The rise of surveillance TV
By ABHINAYA KASAGANI — akasagani@ucdavis.edu
In 2024, when Rob Rausch dismissed Leah Kateb on national television in Love Island Season 6, my world was turned upside down. I had always prided myself, to some degree, on my faculty for consuming reality TV “ironically.” Yet, somehow, I found myself sucked into the spectacle almost instantly, as if I had no real control over my body and mind.
Reality television has long been dismissed as lowbrow, almost in the same, hushed tone as the idea of gossip — as if watching it makes you an unproductive member of society. Although it remains true that there is less value in participating in mass surveillance, people-watching is a skill in itself.
Michel Foucault, a French intellectual and critic, uses English philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham’s conceptual prison design of the panopticon as a metaphor for the mechanism of power. Bentham discovered that by forcing inmates to self-regulate out of fear of being watched, prison guards were able to foster a sense of authority (whether or not they were guarding the prison at the moment). Foucault claimed that the uncertainty of knowing whether or not they were being surveilled guaranteed their self-monitoring, which he believed made them internalize this surveillance and ensured discipline. Whether a villa in Mallorca (Love Island), a restaurant in West Hollywood (Vanderpump Rules) or a castle in Inverness (The Traitors), the center still holds.
Reality TV’s reinforcement of the panopticon isn’t the newest idea we’ve had, yet classic surveillance models (like the one in “Big Brother,” for instance) have extended to shows like “Love Island” or “Vanderpump Rules.” These shows don’t track the lives of celebrities, and so do not rely on audience recognition.
However, in shows like “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” the contestants temporarily opt out of their regular lives in order to enter themselves into a system that rewards visibility. Despite having “reality” in its name, this form of television is anything but authentic. Curated to a T, this digital panopticon causes participants to self-contain.
“Big Brother,” for instance — the show was deliberately named after the totalitarian frontman in George Orwell’s “1984” — had cameras running all day, in ways that promoted the houseguests’ hyperawareness and self-regulation. Big Brother 2024 finalist, Nathan King, stated that “there were cameras everywhere […] the first week I was there I was really, really aware,” eventually causing him to dissociate altogether. Contestants sometimes feed into this model, performing until the illusion shatters. Most of this surveillance model allows others to anticipate audience behavior and feed into player strategies.
When it comes to “Love Island,” intimacy has become so commodified that it’s unrecognizable; contestants are walking, talking brands. The United States version of the show gained popularity following the release of Season 6, which retained some semblance of authenticity because its participants were unaware of the show’s success during their time in the villa.
Season 7, however, devolved into clipfarming almost immediately. If you were interested in this at all during the summer of 2025, you most likely were bombarded by the influx of Huda and Jeremiah content. Viewers dissected body language, motives and the extent to which the cast had been media trained. This season also failed to properly vet its cast, bringing on those with problematic histories and ruining the show before our eyes. It was clear that Season 7 was attempting to ride the waves of its sister season’s success, yet was failing miserably. Producers were more focused on what drove engagement, which convoluted gameplay entirely.
“The Traitors” occupies a slightly different position within the reality TV surveillance model, externalizing the panopticon. Douglas Brown, dean of the Faculty of Screen, Technology & Performance, argues that “in each version the same central tension endures: who can you trust when everyone might be lying, and how can you identify liars through nonverbal communication?”
Most participants on the show have been privy to an attempt at surveillance before, having made their mark elsewhere on reality television. The audience is spread out amongst those who have engaged in “Survivor” reruns and others that watch “The Real Housewives.” Much like the game of Mafia, the “Faithfuls” participate in surveilling those whom they have pegged as the “Traitors,” yet they are provided with the same degree of uncertainty as presented by Foucault in his theory of the Panopticon.
“Vanderpump Rules,” on the other hand, catapulted wannabe creatives into spaces wherein they would be constantly interrogated for their misdeeds. Scandoval, which refers to Tom Sandoval’s public cheating scandal on Ariana Madix with her best friend, garnered audience participation. In an attempt to validate that a friend-to-all is a friend-to-none — sorry, Scheana — the audience shirked the neutral position. These shows remove themselves from any moral responsibility, often supplanting the value of morality with monetary gain.
Reality TV, though it’s evolved, hasn’t yet shed its car-crash allure. Lemi Baruh, in “Mediated Voyeurism and the Guilty Pleasure of Consuming Reality Television,” argues that the voyeuristic appeal of reality programs is a result of their rather public display of intimate and embarrassing moments, and the opportunity they give the audience to scrutinize the participants’ behavior. We get to be arbiters of justice with no real power or consequence, yet at what point does watching with reckless abandon make us complicit?
While I have gotten off my high horse to become a frequent consumer of reality TV, I am not quite sure I’d ever want entry into the cast-iron tower. The contestants are largely accessible, due to not being actual celebrities, and allow us to imagine ourselves making the moves they make. We are also allowed to get on a high horse to say that we would never make those mistakes, or that we’d opt for a different strategy.
Soon enough, you, the viewer, find yourself conscripted into the role of a guard in the tower, surveilling the common man. The line, however, is drawn in chalk.
Written by: Abhinaya Kasagani— akasagani@ucdavis.edu
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