Podcast review — Edge of Reality shines a light on a troubling genre

Ten years ago, the journalist and documentary-maker Jacques Peretti got a call from a friend who worked in television suggesting he make a film about the reality TV stars who had died by suicide. At the time, the number of deaths had just reached double figures; now it exceeds 40. Peretti duly sent out proposals for a documentary on the dark side of reality TV to every major UK television network, and several American ones, but was met with silence. He compares the secrecy around reality TV to that of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club, where the first and second rule is that you do not talk about Fight Club.

A decade later, television is still pumping out reality shows and viewers are still watching in their droves. Meanwhile Peretti has made his documentary by bypassing TV’s gatekeepers and making a podcast instead. Edge of Reality: The Story TV’s Too Scared to Tell, on Audible, promises to “reveal the truth about how reality TV really works and the lengths the franchises will go to get their story”.

I naively imagined there would be little he could reveal about this all-encompassing genre that we don’t already know. But the series digs deep, tracing the roots of reality TV in the Stanford prison experiment in the early 1970s, in which students and tutors mocked up a jail in the basement of Stanford University, before moving on to its modern incarnation: long-running series in which ordinary people are put in unusual situations and pitted against one another as the world passes judgment.

At the centre of the series are the stories of those who have died, among then Sinisa Savija, who was the first person voted off Sweden’s Expedition: Robinson in 1997, and Najai Turpin, who was ejected from NBC’s The Contender in 2005. Both were seemingly victims of a TV industry looking for malleable new stars and low-cost formats that would recoup the losses made on high-end dramas.

Peretti looks at the role of producers who often work punishingly long hours on low pay, and the pressure put on them to create heroes and villains. He also delves into the non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) regularly foisted on reality contestants to stop them spilling the secrets of their respective shows. At one point he talks to the psychologist who assessed the contestants of The Contender who has to speak in hypotheticals since he too is bound by an NDA. This penetrating and discomforting series is neatly summed up by Tim Wilson, former contestant on The Circle, who says: “I’m a post-reality TV person. I have touched insanity.”

The BBC series Unreal: A Critical History of Reality TV, presented by the journalists Pandora Sykes and Sirin Kale, offers a similarly damning assessment of the genre as it talks to creators, contestants and commentators, and assesses its cultural impact.

audible.co.uk; bbc.co.uk/programmes