Reality Bites: Why the Deadliest TV Shows of the 2000s Are Now Haunting Us | Reality TV

CAuction: The 2000s have become a crime scene. The reality TV that my generation once watched as an escape from comfort – built hastily and clumsily, before anyone knew the rules – is now being dusted off for fingerprints by a younger generation who have mastered the language of hurt, confident that cruelty was the point. The past six months have brought a flurry of thoughtful post-mortems like The Biggest Loser, Catch a Predator, and America’s Next Top Model — elusive network TV experiments that turned humiliation into massive cash.

Although the criticisms are often justified, they are also conveniently calibrated for a judgmental media landscape in which anger retroactively doubles as a growth strategy. “Generation Z wants to get into a time machine and fix mistakes that happened 20 years ago,” says Christine Warner, a professor of media studies at Cornell University. “There was no road map. Reality TV was the Wild West, and people were doing the most bizarre things to keep it going.”

Netflix’s Fit for TV is a reckoning with The Biggest Loser, the NBC show that oscillated between inspiration and cruelty across more than 200 episodes. Co-creator David Broome recalls deliberately choosing a title for a show that defies expectations, draws viewers in with a thrill of passive embarrassment and keeps them hooked with stories of personal triumph. Amid the revolving door of contestants and the rise of host and trainer brands, one star has overshadowed them all: Libra.

But for all his health and wellness tirades, The Biggest Loser was powerless against the craving for ratings and gobbling up the lowest hanging fruit. Contestants have gone from being pushed beyond their physical abilities to subjecting them to “temptation challenges” that can erase their progress in exchange for a fleeting family connection, all to win the $250,000 grand prize — leading some to rely on questionable treatments and medications to achieve their fitness goals.

These practices were clearly wrong, and were harshly criticized at the time, yet the producers still act as if the harm is invisible. But who is Generation Z to judge? The show’s annoying and conventional transformation attempts now seem laughably bizarre in the age of semaglutides and bulky looks. Meanwhile, those of us who watched in real time, unironically, can’t help but be drawn back in.

These docs provide a strange nostalgia trip, surgically precise in the generational sentiments they mine. “At the same time, there’s a heavy dose of ‘Remember this?'” says Raquel Gates, a professor of film and media studies at Columbia University. This is fundamental to our decision to listen. But at the same time, there’s this impulse to project all of society’s problems onto these specific shows, which is appropriate, because they’re not on anymore, so we can only retroactively demonize them and say they shouldn’t have done better.

MTV’s Predators is a documentary about a documentary: NBC’s To Catch a Predator, the apotheosis of caught journalism. The show’s producers cast adult actors who can act as children to lure the pedophiles from their hiding places and froth them before handing the stage over to Chris Hansen, a stubborn TV journalist who enjoys humiliating them from his righteous position and sending them back into the wilderness – where a horde of sheriff’s deputies await. Anyone paying attention could see that this scene was destined to collapse under his arrogance.

The incident was violent. An assistant district attorney in Texas shot himself when police tried to serve him a search warrant, after he was caught exchanging messages and photos with a prankster pretending to be a 13-year-old boy – excerpts that were captured on camera. The attorney’s estate sued Dateline for $105 million, and NBC settled out of court.

Although it was canceled after 20 episodes, To Catch a Predator has remained a huge attraction in reruns, inspiring imitators not only in reality television but also among a new generation of “predator hunting groups” exploiting these sting operations for content. A creator who goes by the name Skeet Hansen brags about going beyond law enforcement cooperation standards on YouTube with these videos, in which friends dress up in police gear and add flashing lights to simulate the presence of cops. Many of the viewers who watch Skeet — or Chris Hansen, who inevitably followed him online — belong to the same generation that now judges their parents for helping to create a genre that has become virtually inescapable.

However, no doc embraces retrospective judgment quite like Reality Check, which reevaluates America’s Next Top Model through a contemporary lens. The doc’s sympathy for contestants who have been mistreated, abused or, in two high-profile cases, sexually assaulted on the show, reflects the social media outcry that has erupted as younger viewers stumbled upon the franchise during the pandemic. In fact, there’s still enough outrage after the three-part series launched by E! It rolls out its own two-part follow-up in March, bolstering the criticism with archival interviews with the show’s directors and grande dame of disdain Janice Dickinson — a notable absence from the Netflix project. As much as Tyra Banks deserves to be held accountable for the decisions she made as creator and executive producer of the series, she was right to give her Carmen Sandiego speech on the Netflix series and point out that her crimes against television are being judged out of context.

During its 12-year run, America’s Next Top Model was chosen from Survivor, Fear Factor and Jersey Shore, shamelessly feeding the growing hunger for spectacle. All the while it went from UPN to the CW to VH1, mostly because a fair number of us old-timers were tired of the shenanigans and were happy to wish Banks well on her quest to become the next Oprah — truly groundbreaking stuff for the misfit supermodel.

What’s rich is that the same generation that mocked Banks for harshly criticizing a contestant for not wanting a TV opportunity badly enough is also the first to turn that moment into one of the internet’s iconic memes. Says Gates, who will appear in E! “This is very indicative of the kind of post-modern pop culture moment we’re in right now.” document. “The memes and gifs from these shows function as their own entities, completely separate from the shows they originated from.” The docuseries has even been talked about in social media videos, each parody more hilarious than the last.

In the analogue era, television retrospectives did not explicitly address moral panics. Old Hollywood’s contract violations, studio control and pay were treated as lore—not fodder for the deferred indictments of Louis B. Mayer. In Mad Men, Sally Draper plays a “spaceman” in dry cleaning plastic while her mother gossips with her pregnant friend over a cigarette about how much time she has learned. Television treated the past as a lesson, not a crime scene. Sure, our elders also warn us about our TV habits, but at least we can access empathy and insist that we watch the same shows they grew up on, in part, to better understand the lives they lived before us.

But now there is little distance between the past and the present, and there is hardly any distinction. The monochromatic, technicolor signs that once signaled a new era have faded into a fast-paced, algorithm-curated highlight reel. Mayer was long dead by the time his best films hit Turner Classic Movies, but Banks is on Instagram now. Any complaint from viewers, no matter how late, can go directly to the source. This reality docuseries makes you wonder if it fuels today’s generation’s greater desire for fairness and justice – and if so, where does The Apprentice delve into them? “People are dealing with a lot, and there’s a desire for emotional validation and a feeling that some of these problems that seem so big and insurmountable can be solved,” Gates says. “But the desire to reform society through media representation goes back a long time, and has never been effective.”

However, the forensic quest to dissect television has been described with pride waste It shows no sign of stopping. But young people today should take notice: soon, you’ll have to answer to Love Island and MrBeast. “We hope that your children and your children’s children will look at the mistakes your generation is making more generously than you did ours,” Warner says.