It felt like almost yesterday when everyone sat at home awaiting the highly anticipated and intense season finale of Flavor of Love. Would the iconic TV villain New York win over Flavor Flav’s heart once and for all, or would the underdog basketball player ‘Hoopz’ snatch the highly successful Public Enemy member’s interest. Despite the outcome, everyone at home watching knew that it would be an immensely entertaining finale…and the ratings proved nothing short of that as the season finale, alone, drew a whopping 5.9 million viewers. Those numbers are unheard of in our contemporary reality television landscape, with some shows today struggling to even get over 1 million viewers. To say that reality television is on a rapid decline is far more than an understatement. Today’s reality TV has suffered an abysmal drop in popularity, and while it seems like a shock considering that we are living through the digital and social media age, studies have shown that people just don’t find reality TV all that entertaining anymore.
I mean, I can think of several reasons why reality TV sucks now—but, I’ll just name a few. One major reason why the once popular genre has failed to gain any traction in this day and age is simply because we’ve seen it all before. Nothing is original anymore. From table flips, to bar fights, all the way down to a Guido smashing his head into a cement wall…it feels like reality television has showcased everything. A lot of the storylines and themes that modern television looks to produce have already happened at some point. No one wants to be fed the same cheap, superficial drama over and over again…they want something new…something fresh.
And to say that reality television is fake is false. It’s scripted. A lot of the scenes and incidents that transpire on the show are genuine but contrived. Production companies look to manipulate scenes as a way to instigate drama amongst the cast members, and while this worked for many years, people are catching on way too easy these days. The connections that we see and the personalities that we are introduced to don’t feel authentic anymore…everything just feels forced.
And then you have shows like Baddies that just serve as a senseless degradation of primarily black women. The entire premise of the show is a bunch of young women gathering together, drinking, partying, performing, and well, fighting. I’d say with absolute confidence that 85% of the show is centered around the women tearing each other apart just because. There’s no real substance within the show. There are no deeply impactful stories nor genuine bonds that come from the show, but instead just seemingly superficial alliances and petty rivalries—It almost feels like I’m watching Survivor.
Reality TV is not the same anymore. The authenticity that the genre once exhibited has begun to fade, and we are now forced to watch the same recycled themes over and over again. These horrific patterns and minimalistic efforts to push the genre have led to many labelling it as absolute rubbish.
