There’s a fine line between… good trash and trash trash, I guess would be the best way to describe it…? I’ve been watching a lot — really, too much — reality television lately, including Love Island, Fboy Island, and Below Decks: Mediterranean, and as a result, I feel like I can recognize the rhythms and the tropes of each show even before they appear onscreen at this point. I’ve become an accidental scholar of reality television, and I’ve started to lean into the ways this impacts my viewing of each show.
It’s because of this that I’m convinced that Fboy Island is either an entirely scripted parody of the genre — no spoilers, I’ve not made it to the end of the season, and therefore any potential reveal, yet — or an incompetently edited attempt to lean into the expectations of the audience. There are just too many moments that land too heavily, and too many things that are artificial constructs that no-one seemingly questions at all for things to even ring as truly as, say, Love Island, another show that’s entirely artificial.
And yet, Love Island, now in its seventh season — not to mention the international spin-offs, which include at least Australian and American versions, neither of which truly measure up to the real thing — has a history to its artificiality, which gives it a feel of… verisimilitude, perhaps? Reality? Something that somehow stretches beyond the fakeness and allows for a shorthand and acceptance of things that we as an audience understand because, even just as viewers, we’ve been here before.
(This doesn’t make things like “Casa Amor,” wherein the groups are split across gender lines and sent to different locations where a new group of potential suitors basically try and ruin whatever romantic connections they’ve made to that point, are any less troublesome or, honestly, annoying even now. But at least they’re familiar.)
There’s something to watching these shows and recognizing signs, thinking, oh, now they’re going to do this plot twist, and then remembering: In theory, these are people’s actual lives. It’s a key point of watching Below Decks, to be honest — the one show I’ve mentioned where it’s not meant to be a performative contest, but instead a fly on the wall look at people doing their jobs: Is this what people actually just do in their lives now? Is this how life is for other people?