Samantha Allen’s Reality TV Twist on A Midsummer Night’s Dream
When the first massively popular reality TV shows hit the air in the early 2000s, I remember thinking in my naïveté: Surely this is just a passing fad. I was entering my teens and, like so many closeted queer youth before me, was beginning to form an intense fixation on media. Predicting that Survivor and The Bachelor would only last a few seasons became my way of establishing myself as a sophisticated observer of the landscape. To whom, you might ask? Mostly to the adults who came over for dinner. God, I must have been an obnoxious child. Or maybe I was just gay. But I was so smart, I thought. An assessor of trends. An expert on entertainment.
Of course I was dead wrong.
A quarter of a century later, and reality TV is thriving while all but the buzziest scripted shows die on the vine. We can watch yachties fight and fuck in a half-dozen different oceans on Below Deck and its sundry spinoffs. We can watch housewives of the Mormon and non-Mormon varieties flaunt their wealth. We can watch people cheat on each other in all sorts of warm locales, from Puerto Vallarta to Fiji and beyond. By now, most people know why reality TV makes more economic sense: It’s generally cheap to produce, the contestants aren’t unionized, and we all keep coming back for the kind of drama you just can’t write.
