, you know, especially in terms of, I would say, LGBTQ representation. Shows like The Real World were, you know, telling LGBTQ stories long before we were really seeing them on scripted TV.

Someone like, I think the most obvious example is Pedro Zamora, which is, you know, maybe people today don't know who that is. But at the time, it was a really big deal. He was on the San Francisco season of The Real World in the mid-90s. And he was a gay man. He was living with AIDS. He had a commitment ceremony to his partner on the show. This was a really big deal at the time, so much so that

When he ultimately passed away, the then President Bill Clinton said, you know, he was really the first gay person, the first person living with AIDS that many of us kind of got to know. And so I do think that there is a benefit there.

to the representation that we see on reality TV. It is more diverse and historically has been more diverse than scripted television, both in terms of sexuality, in terms of gender, in terms of race. But of course, you know, we have to have the asterisks because some of those representations can be deeply problematic.

But I do think there is something to be said for representation. And these reality shows, of course, are meant to reflect reality in some way. They're born of their times. You know, they reflect the zeitgeist.

And looking back on them, they can be really problematic. They haven't aged well. And I want to point to America's Next Top Model. If you search for a video called Ways America's Next Top Model Has Aged Badly, you'll get some interesting results. And one of the challenges on this modeling contest was having contestants portray people of other colors.

So white people portraying African-Americans, African-Americans portraying East Asian people. Looking back, it's very, very insensitive. Can you think of any other examples of shows that haven't aged well? Sure. Yeah. They did that challenge twice on America's Next Top Model, so they did not learn their lesson.

I mean, people always point to The Swan as a classic example. If you don't know, this was an early 2000s show where they took women who were supposed ugly ducklings and they gave them all plastic surgery and radically remade their bodies and they all kind of came out looking the same. I think that was a bridge too far for a lot of people. I would guess that a show like that would not air today. Yeah.

And we're actually going to pause for a moment because we have a clip. She was a contestant on The Swan. She's going to share her experience. Hello, my name is Tanya Parada. They asked me what two things I would change with plastic surgery. And the two things I said is that I would like a beautiful smile. And so I thought I'd like some veneers and I would also like some liposuction. They wanted to do a tonic.

a tummy tuck, a brow lift, a face lift, a nose job. They wanted to go in and do something to my cheeks to push them up to make them more higher. It was pretty traumatic when I found that out. I didn't really want to go in there and for three months be in LA and be nothing in procedures. I knew the dangers of it. That's why I was a little hesitant. I don't have any regrets about doing the show. I made

So many close friends. It helped me get enough confidence. So when I did come back to Colorado, I did secure a job. And Danielle, The Swan was canceled. It was hugely controversial. People said you called them ugly ducklings. That's almost misogynist. You subjected them to all this surgery, which in many cases may be irreversible. Why do you think a show like that hasn't been attempted since then?

I mean, because I think for all the reasons you mentioned, right, because there was so much public outcry, even though other shows do involve makeovers that are almost as extreme as the ones on The Swan, this was just a bridge too far. Just everything together, right? Like you said, misogynistically referring to the women as ugly ducklings, really having them go under the knife and these dangerous procedures and all of it together.

But I think elements of those have persisted on other reality shows. There are plenty of makeover reality television shows, for instance. But I just think that entire ball of terribleness that was The Swan, I don't see that being duplicated.

The other show that I'm thinking of is actually a British show. Are you familiar with There's Something About Miriam? This was 2004. Again, the early 2000s were kind of a wild time for reality TV. But this was a show where they had a transgender woman and these men were competing for her romantically. But they did not know that she was transgender. They thought she was a cisgender woman. And then at the end of the show, there was like the big reveal where she came out as transgendered.

obviously super transphobic and problematic, and I don't think a show like that would air today. Even at the time, I think there were lawsuits filed because of this show. We've probably moved past airing a show like that. Miriam was sadly found dead in Mexico in 2019, and while her death was years after the show, people do talk about the fact that an experience on a reality program can color someone's future.

One show that's been under the spotlight is America's Next Top Model and its host, Tyra Banks. There have been academics who have suggested that perhaps she was harder on African-American contestants than she was on white contestants. As with Tiffany, the famous viral clip of her saying, we were rooting for you. We were all rooting for you. Do you think there's anything in that?

I think there was this kind of sense that she wanted them to fit a particular mold. The framing of Tiffany on that show was really interesting because they framed her as being like a certain type of

of unacceptable African-American woman. And Tyra was kind of shown as trying to like move her into a mold that would like be more socially acceptable, which is really problematic in a lot of ways. And I think at the time, a lot of people just kind of didn't, it didn't register as deeply problematic at the time. I know we can look back and say, how did these things not register? And I think part of it was because, you know, Tyra herself was,

So I think I would think and hope that if someone if it were like a white man who was the judge of the show and doing the same things that Tyra did, there would have been more outcry.

In 2020, during the pandemic, a lot of the more insensitive clips from America's Next Top Model started resurfacing online. Among the clips were those of Danielle having the gap in her teeth widened, photo shoots where girls were asked to portray women of other races, and the

and comments towards Tiffany Richardson. We were all rooting for you. Now, that prompted Tyra to issue a statement on social media. She said, quote, "...been seeing the post about the insensitivity of some past ANTM moments, and I agree with you. Looking back, those were some really off choices. Appreciate your honest feedback, and am sending so much love and virtual hugs."

and Ken Mock, one of the show's producers, he replied to that statement on social media saying this. Quote, I look at some of those AMTM moments and cringe. Just a FYI, the entire creative team made the choices in those shows, not just Tyra. So please feel free to yell at me for some of the worst moments in AMTM history. Apologies to all.

I want to bring in Anjali Preston now. She is a broadcaster and a journalist in New York. She first came to the public's attention in 2010 when she competed on America's Next Top Model. She returned a year later for the All-Stars edition, and she won it all. But producers then stripped her of her title after it emerged that she had worked briefly as an escort. Anjali, hello. Hello.

So good to see you. Thanks for joining us. That was a really, really good intro. I like it. Oh, thank you. And I'm sorry for any awkwardness. So let's just address that elephant in the room. You know, that incident where your title was stripped from you. How do you reflect on that now? Just

Just going through it, I realized that this isn't something I should be ashamed of. And I feel like that I was wrong. You know, like they took my stuff away from me because I made a mistake. We all make mistakes. I just feel like it was wrong how they how they went about it. I was scared about what people would think about me and judge me. But then I was like, why do I care what people think? I just wanted people to know, like,

I was the real winner. It was me. There's been a lot of talk, some of it in academia, that perhaps Tyra Banks is harsher on Black contestants than white contestants. Do you think there's anything to that? I feel like that Tyra was not very helpful to the urban girls, the urban Black girls themselves.

To this day, I don't understand why, but it doesn't bother me. This is just something that I've noticed. If you watch the previous cycles and you see all the girls who are labeled as urban, as ghetto, as rough around the edges...

they'll probably tell you, no, she didn't help me after the show. When you hear the theme tune to Top Model these days, when it's on in the background, does it elicit fear, joy, a combination of both? Sometimes when I hear it, I'm like, I smile. And I'm like, I can't believe I was a part of something historic, you know, something iconic. It was one of the first reality shows in a time when there weren't many reality shows on TV. But then also when I hear it, I'm like...

Oh, Lord. But for the most part, it's happy thoughts. A final question for you. People now look back on episodes and say that's deeply culturally insensitive. This hasn't aged well. At the time when you were participating, did anything seem insensitive or was it just sort of accepted? It was part of the time you were living in back then. I think it was a part of the time that we were living in because, you know,

Now it's like, oh, my God, like you would never have someone change their race. Right. It wasn't on my cycle, but there was like this shoot where they changed ethnicities and, you know, such and such is going to be an indigenous woman. And then this person is going to be an African-American woman. Me as a viewer at the time, I thought it was cool. Like I was like, oh, this is dope.

Only because me being a lighter skinned, a mixed woman, but I'm a black woman, like I identify as a black woman. That's who I am. I've always been told, you know, you look ethnically ambiguous. But just for me, I just looked at it like it was like, dang, that's cool. Oh, my God. And that's creative.

Do I think it's problematic? Of course, yeah. Looking back on it, yeah, a lot of the stuff were a bit, you know, troublesome. Now we hold people accountable for their actions and for things that in the past we didn't, you know? And I think also there's probably a little bit of

taboo that you couldn't say this or couldn't do this back then because you didn't want to upset the stat quo. Well, Anjali, let me just say this. I have one photo in my hands and it goes to the girl who originally won America's Next Top Model All-Stars. Thank you so much for joining us. ♪

Danielle, we are in 2025 now. Is there any show you think that typifies the future of reality TV or at least will define the genre for the next few years? I think the future of reality TV is not these episodic network shows. They still persist.

but we're moving more toward the TikTokers, the influencers. I don't know if people would consider that to be reality TV, but it's certainly reality TV adjacent. TikTok, YouTube, the influencers, even Peloton instructors who people are following. I think that those kind of DIY reality shows, I think those are going to be the future of reality TV. Danielle, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.

That's all for today. Thanks for listening to another episode of What in the World from the BBC World Service. I'm William Lee Adams. We'll see you again soon.