Podcast dissects the distressing truth of reality TV

In 2003, Gareth Smith, a consultant psychiatrist at Glasgow’s Southern General hospital, received a call from an executive at a big TV production company. He asked Smith to travel to Ibiza to keep an eye on contestants during the late stages of a new series billed as a dating show “with a twist”. On his arrival, Smith found a production team looking deeply anxious, although one executive producer remained upbeat as he discussed the programme’s big reveal which would take place over champagne and canapés. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, he has no fucking idea what’s going to kick off here,’” Smith recalls.

We are now grimly acquainted with the dark side of reality TV — the onscreen manipulation and humiliation, the subsequent online harassment — leading to contestants suffering emotional damage. This may feel like a recent phenomenon, but the Wondery series Harsh Reality: The Story of Miriam Rivera reminds us that televised cruelty is older than social media. It tells the story of There’s Something About Miriam, a Sky series that aired in 2004 in which six British men were invited to a Spanish villa to compete for the affections of a Mexican model. It was only when the winner was announced that Miriam revealed she was a trans woman.

The series is narrated by another trans woman, the actor Trace Lysette, who brings great empathy to her descriptions of Rivera, who died in 2019, aged 38, by suicide. Lysette reads out extracts from Rivera’s blog and imagines her delight at finding herself the centrepiece of a show in which, after years of hardship, she would be seen as the person she really was.

The podcast also interviews There’s Something About Miriam’s crew members, along with commissioners and producers, some of whom talk unconvincingly about how the show would celebrate trans experience. Others sound more sheepish, confessing they thought it would be funny or that it would advance their career. In the early stages, no one saw the central deception as a problem. “There was a certain degree of naivety,” says Smith, with understatement.

If the first instalment of this six-parter is weighed down with too much scene-setting and not enough analysis, equilibrium arrives in subsequent episodes during which the extent of the exploitation and duplicity is revealed. The audio of Miriam finally announcing her secret makes for distressing listening, as the contestants cackle mercilessly and the winner, Tom, is left speechless. A nagging sense of unease underpins this podcast, which asks us to look at the messy aftermath of what was intended as light entertainment. While such a heinous set-up wouldn’t be greenlit today, our continued appetite for televised humiliation means we are in no position to throw stones.

Spectacle: An Unscripted History of Reality TV is a smart and insightful account of reality TV in America, from Keeping up with the Kardashians to Queer Eye, showing how the genre has shaped culture, for better or for worse.

wondery.com; apple.com