The Wild West of Noughties Reality TV

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Inside This Episode

• Reality TV reckonings as a new genre: Richard and Marina open by discussing the recent glut of streaming documentaries revisiting the ethical abominations of noughties and 2010s reality television. Big exposés have landed on Netflix and other streamers, including a look behind the scenes of The Biggest Loser and Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, with another documentary about The Swan on the way. Marina notes it is a genre where reality TV’s worst moments are being “repackaged in documentary format, perhaps for learnings.”
• Donald Trump and the reach of reality TV: Marina argues the most significant reality TV star of the noughties was Donald Trump, and that he could not have become president without it. Having failed in property in the 1980s and gone “away with his tail between his legs,” he returned as a force via “one of the absolute sort of marquee reality TV formats.” The pair suggest reality TV culture has now “permeated everything,” including the Oval Office.
• The origins of the genre: Richard explains that reality TV as a category barely existed before Survivor and Big Brother. He recalls that the very first version of Survivor was a Swedish show called Expedition Robinson in the mid-1990s, and that John de Mol then developed Big Brother as essentially Survivor in a fixed-rig house. In America, because the schedules were dominated by scripted drama and news, “reality TV came to mean everything that wasn’t scripted.”
• From social experiment to manufactured drama: Marina describes an early innocence, with contestants treated more like documentary subjects, before producers began editing material “for the kind of emotional arc of this episode.” Richard counters that the very first Big Brother series had a purity to it because it was streamed live twenty-four hours a day, making villain edits difficult. Both agree that once the gold rush for non-scripted programming kicked in, the hooks and cliffhangers had to become ever more extreme.
• Huis Clos and the birth of Survivor: In one of the episode’s odder coincidences, Richard reveals that the idea for Survivor came to him after watching a student production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos at the Bedlam Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival around 1990, featuring a young Robert Peston. Marina then realises she saw the very same production in the same tiny venue. Richard jokes that “the most profitable franchise in the history of television came out of it and neither of us made any money from it.”
• America’s Next Top Model and Tyra Banks: Marina reflects on the recent Netflix documentary Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, describing a ratchet effect in which contestants were asked to pose as victims of shootings for fashion shoots, including one young woman whose mother had been killed by gun violence. She considers Tyra Banks “a monster, but… one of those monsters that’s made not born,” arguing that Banks internalised the cruelties of the fashion industry before turning them on her contestants. Richard notes that performers on these shows had no agents and no protection, and that producers often told themselves it was “fair enough, everyone’s getting something out.”
• Producers knew it was wrong: Richard is firm that the producers’ current line — that “things were very different then” — does not wash. Having been in the rooms himself, he insists, “you knew what right and wrong was.” Marina agrees, recalling writing for Heat magazine during the noughties and the infamous “Circle of Shame,” along with a paparazzi shot of Britney Spears under the headline “She’s not pregnant.”
• The Swan and the extremes of makeover TV: Richard describes The Swan, hosted by Amanda Byram, as a makeover series in which women with poor self-image — cast as “ugly ducklings” — underwent months of transformations including plastic surgery, and were denied access to a mirror until the final reveal. He warns that the forthcoming documentary suggests the show was far darker than its wholesome framing implied. Both hosts agree that “reveal” is central to almost every reality format.
• International madness — Sperm Race and The Big Donor Show: Richard details two extreme noughties formats. The German show Sperm Race involved twelve men donating samples in Cologne, with the winning sperm earning its owner a Porsche. The Dutch show De Grote Donorshow, made by Endemol for BNN in June 2007, pretended to let a dying woman choose which of three kidney patients would receive her organ — only for the finale to reveal that the woman was an actress and the entire broadcast was a publicity stunt to raise awareness of the Netherlands’ dire organ donor shortage, which ultimately helped change Dutch law.
• Married at First Sight Australia and the modern reboot cycle: Marina describes a scandal from the past fortnight in which Brooke Crompton returned to Married at First Sight Australia for a dinner party and, having apparently been told to insult everyone present, did exactly that. Crompton’s subsequent statement — that “this behaviour is not a reflection of who I am at my core” and that she hoped Australia would “one day see this” — strikes Marina as grandiose. She suspects these nostalgic documentaries are less about cleansing the earth than about “a second bite at the footage,” another form of IP reboot.
• Sora is dead — but not because Hollywood won: Richard announces that OpenAI’s video generation app Sora, which Disney had agreed to back with a $1 billion investment, has been shut down. The assumption might be that Hollywood’s pushback killed it, but Richard argues the real reason is that it was “wildly, wildly unprofitable,” reportedly costing OpenAI around $15 million a day to run. Marina notes that OpenAI told staff to “avoid distractions” and side quests, and to focus on enterprise and productivity applications where the real money lies.
• Why Sora never made money: The pair explain that each generated video cost between roughly $1.30 and $2 in compute while being free to the user, and that the planned Disney deal had given Sora access to about two hundred character likenesses. Marina notes that new Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro has been handed a problem created under Bob Iger, and that the “direct to consumer” market for people sitting at home making Sora videos simply did not exist at any meaningful scale. Richard argues that flashy consumer apps like Sora and ChatGPT were always primarily PR exercises for OpenAI.
• AI has already colonised Hollywood quietly: Richard insists the real story of AI in film has never been Sora but the quieter integration of tools like Kling (a Chinese rival backed by the state rather than venture capital), Seedance (from ByteDance) and Runway Gen-3 into development, edit and post-production. He notes that the Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt bridge-fight clip that went viral was made with Seedance. The hosts argue Hollywood is only publicly fighting for the visible bits — writers and star likenesses — while integrating AI across every other part of the business.
• Distrust of AI company claims: Marina says she no longer trusts anything the big AI companies announce, pointing to Nvidia’s supposed $100 billion investment in OpenAI being quietly “commuted back” to around $30 billion. She names Sam Altman as her current “number one” among the tech lords she finds most loathsome, joking that even the uncanny valley has been eliminated from him — he “looks like someone who’s wearing a sort of state of the art human” suit. Richard suggests it might actually be Paul Chuckle underneath.
• Will Smith’s social network pitch and the Sony hack: Marina recounts Will Smith once pitching Sony a film project so “mesmeric for the planet” that he also wanted a bespoke social network built around it — a detail revealed by the Sony email hack. She suggests this is the kind of grandiose mogul-era thinking that also characterises OpenAI’s pronouncements. Richard closes the discussion by noting that high-end writing will probably be the last creative frontier AI can reliably conquer.
• Recommendation — Sort Your Life Out: Richard recommends Sort Your Life Out with Stacey Solomon on BBC One and iPlayer, calling it “so beautiful.” He argues it is like all the best television programmes in that “it is not about the thing that it says it’s about” — not really about decluttering but about “who you are as a human being and the things you’ve accumulated and why.” He also notes that producer Joey would love to hear from anyone on the show’s production team, because they have lots of listener questions and no contacts there.

Media Mentions

Television Shows

• Would I Lie to You? — the BBC panel show; Marina mentions watching the Jason Isaacs episode with her children.
• The Biggest Loser — the US weight-loss reality show, now the subject of a behind-the-scenes exposé.
• America’s Next Top Model — Tyra Banks’s long-running modelling competition.
• Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model — the Netflix documentary series revisiting the ANTM years.
• The Swan — the American makeover series hosted by Amanda Byram, soon to be the subject of a new documentary.
• Survivor — the hugely successful US reality format Richard describes as central to reality TV’s birth.
• Expedition Robinson — the original Swedish Survivor format, referred to in the episode as “Operation Robinson.”
• Big Brother — John de Mol’s fixed-rig reality format that became a global juggernaut.
• 60 Minutes — cited as an example of the traditional US news programming that pre-dated reality TV.
• Inside the Factory — British factual entertainment given as an example of a docusoap.
• The Dog House — the UK dog-adoption docusoap mentioned as another example of factual entertainment.
• Shattered — Richard’s own noughties Channel 4 series in which contestants were deprived of sleep.
• The Chamber — the short-lived Fox endurance quiz show.
• The Chair — the competing endurance quiz hosted by John McEnroe.
• Fear Factor — the Joe Rogan-hosted US reality show, cited as a huge hit of the era.
• De Grote Donorshow — the 2007 Dutch kidney-donation hoax broadcast by BNN.
• Sperm Race — the German Endemol format in which twelve men competed for a Porsche (no dedicated Wikipedia page).
• Married at First Sight Australia — the Australian reality show at the centre of the recent Brooke Crompton scandal.
• Space Cadets — the Channel 4 reality hoax in which contestants were convinced they had travelled to space; flagged for a future episode.
• Sort Your Life Out — the Stacey Solomon decluttering series on BBC One and iPlayer, Richard’s pick of the week.

Magazines

• Heat — the celebrity weekly for which Marina wrote during the noughties, home of the “Circle of Shame.”

Plays

• Pygmalion — George Bernard Shaw’s play, referenced by Marina as a darker template for reality TV’s Svengali dynamic.
• Huis Clos (No Exit) — Jean-Paul Sartre’s one-act play, which Richard credits as the direct inspiration for Survivor after seeing it staged at the Bedlam Theatre in Edinburgh.

AI Products & Platforms

• Sora — OpenAI’s now-discontinued text-to-video app, the main subject of the second half of the episode.
• ChatGPT — OpenAI’s flagship product, cited as the company’s other great PR coup.
• Kling — the Chinese text-to-video rival Richard says many in Hollywood are already using.
• Runway — the AI video company whose Gen-3 model is cited as another tool widely used in Hollywood development.

Hot Takes

• On Donald Trump and reality TV: he “couldn’t have become president without having done reality TV.”
• On the noughties boom in unscripted formats: “It was a gold rush for non scripted programming.”
• On writers striking at the worst moment: “Writers will always help themselves out by going on strike at exactly the wrong time.”
• On how contestants were treated once reality TV outgrew its documentary roots: they were “almost sort of meat puppets” whose interactions could be “completely misrepresented.”
• On the lineage of the whole genre: “There’s actually a genuine play that’s behind the whole of reality television, and that is Jean Paul Sartre’s the Huis Clos, which is where He[l]l is other people.”
• On Richard’s accidental contribution to television history: “The most profitable franchise in the history of television came out of it and neither of us made any money from it.”
• On Tyra Banks: “She is a monster, but I think she’s one of those monsters that’s made not born.”
• On the fashion industry: “Modelling is a disgusting business, it always has been.”
• On Gen Z lecturing older viewers about noughties cruelty: “I know your biggest star is like, you know, MrBeast… many other YouTubers who are arguably making people do quite odd things for money.”
• On Mike Darnell, the Fox executive behind many of the era’s wildest shows: he was “the absolute evil genius who worked at Fox and was the evil genius of this era.”
• On Fear Factor’s former host: “Fear Factor was a huge show in America. We made it hosted by Joe Rogan. Where is he now?”
• On nostalgia for the turn of the millennium: “It was the era of trainwreck celebrities, the 2000s… it was an awful time. Reality TV was so dark.”
• On Britney Spears and the noughties tabloid culture: a paparazzi shot of blood on her underwear ran with the headline “She’s not pregnant.”
• On why producers can’t plead ignorance: “I was there then and things were not that different then. You knew what right and wrong was.”
• On how reality TV bled into politics: “You see it in the Oval Office now all the time.”
• On De Grote Donorshow: “This is absolutely mental.”
• On Brooke Crompton’s post-scandal statement about Married at First Sight Australia: “This behaviour is not a reflection of who I am at my core and I hope that Australia will one day see this.” Marina’s reaction: “The grandiosity of Australia… I hope they will see this.”
• On the retrospective documentary boom: Marina suspects it is largely “a chance to have a second bite at the footage.”
• On Sora’s original threat level: “It was going to destroy Hollywood. It has now destroyed itself.”
• On the economics of Sora: it was “wildly, wildly unprofitable”, reportedly costing OpenAI roughly “$15 million a day.”
• On what OpenAI really cares about: Marina says their internal message was to “avoid distractions” and not be distracted by “side quest[s].”
• On AI companies and Hollywood being a one-sided relationship: “They do not even think about Hollywood at all.”
• On AI company announcements: “I don’t want to say they lie all the time, but they… fib all the time.”
• On Sam Altman: “He’s been number one for many, many, many, many weeks” on Marina’s list of most loathsome tech lords, and he “looks like someone who’s wearing a sort of state of the art human” — with Richard suggesting the person underneath might be Paul Chuckle.
• On Will Smith’s pitch to Sony for a film so vast it needed its own social network: it was going to be “so mesmeric for the planet and everyone was going to want to talk about it, that it wouldn’t be possible for them to do it on the existing social networks.”
• On the ongoing integration of AI into film-making: “This is not a fight that’s going to be fought. It is already done.”
• On where AI will make Hollywood cheaper: “The main way it’s going to make producing things cheaper is by getting rid of a lot of jobs.”
• On what AI is worst at: “The last thing that will remain is high end writing.”
• On Sort Your Life Out: “It is not about the thing that it says it’s about. It is not about decluttering your house… It’s about humanity.”

Who’s Who

• Jason Isaacs — the British actor whose episode of Would I Lie to You? Marina had been watching with her children.
• Donald Trump — cited as the era’s most significant reality TV star and proof that the format reshaped politics.
• John de Mol — the Dutch television executive who created Big Brother.
• Tyra Banks — creator, executive producer and host of America’s Next Top Model, and the central figure of the Reality Check documentary.
• Mike Darnell — the former Fox executive nicknamed by Richard as the era’s “evil genius” of reality TV.
• Joe Rogan — the original host of Fear Factor in the United States.
• John McEnroe — the tennis star who fronted Fox’s quiz show The Chair.
• Amanda Byram — the Irish presenter who hosted The Swan.
• MrBeast — the American YouTuber cited by Marina as a contemporary equivalent of noughties reality TV showmen.
• Piper Rockelle — the YouTube child star whose situation has been the subject of a Netflix documentary about controversial family channels.
• Britney Spears — referenced as a totemic victim of noughties paparazzi culture.
• George Bernard Shaw — author of Pygmalion, cited by Marina as a darker template for reality TV’s Svengali dynamic.
• Rex Harrison — the star of the film adaptation of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady invoked in the Pygmalion reference.
• Audrey Hepburn — Rex Harrison’s co-star in My Fair Lady, mentioned in the same aside.
• Jean-Paul Sartre — the French philosopher and playwright whose Huis Clos Richard credits as the unlikely origin of Survivor.
• Robert Peston — the ITV political editor, remembered by Richard as having appeared in that student production of Huis Clos at Edinburgh.
• Timothée Chalamet — mentioned in passing by Richard as a throwaway joke.
• Les Moonves — the former CBS chief executive, described as the “titan” who intervened when Big Brother contestants threatened to walk out.
• Brooke Crompton — the Married at First Sight Australia participant at the centre of a recent dinner-party scandal (no Wikipedia entry).
• Bob Iger — the outgoing Disney CEO who originally signed the $1 billion Sora investment deal.
• Josh D’Amaro — the incoming Disney CEO left to deal with the fallout from the collapsed Sora partnership.
• Sam Altman — the OpenAI chief executive, and currently top of Marina’s list of least favourite “tech lords.”
• Tom Cruise — cited in reference to a viral AI-generated clip of him fighting Brad Pitt on a bridge, made with Seedance.
• Brad Pitt — the other star of the same AI-generated bridge-fight clip.
• Robert De Niro — used as a hypothetical example of a star who might one day sell his likeness to an AI company “in perpetuity.”
• Matt Damon — mentioned alongside De Niro as an example of a star whose likeness Hollywood is publicly fighting to protect.
• Will Smith — the actor whose grandiose pitch to Sony for a film-plus-social-network was revealed by the Sony hack.
• Conor McGregor — cited by Marina as an analogy for the AI industry’s one-sided attitude to Hollywood — “I don’t even think about my opponent.”
• Paul Chuckle — named by Richard in a running joke about who might really be inside the Sam Altman suit.
• Stacey Solomon — the presenter of Sort Your Life Out, Richard’s pick of the week.
• Joey — the podcast’s producer, whom the hosts encourage anyone working on Sort Your Life Out to contact with listener questions (no Wikipedia entry).

Notable Numbers

• 1990 — the approximate year Richard (and, it turns out, Marina) watched a student production of Huis Clos at the Bedlam Theatre, Edinburgh.
• 1993–94 — the period Richard gives for when Sweden made Operation Robinson, the first ever Survivor-style format.
• 25 years — how long ago the era of wild-west noughties reality TV now sits, prompting the current wave of retrospective documentaries.
• 10 days — the time in which Fox reportedly tried to rush rival reality formats to air during the gold rush era.
• 15 minutes every 2 hours — the amount of sleep contestants were allowed on Richard’s noughties series Shattered.
• 12 — the number of men who donated samples for the German format Sperm Race.
• June 2007 — when De Grote Donorshow aired on Dutch broadcaster BNN.
• 5 years — the gap between the death of BNN founder Bart de Graaff on the kidney waiting list and the show’s air date.
• 3 people — the number of real kidney patients who took part in De Grote Donorshow.
• 12,000 — the number of Dutch viewers who signed up to donate during the broadcast itself.
• 350 per year — the approximate number of people Richard cites as dying in the Netherlands while waiting for organ donations before the show.
• 1 million+ — the estimated Dutch audience that tuned in to watch the broadcast.
• $1 billion — the size of Disney’s now-cancelled investment in OpenAI.
• 200 characters — the number of Disney/Marvel/Pixar/Star Wars character likenesses that had been licensed for Sora use.
• $15 million a day — the approximate cost to OpenAI of simply running Sora.
• $1.30–$2 — the estimated compute cost of each Sora video generation.
• $4 — the freemium upgrade charge discussed for extra Sora videos.
• $10,000 a year — the ballpark price for a big professional Kling subscription, and the equivalent high-end Sora business tier.
• $100 billion → $30 billion — Nvidia’s supposed investment in OpenAI, which Marina says was quietly “commuted back” to around a third of its headline figure.
• Half a billion dollars — the hypothetical licensing fee Richard floats for Robert De Niro’s likeness “in perpetuity.”