Culture Crash: What’s Going On With Reality TV?

Reality TV is king right now. Thanks to strikes and the low production cost of reality TV, almost every network has been stacking their schedules with reality TV offerings. Cable channels like BRAVO have also made a living on reality programming with likes like Vanderpump Rules and Below Deck. But one other massive player in the reality TV game is Netflix. With hit shows like Love is Blind, The Ultimatum, and Selling Sunset and its spin-off Selling the OC, Netflix has mastered the art of the reality TV formula…

But here’s the thing. Whenever I watch a season of reality TV on Netflix, I ultimately find it pretty unfulfilling. Take the second season of Selling the OC, for example. The premise of the show is supposed to be that you follow several high-end realtors in one of the wealthiest areas in America. But in the entire second season, viewers were only properly shown a handful of the properties that the realtors are selling, and most of them weren’t given proper tours. Instead, the show was almost entirely focused on the in-office drama, which is fine since that is definitely the primary driver of the show’s serialized storytelling. But the drama wasn’t very compelling. For almost the entire season, they were focused on one issue and they just kept beating a dead horse. At only 8 episodes, the season somehow still felt overlong for what the content of the show was.

Or, if Selling the OC isn’t on your watchlist, take the latest season of Love is Blind. That show is very popular and has grabbed a lot of attention online over its five seasons, but as the show has become a proven launching pad for Instagram influencer-dom, its casts have been filled with more and more outsized personalities who seem more interested in getting screentime than actually engaging with the show’s gameified dating premise. Again, that’s something that happens in every reality show, but I find I really feel it on these Netflix productions which seem to have lower budgets with fewer locations and shorter episode counts. By the time I’ve binged my way through their 8 to 10 episode seasons, I often find myself more annoyed than enticed to watch another season. All I’m saying is that as the costs of streaming services continue to go up, streamers like Netflix might want to up their game to keep their shows at least as interesting as Bravo or they’re making the decision to cancel even easier.