Outside of certain enlightened groups, when I confess my deep love of The Real Housewives franchise, the reactions range from disgust to rage. The occasional few admit that they appreciate these types of shows as a “guilty pleasure”. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the novel was considered a cheap and feminine form of entertainment because it caused readers to form emotional attachments to fictional characters. Today, reality TV is undervalued for the same reason. Writer and scholar Anne Helen Petersen wrote in regard to celebrity gossip, an umbrella under which today’s reality stars fall: “like so many other gendered media texts, it causes anxiety […] because it has been labeled, mostly by men, as feminine and frivolous.”
Admittedly, The Real Housewives doesn’t have the intellectual heft of, say, a documentary feature on particle science or the ills of the criminal justice system, but it’s no less intelligent than shows viewers readily admit to loving without guilt, such as Westworld or The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Writing for the New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum declared that while reality TV is an “easily mocked mass artistic medium”, it also provides a “magnetizing mirror for culture”. The mirror shows women “who have succeeded all too well at becoming visible” being “penalized vigilantly and forcefully, and turned into spectacles” (Doyle 2016a). Likewise, fans are mocked at best, scorned at worst for allowing these spectacles to flourish. According to Peterson, however, “the more you talk about gossip in a critical, feminist way, the more the seams of its construction become more visible.”