It’s Christmas Eve in 2017 and Countess Luann De Lesseps has just been arrested in Palm Beach. “I’m going to kill you,” the 52-year-old intones from the back of a police cruiser, before slipping out of her handcuffs and attempting to flee like Harry Houdini in a floral sundress. Later, when she’s alone in a jail cell, a guard takes pity on her and throws her a bologna sandwich. “It was almost like a dead fish hanging out of my mouth,” is how Luann describes it, somewhat poetically, on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New York after they’d aired the grainy dash-cam footage of her arrest. “It was so sad.”
I remember watching this play out, enthralled. This trilingual, high-society woman was now also a convicted felon (her charges included battery, disorderly intoxication, and trespassing). Not long afterward, she transformed her experiences into a successful cabaret show that she now tours around the world. Amid all of this, one fact remains: RHONY is still some of the best TV I’ve ever seen. Better than The Wire or Peaky Blinders or whatever else peoples’ boyfriends insist I watch. Yet if I were to say that reality TV as a genre is responsible for some of TV’s most emotionally complex, moving, comedic, Shakespearean story arcs, I would probably sound like I was being ironic. Because reality TV is vapid and smooth-brained, right?
Sometimes, yes—but not always.
Reality TV’s reputation for being anti-intellectual and lowbrow likely stems from a few factors. As a genre, it occupies a strange space—neither documentary nor scripted TV, but a glossy third thing involving overly dramatic background music and pre-planned scenes. Detractors consider this format both mind-numbing and salacious, engineered for immediate gratification and often focused on cast members’ petty personal grievances and rock-bottom moments. Yet these shows follow real people in their real lives, sometimes over years, even decades. For anyone deeply interested in the minutiae of what it means to be human, reality TV is king. The best reality shows—every Bravo franchise, The Kardashians, Dance Moms—are anthropological studies with campy one-liners, life blown up to exaggerated proportions.
I’m not the only one to make this argument; it’s recently gathered pace on TikTok. “It’s anthropology, sociology, the human condition,” says one poster. “When you’re bingeing, you’re not being a piece of shit. You’re researching, you’re gathering data points.” Obviously “researching” is a bit of a stretch, but there’s a reason Vanderpump Rules was nominated for two consecutive Emmy Awards, with a special nod for outstanding picture editing in 2023 (the year of “Scandoval”). It’s rare that we get to see the events leading up to—and in the aftermath of—a romantic betrayal, and hear from all affected parties. Such things are usually confined to Esther Perel’s podcast, or a season of Couples Therapy.
I also suspect that, like “chick flicks” or “rom-coms,” disdain for reality TV is intricately tied to the fact it’s a format predominantly consumed by, and featuring, women and gay men. Women’s interests have long been considered frivolous—especially if such interests involve expressing emotion; talking about their feelings with each other; or navigating status and power outside of, or in direct opposition to, their relationships with straight men. But if it weren’t for Housewives, I would not see the lives of women in their 50s—their fears, hopes, frustrations—play out onscreen in such detail or flagrancy. Dismissing TV like this as dumb or vapid reveals a great deal about what our wider society deems worthy.
