ive been watching the bi/pan season of Are You The One? with my neighbor and oh my god the messy queer drama is delicious. Also the most desired person in the house is the trans guy, who is like, unbelievably toxic and its just a lot of fun. I did not realize how much seeing myself represented on reality TV, seeing queer kisses and (blurred out) sex and just queers hanging out and being flirty with each other would hit me, too. Like, is it good representation? No! But it is about as real as reality TV gets.
Why is reality TV so afraid of queers. There should be 8 seasons of this show that are all queer seasons. Straight ppl's reality TV dating drama is so repetitive and cookie cutter. Why are tv execs afraid of casting queer shows when we can provide literally everything they want and need for messy drama. There are so many other genres of reality TV where the whole point is letting boring straight americans in flyover states gawk at people who live lives very different from what they are used to. This is like, barely, a tiny bit, happening right now in that there is exactly one (1) show about opening up monogomous relationships to a 3rd person, but even that is so limited and structured and leaves out like, 99% of actual queer and poly experiences. Its following to the letter the exact phenomenon that has gained a small level of mainstream awareness among boring straight married ppl in flyover states, rather than exposing those ppl to the infinite diversity in infinite combinations of real, unmediated queer poly drama. The whole point of the genre is spectacle and sensationalizing! I will never understand reality TV execs shooting themselves in the goddamn foot by excluding queer people.
i exclude the Bachelor franchise from my confusion, bc in that case i am not confused. The Bachelor has had a specifically white christian agenda it pushes on its viewers, so their motivations to eschew money and viewership for ideology makes total sense. Its (part of) why they were failing for so long, and its recent upswing with Charity's and Joey's seasons, as well as the Golden Bachelor, can be directly attributed to the departure of the disgraced show creator making room for more actual diversity and less ideological bullshit. But still, I expect Bachelor is never going to budge on being open to queer (and out) cast members and storylines.
But like, Kinetic, what are you even doing? Or whoever does the Ultimatum, where is the next queer season? They just made another straight season when the queer season was literally the most watched and talked about.
Like, ok, is your casting pool smaller if you are casting a queer reality show? Obviously. But if you are one of like, 3 shows casting non-straight ppl, or as it stands right now, any show that did this would be the only show, you are getting the entire casting pool of queer ppl who wanna be on reality TV. You would have such a wealth of players to choose from, and could probably get some big name queer players from non-dating shows, as well, to pull in cross viewership. It is simply stupidity and bigotry and fear of change that stops them from doing this.