Even Michelle Obama watches trash TV

The reality TV thirst is a sickness. I'm sitting here watching House of Stassi, trying to work out what exactly this show is. First she tells us she pitched the show to Disney – and, I'd guess, half a dozen other networks before that. Then she tells us she coached her own family on what it takes to make good reality TV: that you have to be open, vulnerable, willing to have the hard conversations on camera. She doesn't hide her hunger for fame or relevance but what I can't work out is whether she and her cast of family and friends are performing a role, or whether they've actually sold something real in exchange for the money and the attention.

Is it supposed to be an anti-reality TV show? Where you can break the fourth wall? I can just imagine Stassi turning to her beleaguered husband Beau (who behaves like a fictional character) and saying: ‘I really think we'll get renewed for season two, don't you think?’ or ‘Wow! That was brilliant babe, you nailed that scene'.

This is a Faustian bargain, I thought, but after reading up on what she keeps dismissively referring to as ‘the cancellation’ I think there’s something more insidious lurking beneath all of this performance – much worse than a trade off.

In 2018, she and Kristen Doute reported their former Vanderpump Rules castmate Faith Stowers to the police after seeing a Daily Mail article about a Black woman wanted for theft and decided it was her. The only thing the two women shared was their race. Stassi didn't quietly regret it, either – she went on a since-deleted and now-scrubbed podcast in 2020 and bragged about the great ‘detective work’. Bravo fired her, she apologised, and the apology has since become part of the redemption arc that House of Stassi is quietly built on. It’s one thing to advocate for ‘willing to have the hard conversations on camera’; it’s quite another thing entirely to perform vulnerability so your reality show gets renewed. 

Which answers why she still gets a show at all. A few years after the racism scandal she created a comeback strategy out of ‘the cancellation’ – selling tickets to live shows, doing the podcast rounds and publishing a book about it. I’m sure she feels like she’s done paying for it.

I'm not exempting myself from being part of this circus. I watched all eight episodes of this series and there isn't a Real Housewives franchise, from Dallas to Dubai, that I haven't watched. Fortunately, I don't hold the lore in my head, but I'm fully absorbed by it anyway, amused and occasionally triggered, every time I play a new episode. I enjoy the takes on Threads too, though I mute the people whose opinions don't match mine. Call it an addiction if you like, but I'd rather frame it the way think pieces have for the better part of five years, from Psychology Today to Vogue to Dazed, all of them running some version of the same piece: clever people watch trash TV, and have good reasons for it.

The book True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us makes the case properly. Sociologist Danielle J. Lindemann argues that reality television deserves to be taken seriously – not despite its excess, but because of it. It works, she says, as a kind of funhouse mirror: it takes ‘the elements that are central to our culture – our collective preferences, our norms and taboos, and the jagged edges of our social inequalities – and beams them out to us in frenetic detail.’ She adds: ‘It may seem counterintuitive that a genre focused on zany personalities and extreme cases has so much to teach us about our own ordinary lives. Yet scholars have long argued that we can learn about core features of society by looking at the extremes.’

That might explain why I'm drawn to watching these people whose lives look nothing like mine. Some of it is the pleasure of full disassociation – watching something with no bearing on your own reality. But that doesn't explain why my blood pressure rises when a certain housewife starts behaving like a lunatic, or why I get genuinely annoyed when a TikTok doesn’t back up my read on a particular cast member or situation. For context: I fast-forwarded through the scenes of Simba’s entire redemption arc on Love Island. And ‘not afraid to speak her mind’ is what they call it when they should really be saying obnoxious and tone-deaf. IYKYK.

And, admittedly, it's a lot of feelings to have about people I don't know.

Still, even Michelle Obama watches trash TV so I know I'm in good company.