The smartest people I know are watching reality TV

It’s Christmas Eve in 2017 and Countess Luann De Lesseps has just been arrested in Palm Beach, Florida. “I’m going to kill you,” intones the 52-year-old from the back of a police cruiser, before slipping out of her handcuffs and attempting to flee like Harry Houdini in a floral sundress. Later, alone in a jail cell, a guard takes pity on her and throws her a bologni sandwich. “It was almost like a dead fish hanging out of my mouth,” is how Luann describes it somewhat poetically on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New York after they’d aired the grainy dash-cam footage of her arrest. “It was so sad.”

I remember watching this play out, enthralled. This trilingual, high-society woman was now also a convicted felon (charges include battery, disorderly intoxication and trespassing). Not long afterwards, she transformed her experiences into a successful cabaret show, which she now tours around the world. Amid all of this, one fact remains: RHONY is still some of the best TV I’ve ever seen. Better than The Wire or Peaky Blinders or whatever else peoples’ boyfriends insist I watch. Yet if I were to say that reality TV as a genre is responsible for some of TV’s most emotionally complex, moving, comedic, Shakespearean story arcs, I would probably sound like I was being ironic and superfluous. Because reality TV is vapid and smooth-brained, right? Sometimes, yes—but not always.

Reality TV’s reputation for being anti-intellectual and low-brow likely stems from a few factors. As a genre, it occupies a strange space—neither documentary nor scripted TV, but a glossy third thing involving overly dramatic background music and pre-planned scenes. Detractors consider this format both mind-numbing and salacious, like cultural fast food; engineered for immediate gratification, and often focused on cast members’ petty personal grievances and rock-bottom moments. Yet, these shows follow real people in their real lives, sometimes over years, even decades. For anyone deeply interested in the minutiae of what it means to be human, reality TV is king. The best reality shows—The Kardashians, Dance Moms, The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives—are anthropological studies, except with campy one-liners; life blown up to exaggerated proportions.

I’m not the only one to make this argument. “It’s anthropology, sociology, the human condition,” says one poster on TikTok. “When you’re bingeing, you’re not being a piece of shit. You’re researching, you’re gathering data points.” Obviously, “researching” is a bit of a stretch, but there’s a reason Vanderpump Rules was nominated for two consecutive Emmy Awards, with a special nod for Outstanding Picture Editing in 2023 (the year they aired an affair, nicknamed “Scandoval”). It’s rare that we get to see the events leading up to—and in the aftermath of—a romantic betrayal, and hear from all affected parties. Such things are usually confined to a single Esther Perel podcast episode.

I also suspect that, like “chick flicks” or “rom-coms”, disdain for reality TV is intricately tied to the fact that it’s a format predominantly consumed by, and featuring, women and gay men. Women’s interests have long been considered frivolous—especially if such interests involve women expressing emotion, talking about their feelings among each other, navigating status and power separate or in direct opposition to their relationships with men. If it wasn’t for Housewives, for example, I would not see the lives of women in their 50s, affluent as they are—their fears, hopes, frustrations—play out on screen in such detail or flagrancy. Dismissing TV like this as dumb or vapid reveals much about what wider society considers worthy.