One of television’s longest-running reality shows is CBS’s Big Brother, the 26-year-long international franchise with iterations in 62 countries. The title Big Brother is an apt reference to the totalitarian, omnipresent and omniscient supervisor in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The dystopian surveillance that Orwell forewarned comes to fruition in the show’s premise, in which a group of participants live together in a house constantly watched over by a 24-hour livestream both visually and sonically recording their activities.
Big Brother serves as an interesting case study to recognize the ways that social media and influencer culture has impacted the reality genre, and the reality format’s continuous shift toward performance. In early seasons of the show, like contemporary early shows of the same format such as The Real World, which is credited as having spawned the format of reality TV used now, contestants are presented as ordinary people graced with the rare opportunity to glimpse a likely short-lived fame. Though for the most part conventionally attractive, these participants are unglamorous and present themselves in sharp contrast to TV or film actors. The presence of cameras and crews on reality TV sets have long attempted to erase themselves, with a long-standing tradition of participants not acknowledging their presence on a set or to question the rules of the game. In this way, pre-social media reality TV sought to create an immersive space for the contestants, enhancing the perversity of the voyeurism that is truly taking place.
Today, however, in the age of social media and influencers, fame is on a sliding scale, a ladder that can be climbed in no way better than appearing on a reality game show. Producers of reality TV today specifically seek to cast participants with an already large social media following. The influencer industry is a significant byproduct of a creative industry steeped in neoliberal practices and ideals, as Angela McRobbie writes in her monograph Be Creative.[1] “Passion” labor paving way for overworking and lack of unionization, and social media companies themselves being born from neoliberal mythologies and labor exploitation on every level, the circumstances in which influencer culture boomed is highly linked to those in which reality TV rose to popularity, as described in Chad Raphael’s piece The Political Economic Origins of Reali-TV. It is no wonder that now influencer culture and reality TV have become inextricably linked. Most of the recent season of U.S. Big Brother’s cast were already influencers before their fame was yet increased by their presence on the show; in fact, all are Instagram verified. Comparatively, only a few of Season 2 Big Brother’s contestants can be found on Instagram at all. Aesthetically, most reality TV show contestants — especially the more glamorous shows about finding love such as Love Island, F Boy Island, or The Bachelor(ette) — are far more glamorous than reality show participants of the 1990s or early 2000s. With more direct ways to financially profit from their presence on reality TV besides winning the game’s cash prize, perhaps those surveilled by Big Brother are now starting to gaze back at us.
This brings us to the extreme “Fielder method”, a parody of method acting tailored toward Nathan Fielder’s satirical reality show “The Rehearsal.” In this show, participants are granted the opportunity to rehearse anticipated events in intricately simulated spaces with paid actors, practicing every concievable direction the scenario may go.
The setting of Angela’s rehearsal of motherhood—the season’s main storyline—is one in a neoliberal haven: Angela is falsely self-sufficient in her production of food (Production assistants hurriedly place store-bought vegetables in her backyard garden during the night, conspicuously “forgetting” industrial evidence such as stickers and rubber bands) and funds her tranquil lifestyle through her dream Etsy business (a fake USPS driver picks up empty boxes of home-produced goods every day). Meanwhile, Fielder ludicrously adheres to child labor regulations by going to great lengths to sneakily switch child actors without Angela noticing and breaking the immersion.
Participants are acutely aware of the cameras and visibly react to them; while most reality shows forbit acknowledgement of cameras, here the show becomes self-reflexive, as visiting cast members are visibly bothered by the cameras and the absurd scenario of the show. The only cast member who is fully immersed is Remy, one of the actors playing the now 6-year-old child of Angela, Adam. Revealed to not have a father in real life, Remy confuses Nathan for his real father, unable to cope with their separation once his part in the rehearsal has concluded. Nathan exposes the ethical dilemmas of putting a child through a psychologically risky experience in the service of a reality show purported to help the select participants. By the end, Angela has left the show frustrated, Fielder suggesting she was there for disingenuous reasons. This realization is foreshadowed when Nathan is “rehearsing” his Fielder Method workshop as an enigmatic student — “I felt a rush of excitement come over me when I remembered there were cameras filming me. (Looks into camera) HBO cameras. I love being on camera” (S1E4 12:16) — likely a broad criticism of the motives of those who voluntarily join reality shows that purport to improve their lives. Ramy seems to still be struggling with the loss of a father figure, while Nathan now uses the show for his own benefit, soothing himself by simulating a scene in which “Remy” (played by an older child actor) shows he has recovered and forgives him. Fielder has become the show’s villain, a satirically abusive producer who has far too strongly inserted himself into the mechanics of a reality show he governs; one that, by the end, nearly every participant has abandoned.
The Rehearsal is not alone in satirizing exploitative and neoliberal values and practices present in reality TV production. For example, Netflix original Squid Game (2021), though a broader critique of capitalist systems, conspicuously is a dystopian image of a gameshow in which participants are brutally killed for the viewing pleasure and financial gain of an elite, foreign few. However, in the wake of the show’s massive success, Netflix announced a reality game show based on the hit series; a show, which, ironically, received backlash for its inhumane treatment of participants.[2] More severely, attention has been brought to the exploitation and maltreatment of reality show contestants in the wake of three suicides from former Love Island contestants and host.[3] But this is perhaps not new in terms of producers’ own awareness of the dystopian nature of their reality shows; after all, Big Brother was consciously named after Orwell’s totalitarian, ever-surveilling figure by its own overseers.
But more importantly, Couscous:
[1] McRobbie A. (2016). Be creative : making a living in the new culture industries. Polity Press.
[2] Ravindran, M. Inside Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ Reality Show Disaster: ‘The Conditions Were Absolutely Inhumane’. Variety. https://variety.com/2023/tv/global/netflix-squid-game-reality-show-frozen-inhumane-welfare-1235511809/
[3] Talor, D.B. Caroline Flack, Who Hosted ‘Love Island,’ Dies by Suicide at 40. New York Times. 2.19.2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/arts/caroline-flack-dead.html
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