In Hay and Ouellette’s writing, they characterize TV as being “predicated upon the social contract between participants” which perpetuate practices of self-governance within imagined communities both on and off screen (204). One particularly interesting, contemporary example of a reality TV show which blurs the lines between social contracts and exploitation, self-governance and oligarchic control through opportunism, as well as on-screen and off-screen participant positionalities is Netflix’s 2023 production Squid Game: The Challenge.
According to reports by three anonymous participants of the reality TV program, conditions during the first game (Red Light, Green Light) were unbelievably inhumane. Film preparation began in the early morning. Although participants were provided with adequately warm clothing, they were later required to discard their coats and leave their jackets open when filming started. The contestants were allegedly told that filming would last around two hours and that players would need to hold their poses for around two minutes each, but in reality, the crew shot for around seven hours and required contestants to hold their frozen positions anywhere from 10-30 minutes. In addition, one of the contestants claims that during filming, none of the contestants were allowed to use the bathroom, take a break, or drink water.
These infractions represent clear breaks with the contract the production company established with the contestants (or code of conduct maintained by the production world at large), but it could be argued that it is not a break with the social contract constructed within the Squid Game imaged community which understood that the K-drama, at least, was founded on unabashedly inhumane principles. As many reporters have cynically observed, didn’t the contestants know what they were getting themselves into? It might also be pointed out that although contestants had concerns about the health and safety conditions of the game, none of them actively refused to comply with said conditions. One participant reported that she watched as a woman standing next to her fainted after holding a pose for minutes on end in freezing temperatures, noting that she could even hear the sound of the contestant’s head hitting the ground as she fell. But she herself was compliant. The desire to move on and claim the $4.56 million reward overrode any inclination to catch her neighbor and be eliminated in the process. In a strange and disturbing overlapping of fiction and reality, the contestants (just like the characters of the K-drama) looked past the games’ unethical consequences because of the promise of monetary compensation and, just like those characters, they became opportunists who viewed one more eliminated competitor as one less obstacle to their ultimate prize. The sadly ironic thing is that while the original Squid Game was meant to be a social critique on capitalism and the violence through commodification it perpetuates in its zero-sum game, Squid Game: The Challenge ignored that commentary and further created a space where additional violence through commodification could take place.
While Squid Game: The Challenge may not be emblematic of every reality TV show, it does stand as a powerful illustration of how reality entertainment structures can encourage participants (contestants and viewers alike) to become complicit—and even active contributors—in their own oppression. After all, while the contestants in this example did come forth with allegations against the show, that was only after they had been eliminated. It’s hard to imagine the winner of a $4.56 million reward would have anything negative to say at all.
If Squid Game: The Challenge signals a cruel and oppressive representation of reality TV regarding its production, one can find equally compelling examples of judgmental receptive practices of reality TV. As a teenager (Josh here), I was not an avid viewer of reality television, but I did watch The Soup quite regularly. For those unfamiliar with the show, the premise is very simple. Accompanied by a variety of guests and side comedians, host Joel McHale (of Community fame) would recap the previous week in reality television. Instead of contextualizing the shows or focusing on their broader concepts, McHale and company would simply present the nadir of each program and serve it up on a platter for comic mockery. Served with a healthy dose of snark and puckish irony, McHale would eviscerate the subjects of reality TV who made a particular fool of themselves that week. McHale’s targets spanned from popular programs (The Bachelor was a frequent target) to cable staples (this was my introduction to the Gulf Coast classic Party Down South) to obscure Christian pay-per-view television. Regardless of the source, the end result was always befuddlement and sarcastic mockery.
Now before anyone thinks this post will suddenly become too aghast at The Soup’s cruelty, I should emphasize: I thought it was hilarious. Funniest show on TV. If I watched some of the episodes again right now, I still would probably laugh. Am I a bad person for that? Perhaps. But to pretend to be retroactively outraged by The Soup exemplifies the kind of “[disingenuous]” response that McCarthy establishes at the start of her piece (17), in which web readers feigned anger at a particularly cruel memorandum – we act surprised but this is part of the reality genre’s appeal. The Soup also, in some manner, lays bare the arguments that McCarthy and Hay and Ouellette are making about self-governance: it becomes a kind of meta-critique on reality reception practices themselves. McHale’s targets exposed a different wing of reality television – rather than engaging with “suffering,” as McCarthy describes, McHale’s preferred sources of mockery were often individuals perceived as dumb, shallow, and self-involved (think Jersey Shore rather than The Biggest Loser). Yet this still produced an exercise in self-governance that made explicit the kind of “shame and scolding” that McCarthy identifies as the key to Hay’s analysis (18). It literalizes what the readings see as the latent nature of programs such as Judge Judy and Extreme Makeover, taking its citizen-subject as cause for comic relief rather than nuanced individuals. If one deviated from the norms of reality conventions and looked foolish, they could guarantee themselves a sneering scold from McHale and company.
In doing so, McHale provided his audience with an untapped, unfiltered, and pure cut version of the reality experience. One need not sift through the endless hours of content to enjoy the base pleasures of reality TV viewing: he would simply show you the best of the worst, the dumbest of the dumb, served up on a platter for easy consumption. It’s undeniably cruel – and yet it exposes the structures and “pleasures” of reality TV so shamelessly that one might almost begrudgingly respect it.
The last case we want to discuss is X-Change, a Chinese reality TV show in which two groups of teenagers with different family backgrounds (one from urban and another from the countryside) can experience each other’s life. If Squid Game: The Challenge highlights the brutality of reality TV production, this instance demonstrates how reality TV, in complicity with neoliberal culture, ignores the structural issues in terms of the responsibilities of the government. The urban-rural issue is almost the biggest problem in contemporary China, because people always flock to the cities, and the countryside represents backwardness. However, one of the most notable characteristics is that the government’s intervention is absent in this show, thus downplaying the inadequacies of the government’s role. Instead, the ability of young people in rural areas to acquire mobility is reached through strict self-management.
In the first episode, a boy whose name is Gao Zhanxi is from a rural family in Qinghai Province, a not so developed province in China. His family has five people, and his parents haven’t received any education. His parents are farmers. Because of this reality TV, he gets a chance of experiencing life in the urban city, and years later, he was admitted to a university, and this is unprecedented in his village.
The show repeatedly portrays how affluent urban parents transform impoverished rural teenagers into modern images, providing them with abundant material pleasures. Throughout the show, the urban parents emphasize to the rural teens, "You must work hard and strive for success, so that you can enjoy the same lifestyle as me in the city. The city is a desirable place to live." The systemic problem of urban-rural differences is reduced here to a gap that can be overcome by individual effort and self-management: in the show, the rural teens have dreams of becoming a part of the city. In addition, this show also dramatizes the transformation of rural teenagers. In an article that is called “Reality TV, Shows that May not be Real, and Magical Reality,” the author visited three teenagers and found the teens did not change as much as the program advertised. In this sense, the TV show seems to be complicit with neoliberalism.
As we reflect on these reality shows and many others, it becomes alarmingly clear that Hay and Ouellette are not wrong in their analysis that reality TV drives us to participate in our own oppression. From breaking the contract with participants (Squid Game: The Challenge), to mockery of the worst moments of other reality shows (The Soup), to the reduction and elimination of the facts of real culture in favor of dramatization and over exaggeration of something that isn’t there (X-Change), reality TV not only asks us to watch this oppression in real time, but begs us to return season after season and even offers us a chance to participate in it ourselves. So with all this in mind, the question then becomes why? Why do we watch it again and again? And why do some people want so badly to participate? What do they see that we don’t?
One could argue that in some ways reality tv is best watched under the pretense that “I know nothing about this is actually real.” Perhaps by viewing reality tv as simply another genre of fiction, we eliminate the idea that we as an audience are being manipulated into a certain way of thinking, thereby reclaiming our agency. But how does that translate to shows like America’s Funniest Home videos, people send their clips in, how could they not be real? The lines are more blurred than we realize. Others may claim that shows with audience participation give us back some of our freedom. Have you ever seen someone get saved during the live audience voting of The Voice? Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYY9DbUbNg4. Phrases like “America instantly saved” echo through this clip. And yet in the fine print at the bottom it says “The producers and NBC reserve the right to review the vote for accuracy and to take any appropriate action.” So did the audience really get to make this decision? How can we trust that the information we are getting is what really happened?
And thus we enter into a new discussion: how real is reality tv and how do we know when to trust what we are watching? We can accept that “none of this is real, everything is rigged,” but does that make us more or less susceptible to the oppression reality tv brings about to participants and audience members. Do we avoid watching it because we know it’s not real, thus avoiding the potential for oppression? Or do we dive in head first without a care in the world because at least our awareness can shield us? Furthermore, if we are constantly questioning the shows we are watching, doubting that we are being told the full story, are we already too late, falling into the trap of our own oppression?
I don’t have a concrete answer, but I do want to test a theory. Of the three major reality shows presented in this post, which one seems the most real to you? Is it:
Squid Game: The Challenge
The Soup
X-Change
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