Issue #4: Pooja, what is this behaviour?
Hi,
Welcome back to Continue Watching! It’s a Wednesday, which means different things in different weeks, but this week it means that we just have one more day to go! It’s a long weekend, and just the promise of three days of uninterrupted TV time is making our hearts sing. Another thing that is happening this weekend, which prompted the theme of this issue, is that Bigg Boss is returning to our screens.
The pandemic has brought lives, economies, and governments to a halt, but it has not stopped Bigg Boss or Love Island from locking people up in close quarters and letting it all burn. If you’re rolling your eyes already, we have a question for you: why do we react this way at the mere mention of reality television? What is it that makes us trip over ourselves, trying to explain to anyone who’d listen that we watch reality shows IRONICALLY?
These are the questions we are trying to answer in this issue, due in no small part to the fact that both of us are huge reality TV fans.
Source 1, 2
We’ve also got a reality show recommendation for you where you don’t have to keep up with any families or watch people fight for a rose. It’s about the tough and gruelling world of athletes who make the superhuman feats they perform look like a cakewalk. In other exciting news (exciting only for one of us because the other one is famously anti-old timeyness), The Crown is coming back! They’re finally introducing Princess Diana this season and, let’s be honest, this is why we started watching the show in the first place. We’ll also see Gillian Anderson play Margaret Thatcher, and anything with Gillian Anderson is worth our time (shout-out to Sex Education and The Fall [both on Netflix]).
And now on to our favourite section!
CURRENTLY WATCHING
Kashika
Hospital Playlist: Yet another Korean drama that is saving me in this pandemic. Five friends who went to medical school together are all working in the same hospital now, kicking ass and supporting each other through everything. There is zero plot, but everyone on this show is so damn nice that it has made me feel like flowers are blossoming in my chest. I have great friends and this show is making me want to work in a hospital with them while we eat ramen day in and day out. Streaming on Netflix.
New Girl: My second re-watch. Always a delight. The perfect show for this messy year. Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
—
Shahana
Wynonna Earp: Set in the town of Purgatory, the show revolves around the titular Wynonna Earp, who discovers on her 27th birthday that she has inherited the power to return revenants (reincarnated outlaws her great-great-grandfather, the legendary lawman Wyatt Earp killed) back to hell. Wisecracking, cynical, alcohol-guzzling, and imposter syndrome-suffering Wynonna is a woman after my own heart, who will do the job because she has to, but will whine about it the entire time. Waverly, her younger sister is the woman I want to be—adorable, whip-smart, and the nicest person in the town (she won a sash for it). I’m loving how fun the show is, that they haven’t buried their gays, and also has plenty of women in front of and behind the camera. Seasons 1 and 2 are streaming on Netflix.
Servant: The premise involves a couple who, after the loss of their baby son Jericho, pretend he’s still alive. They hire a nanny to tend to a doll that resembles their dead baby, who doesn’t seem to realise it’s a doll either. The mood is eerie, the music is creepy, and there’s a bunch of secrets regarding how the baby died and what’s going on with the nanny, so I’m intrigued. And there’s a very M. Night Shyamalan twist (he’s executive producing Servant) at the end of the first episode that has me hooked, so I’m going to binge this, I think. Streaming on Apple TV.
Have a great long weekend and tell us what you binge-watch in those three glorious days!
Continue Watching (and reading!),
Kashika and Shahana
Does Watching ‘Bigg Boss’ Year After Year Make Me A Terrible Person?
By Kashika
I was 16 when the first season of Bigg Boss aired on Sony TV. At the time, my TV diet consisted of whatever my parents were watching (many, many daily soaps), a couple of shows I could watch on Star World when my parents weren’t around (mostly FRIENDS), and Gilmore Girls (which a friend would download, five episodes at a time, on her VERY fast internet, and share with me on a pen drive). If I had seen a reality show before Bigg Boss, I don’t have any memory of it. I don’t think I even watched Roadies at the time.
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I have fragmented memories of that first season. I remember being baffled at hearing Kashmira Shah call herself CASH-meera and Rakhi Sawant being, well, herself. I remember Aryan and Anupama romancing the shit out of each other, and not realising that they were just doing it for ratings. The word TRP was not in my dictionary yet. I remember looking at Carol Gracias and just wanting to be that thin and nothing else. I remember being scandalised by what we were watching—celebrities, real actual celebrities, eating and sleeping and discussing their controversial lives and saying terrible things to each other ON CAMERA. I remember thinking, is this allowed? I remember being hooked.
In my first job, as a Bollywood reporter for The Times of India, my first big assignment has, to this day, been my most exciting assignment. Before the premiere of the fifth season of Bigg Boss in 2011, I was sent to the Bigg Boss house for a few hours. I remember feeling light-headed when my boss told me about this. I called my mother and SCREAMED. My entire extended family was informed in the next 15 minutes. My aunt called me from AMERICA. Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt were co-hosting that season, and I was supposed to interview them and write an article about how cool the house was. I couldn’t breathe. Too many things went wrong on that assignment, but every minute was worth it. I had seen the INSIDE of the Bigg Boss house. I found out much later that I got that assignment over a senior reporter because the chief sub-editor had seen me mimic a former Bigg Boss contestant in front of the other interns, and figured I was a fan.
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At the time, I remember many of my friends and colleagues were still watching the show, but over the years, that number has dropped significantly. Now, when I say I enjoy watching Bigg Boss, it’s almost a conversation stopper. WHAT, people scream in disbelief. Aren’t you a feminist? (Yes.) Don’t you know better? (I guess?) Don’t you have something better to do? (No.) There are follow-up questions too. Do you hate-watch it? (No.) Is it your guilty pleasure? (No such thing in my dictionary.) Do you watch it for work? (Yes, but I LIKE watching it.) To put it in Tumblr-speak, Bigg Boss is my problematic fave.
I understand that, with each passing year, Bigg Boss hits a new low. Every fight in the house is an endless cycle of mud-slinging, misogyny, and despicable behaviour. Host Salman Khan, a deeply problematic person himself with a maddening bias every season, often makes things worse. Sometimes, though, he yells at everyone and brings some sense of decorum back for a millisecond. But that does not excuse what we see five days a week for three months every year. I am not here to defend its horribleness. If you think this show is the pits, I am not going to fight you.
So then, the big question is: why do I watch Bigg Boss? More importantly, what does it say about me that I enjoy watching it? I am a big believer in the fact that the pop culture you consume is a reflection of who you are and what values you hold. When I write or make videos about Bigg Boss, I try to look at it as a way to understand our culture. Do we hate women? Do we revel in other people’s misery? Are we just suckers for a good redemption story? The answer to all those questions is yes, and watching just one season of the show will give you the material to write a 20,000-word anthropology paper.
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But that is work, and I have managed to create so much content around Bigg Boss only because I inherently enjoy it and don’t approach these assignments from a high moral ground. I watch the show because I want to, not because someone is forcing me to. I often forget how contrived it is, and message my friends or call my mother and ask, “HOW CAN SHE SAY THAT??????” I frequently get frustrated with it, and especially when there’s no couple to root for. I hate some of the tasks and have zero patience for all the celebrity promotions on the weekend.
I don’t think it’s the ‘watching how celebrities live’ aspect anymore either. I see plenty of how they live on Instagram. I also don’t really watch other reality TV, even though I watched Love Is Blind earlier this year and was obsessed with it for a hot minute. I also watched Too Hot To Handle because I was bored one weekend. When I was younger, I was similarly obsessed with Dare 2 Date, Emotional Atyachaar, and the golden era of Splitsvilla and Roadies. But I never watched Love School or Skulls & Roses. So, I guess we could say that my appetite for voyeuristic reality shows is moderate to high.
But what is it about Bigg Boss in particular? Here’s my very anticlimactic theory: It’s a mix of nostalgia and mindless fun. I’ve been watching it for so many years in a way that ties me to my mother that I find comfort in it. And it is definitely fun to see rich, famous people fighting and making up with each other while they are stuck in those four walls. Over the last few years, Bigg Boss contestants have mostly been Hindi TV actors, which is anyway my sweet spot, so that’s an added bonus. I also like watching people destroyed by controversy try to redeem themselves, unless they’re scum like Swami Om. Every season also has a couple and a bromance that is very hard not to root for. Which basically makes it the equivalent of watching multiple shows in one, except that sometimes people fight over how many rotis they have eaten.
I don’t pretend that this is highbrow television and I don’t let it give me an existential crisis the way watching I May Destroy You might. When something super offensive happens in it, I sometimes stop watching it, but I always go back. I think it is worth asking myself every year why I continue to tune in, but I don’t lose sleep over it. Does that make me as problematic as the show? I cannot answer that.
I made a friend last year who worked on one of the seasons of Bigg Boss. She told me in detail how bullshit the voting system and the ‘reality’ aspect of the show is. Does that ruin it for me? I’m afraid not. The new season is premiering on the 3rd and I am very relieved that this one thing is constant in my life, even if there is a meta quality to it this year. Every October, Bigg Boss comes back and that is not changing even in the hellfire that 2020 is. For the next three months, my extremely random days will revolve around 10.30pm, because I will know exactly what I’ll be doing at that time. Right now, I take massive comfort in that.
Shows mentioned: (Ratings for the last four shows are very random because I haven’t seen all episodes)
Bigg Boss - Colors, Voot ⭐⭐⭐
Love Is Blind - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐
Too Hot To Handle - Netflix ⭐⭐
Dare 2 Date - Disney+ Hotstar ⭐⭐
Emotional Atyachaar - YouTube ⭐⭐
Splitsvilla - Voot ⭐⭐⭐
Roadies - Voot ⭐⭐⭐
What We’re Really Saying When We Say Reality Television Is “Trash”
By Shahana
It’s 2003, and during some random channel surfing, I land on Star World and there’s a show called For Love or Money on. The premise is a dating reality show where a bunch of women compete for the attention of one man—but there’s a twist. At the end, the winner has to pick between the man and a million dollars—but the man does not know she has that choice. Love, intrigue, betrayal—I was hooked. I went on to watch the entire season and the next, and I can probably chalk up my love for reality television to this moment right here.
I spent years watching every reality show I could get my hands on, secretly of course. I watched Laguna Beach, The Hills, Roadies, Splitsvilla, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, even something called Beauty and the Geek. I even watched Jersey Shore for a while, and rarely ever changed the channel if My Super Sweet 16 was on. I always told myself I was watching it ironically; I had multiple variations of “I just read The Mill on the Floss and Finnegan’s Wake (didn’t understand it), I deserve something ‘light,’” in my repertoire if anyone discovered me watching them.
Source
However, as Henry Miller says, “A good lie reveals more than the truth can ever reveal.” And it reveals plenty when we dismiss reality television as being frivolous, trashy, superficial, and the reason for moral degradation instead of just owning up to the fact that we love it. Few can walk away from a reality show when it’s on, because the only thing more real than reality television is schadenfreude.
It’s simple—when we reject a certain kind of person or storyline on a show, and term it uneducated, tasteless, embarrassing, and degrading, we’re essentially saying “These are not people whose lives deserve to be talked about.” Why is a person better for watching The Big Bang Theory, a show full of the most ridiculous stereotypes that didn’t evolve in 12 years, than for watching The Bachelor, which some might argue did show some growth over the years? We might reject the stories and the people we watch on these reality shows, and they might not belong to the bubbles we inhabit or like, but they still exist, and their lives are just as valid.
One might argue that there is no benefit to showing something that one believes is morally and ethically vile—but there absolutely is. We tend to spend our lives in echo chambers, listening and agreeing with people who believe the same things we believe in, regurgitated over and over again by our friends and acquaintances. One might argue, what is to be learnt from watching Swami Om throwing his pee at Bani J on Bigg Boss? There’s nothing to be gained from watching Don Draper sleeping with almost every female character introduced on Mad Men either, except the knowledge that he is an attractive man. So let’s not get into histrionics over the hierarchy of art on television.
To come back to reality television, let’s talk about dating shows, which receive the most, and often justified, criticism. A group of men and women line up and fight it out, so they can end up with the Chosen One. The drama is manufactured, the casting is often racist, and the shows still treat sex and desire as something dirty. Desire on these shows only exists if you seriously love someone and see a future with them; the future only means marriage. In the last few seasons of The Bachelor and its numerous spinoffs, things have changed, not radically, but changed nonetheless. Nick Viall, a contestant on Bachelorette Andi Dorfman’s season (The Bachelorette Season 10), tried to slut-shame her for having sex with him if she never intended to go ahead with him, a move that was widely criticised. Viall went on to become the Bachelor in Season 11, where we met Corinne Olympios, famous for making out with him in a bouncy castle. Other female contestants hated her for her sex-positive ways and the fact that Olympios really didn’t care about anybody else’s opinions. It bears mentioning that she’s white, conventionally pretty, comes from money, and that might explain why she’s immune to criticism, but watching Olympios take pride in her platinum vagene—that’s priceless.
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One of the most landmark seasons of The Bachelorette was season 15, where bachelorette Hannah B blew open all the puritanical notions of sex and romance the producers had been tiptoeing around in the last 18 years. A devout Christian who loves and enjoys sex, she tells off participant Luke, who tries to shame her for having sex, with a resounding, “I have had sex and Jesus still loves me.” It was time that someone told The Bachelorette and its viewers that sex and desire are a very important part of romance, that sometimes you can feel desire for someone and not want to marry them—and that is all OKAY.
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There’s plenty more I could say about shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, Queer Eye, Masterchef Australia, Love On The Spectrum, and Nadiya’s Time To Eat that feature a diverse cast and talk about subjects that we otherwise might know nothing about. It’s the age of peak TV, and with streaming services like Netflix entering the space, we might be seeing more shows in the vein of The Big Flower Fight (it's a show about who can make the best floral arrangement) more than Too Hot To Handle. A show about floral arrangements, what a time to be alive! Either way, let’s just get off our high horses and admit that we watch “trashy” reality television because we feel that we’re better than the people on it. At the most, they’re contributing to the cultural zeitgeist the same way that other kinds of art we consume do. At the very least, they’re a distraction from the lives we’re currently leading. Considering we’re living through a pandemic, fascist governments, total economic collapse, climate change, and severe violence against minorities, a distraction is a good thing.
Shows mentioned:
For Love or Money - You’ll have to get creative to find it ⭐⭐⭐
Bigg Boss - Colors, Voot ⭐
The Big Bang Theory - Netflix ⭐
The Bachelor - You’ll have to get creative to find it ⭐⭐⭐
The Bachelorette - You’ll have to get creative to find it⭐⭐⭐
Mad Men - Amazon Prime Video⭐⭐⭐⭐
Recommendations
We get so many requests for TV show recs from friends, so we’ll get to them here in every issue.
I’m looking for a reality show I can binge on, something with characters I can care about, maybe even relate to. I’m done watching families yelling at each other and people competing for attention in the “pursuit of love.” Does this show even exist?
Yes, it does, and it’s called Cheer. It’s a six-episode show, shot documentary style, and takes you into the world of competitive cheerleading at Navarro College, a small junior college in Corsicana, Texas. I know what you’re thinking, “I don’t care about cheerleading,” and trust me when I say that it doesn’t matter. Even if you don’t know how to do a handstand or what a basket toss is, you will still be drawn into the lives of these cheerleaders and their enigmatic coach Monica Aldama. Every single one of these cheerleaders is a SERIOUS athlete, and watching them push their bodies to its extremes (and then some) will convince you that cheerleading is a sport. The genius of Cheer is that the show goes beyond the practices into the lives of the people that make up the squad—a lot of them come from tough backgrounds and unhappy lives, and they all seem to have found a home and a family in this squad. And just like every family dynamic requires you to share a part of yourself and hide another, everyone on Cheer does the same. It’s addictive, it’s compelling, and a part of you will recoil at how these young athletes will almost literally kill themselves to perform a stunt Coach Monica “needs” them to pull off, but there will also be a part of you that understands. If you’ve ever done something morally and ethically ambiguous for people you look up to and admire, you’ll get it.
Cheer is streaming on Netflix.
Shout-Outs
Kashika
I full-on cried while watching the cast of Schitt’s Creek win ALL THE AWARDS at the Emmys, proof that the show is very good and that I am very close to fully losing it, and then went back to read this GQ profile on Dan Levy.
Shahana
A lot of people have found reality television to be a handy distraction from the horrors of the world right now, which prompted this delightful, intimate, and thoughtful essay on watching bad TV near the end of the world from Riddhi Dastidar. I suspect I’m the friend with the “snarky Instagram commentary” she mentions (I’m very excited by it), and she is far more perceptive about the real reasons we watch reality television. When she wrote, “You see, it takes a certain kind of person to really love bad TV and I have loved bad TV for a really long time,” it felt like she was reaching out from the screen and saying, “You are seen,” which is basically the best kind of writing.
We hope you enjoyed reading this issue as much as we loved writing it. Please write to us if you have any feedback. We look forward to your emails, comments, tweets, and DMs with requests, criticism, recommendations, and anything else that you want to tell us. You can also follow us on Twitter here and here. And if you haven’t already, do subscribe!