Hero Edit: On Literary Depictions of Reality TV

When we watch reality TV, we can’t help but question what divides truth from fiction. Are these people really falling in love, or are they acting? Is this contestant truly deplorable, or has she just received a Villain edit? What about the conditions of reality stardom has led so many former stars to death by suicide? Reality TV won’t answer these questions itself, because its success depends on stifling doubts and fooling us into thinking that what we’re watching is the one true version of the story. As a result, as we watch, we are trapped in our wondering: on what level, if any, is this real?

One wonderfully-articulated, if fictional, response comes in the form of Aisling Rawles’ new debut The Compound. The Compound centers around Lily, a dimwitted-yet-attentive former shop girl self-described as “pretty, but not the prettiest.” Lily is one of 20 contestants starring on a reality television show where players compete to remain the longest in a compound in the desert, all the while completing tasks to receive rewards—think Love Island, if it were structured around a desire for material goods and took place in a climate-disaster-ridden near-future. The few memories Lily shares attest to a life that is unspeakably dull outside of the compound, an (unarticulated) late-capitalistic slog; in comparison, a spectated life divorced from the calculus of an hourly wage appeals to her.

Alliances form and fracture, leaving an ever-dwindling group of contestants who are only out for themselves and would do almost anything to remain in the compound. When Lily is asked what she wants out of her life after the show, we see Rawles delivering her critique of both materialism and reality TV: “I wanted to be free from the daily confrontation with the slow decay of humanity and everything we had built,” she writes. “I wanted to be left alone. I wanted quiet. I wanted to stop pretending that I cared about things.”

The Compound is understatedly funny and wickedly smart, an addictive slow-burn of a novel that is as pretty—and quietly dangerous—as the bushfires that glitter in the distance of the compound. It may be fiction, but in its honesty about our greed, it feels somehow truer than reality. In short, it’s everything we actually want when we watch reality TV.

It’s also about 20 years late.

*

When our society experiences a large shift, there’s usually a five- to ten-year lag before it begins to show up in our literature. The internet, which came online around 2000, started appearing in novels around 2005; smartphones debuted in 2007, so texts began to be sent in fiction around 2015. Social media became omnipresent around 2010; we got our first paranoid, Facebook-infused novels a few years later. Reality television, by contrast, has taken over half a century to make its way into fiction.

Unscripted shows—later dubbed reality television—began broadcasting for the first time in the 1940s in the form of manipulative prank shows and game shows like Candid Camera and Queen for a Day, which preyed on the unsuspecting and the poor. Despite continuous contempt from critics, over the course of the next fifty-odd years, the genre developed, expanding to encompass soaps, dating shows, and talent shows. Survivor’s debut in 2000 marked a turning point in reality television innovation; afterward, many copycats spawned, inspired by the complexity of the gameplay. As critic Emily Nussbaum puts it in her book Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV, “And after Survivor, the deluge.” Ever since, reality TV has become an inescapable facet of American programming—cheap to produce, easy to hate, and impossible to ignore.

Yet despite its arrival into the mainstream, fiction based on reality TV didn’t begin to proliferate until the 2010s. There are a few early exceptions, like “The Prize of Peril,” a 1958 short story by sci-fi satirist Robert Sheckley, and Stephen King’s 1982 novel The Running Man (published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), both of which feature a young man who stars on a show where he is hunted for sport. (These works are oft-credited as predictive of Survivor, though the similarities between them and the show end at the concept of having to “survive” while cameras roll.)

In 2008, over half a century after reality began broadcasting, Suzanne Collins published the first book in The Hunger Games series, which centers around a dystopian reality show where teenagers representing their districts must fight to the death; a predecessor to Rawles’s Lily, protagonist Katniss Everdeen makes history by using live performance to her advantage. (“So as I slide out of the foliage and into the dawn light, I pause a second, giving the cameras time to lock on me,” Collins writes. “Then I cock my head slightly to the side and give a knowing smile. There! Let them figure out what that means!”) The Hunger Games swiftly became reality TV fiction’s largest ever commercial success—the book spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and the series has gone on to sell over 100 million copies worldwide.

If after Survivor came “the deluge” of reality TV, after The Hunger Games came a more insistent trickle of fiction. Reality TV was, for a stretch, the domain of genre fiction. Starting in 2008, Lauren Conrad, a former reality TV star herself, authored a series of YA books based on her own experience. Soon after, romance writers seized the topic and have refused to let go, starting with Jill Myles’s Wicked Games, published under the pseudonym Jessica Clare in 2011.

It took literary fiction longer to respond. In 2022, we got Blair Braverman’s debut novel Small Game, about a Survivor-esque show gone wrong, wherein the producers mysteriously vanish and the contestants really do have to struggle to survive the wild; in 2023, we got Deborah Willis’s Girlfriend on Mars, about a competition show where the ultimate prize is being sent with a partner to live on Mars, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s highly-acclaimed Chain Gang All-Stars, about gladiator-style televised duels between inmates trying to escape death row. The result of this work is most often dystopian: privileging entertainment over humanity, reality writers seem to argue, is how we end up with leaders like President Snow, and societies that root for the public execution of prisoners. Now, in 2025, we received The Compound—and with it, the sense that reality TV fiction has finally arrived.

*

Since unscripted programming’s inception, it has been the subject of harsh and frequent judgment. Nussbaum boils down the critique of each new wave of reality TV to this: “[Reality shows] were cruel carnivals, which traded in humiliation. They were dumb spectacles, made on the cheap. They were shoddy imitators of better types of art: less sophisticated than cinéma vérité documentary, shallower than fiction, too crass to have any lasting value.” In other words: reality TV is so clearly lowbrow, so insistently ugly, as to ward off serious critical inquiry. It seems likely that the genre’s reputation as definitively “shallower than fiction” might have something to do with the lack of fictional response. Indeed, Stephen King didn’t even put his own name on The Running Man, worried that it, along with his other pseudonymous novels, “didn’t fit into his career very well,” according to his agent Kirby McCauley.

Yet when we dismiss reality TV as the dregs of society and refuse to examine it in print, we ignore the power that comes with its popularity. As sociologist Danielle Lindemann points out in her book True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, the average American can name more Kardashians than Supreme Court justices. Our President, a former reality star, was legitimized in part by the show that insisted he was actually a successful businessman despite filing for bankruptcy six times. We’ve let reality television run amok over the past half century, unchecked by thoughtful literary critique.

What does it mean for us as a society, if every fictionalization of reality TV results in dystopia? As writers like Rawles so deftly demonstrate, reality TV fiction can draw on the most propulsive parts of reality TV—the drama, the intrigue—to highlight what lurks behind the scenes of production, in that murky zone of manipulation and psychological damage. If we look into the mirror that reality TV fiction holds up, we will more often than not discover our own complicity. Look at the White House; in fiction, dystopia feels farther away, at least. This, then, is what is real. Why haven’t we been listening?