Fifteen years ago, Christina Travis booked a room at the Vancouver Public Library and handed out flyers hoping to gather people who love reality TV as much as she does.
No one came.
Now, propelled by the momentum of a TikTok account with thousands of followers, a collaboration with a downtown venue and an explosive scandal in the ever-expanding Bravo universe—she’s set to co-host an event where she’ll meet hundreds of other fans.
“I think it is a hugely empowering thing to be able to get people face to face to talk about it, because I think it is very personal, it’s fun, it’s deep, it’s all of these things combined,” Travis says.
Good Co., a bar in the Granville Entertainment District, has 270 reservations locked in for a Summer House reunion watch party Tuesday. A plan for an event was underway when Travis pitched it to her nearly 6,000 TikTok followers in a post last month.
For the uninitiated, Summer House chronicles the weekends a group of New York City friends spend in a mansion in the Hamptons each summer. It features all the tried-and-true tropes of the genre: boozy arguments where drinks are thrown, gossipy confessionals, trendy fashion, messy hook-ups, and elaborate parties.
But as fans and experts who study the genre are quick to point out, there’s more to reality TV than privileged people living large and behaving badly.
‘It has taught me a lot’
Danielle J. Lindemann, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University and the author of the book True Story: What Reality TV Says about Us, points out that nearly half of all shows in production are reality TV and argues the wildly popular genre ought to be taken seriously.
“Looking at reality television shows, paradoxically, can teach us about ourselves. We might think that they’re a space removed from our everyday lives, because they’re populated by outrageous people doing zany things, but actually I argue that reality TV is a kind of funhouse mirror of our culture,” she told CTV News.
“Whether you like reality TV or not, it doesn’t matter, but it’s important to look at reality TV because it is this kind of cultural juggernaut that can really teach us about ourselves.”
Travis agrees.
Watching people navigate conflicts and relationships, as well as struggles with things like addiction, mental health, loss and trauma can help viewers feel less alone in their own experiences while also offering an opportunity for introspection, according to Travis.
“It has taught me a lot,” she says.
‘Nothing is more relatable’
The Summer House cast includes now-separated couple Amanda Batula and Kyle Cooke, and the lead-up to their split was chronicled this season. They announced their decision to end their marriage in January in a joint social media statement. Just over two months later—after being photographed kissing—Batula and castmate West Wilson released identical statements confirming they were in a relationship they had been keeping secret.
Wilson was previously in a relationship with Batula’s close friend, confidante and cheerleader Ciara Miller. That relationship was marred by an acrimonious break-up that inevitably played out in public and the tension between the pair was palpable in subsequent seasons. This past summer, however, Wilson and Miller’s romance seemed on the verge of reigniting on the heels of a tearful reconciliation.
Alex King, a philosophy professor at Simon Fraser University and author of a paper titled “On the Supposed Fakeness of Reality TV,” thinks the scandal has struck a chord because it is, at its core, about a multi-layered and “morally horrifying” betrayal.
“Nothing is more relatable—and in a certain way more feared, within the bounds of what’s legally permissible,” she says.
The confirmation of a romantic relationship between Wilson and Batula happened while the season was still being edited and new episodes were still being released. The discourse went into overdrive, serving up seemingly countless TikToks, Reddit threads, tabloid items, videos, talk-show segments and podcasts about the scandal. Social media updates and interviews from the cast members provided even more fodder.
King says the multiple forums through which people engage with reality TV are as central to its appeal as the content of the show itself. While this season of Summer House was arguably interesting, King says she finds the interactive “secondary texts” dissecting and reacting to the scandal much more so.
“I really do think that reality TV is about social reality. It’s us thinking through our social reality together and watching how other people think through it,” she says.
Discussion of the Summer House scandal, and of reality TV more generally, generates fierce debate and involves often microscopic scrutiny of human behaviour. This, King says, is part of how it can lend itself to self-reflection.
“It gives you a way to think about yourself, because you’re like, ‘When I go out in the world, people are interpreting me in all these different ways.’ It’s a kind of dizzying thought, but it helps you understand better what is happening with your interactions with other people,” she says.
“It helps you unpack those aspects of social reality in a much more alive way. And it gives you an arena for thinking through that stuff.”
Reunions and reckoning
In the Bravo universe, many shows cap off the season with a cast reunion where unresolved conflicts reach their crescendo and people are forced to answer for their behaviour—both on and off camera.
Trailers for and leaked audio of the Summer House reunion tease more of the same, with the scandal taking centre stage.
Part of the satisfaction of watching these reunions, for Travis, is that they offer up a reckoning that isn’t really available to most people. For people who don’t have a contractual obligation to confront a friend, lover or ex over something painful, avoidance is a perfectly viable option. For people who haven’t signed up to have their lives documented, those niggling suspicions about others can’t usually be confirmed with recorded receipts. For people whose lives are private, consequences for their misdeeds don’t routinely include a public shaming.
“When people wrong you in life, you are rarely going to get to see them be held accountable—especially if they’re shady. It always feels like these people get away with it, possibly, for their whole lives,” she says. “I think we’ve all experienced this to varying degrees.”
‘Game time’
Anticipation ahead of Tuesday’s episode of Summer House—the first of a three-part reunion—is at a fever pitch.
“It’s been a lot. It really has been a lot. And it’s game time coming up,” Travis says.
The analogy to sports is apt in many ways. In the wake of the scandal, fans, celebrities and even politicians have declared themselves as being on “Team Ciara.”
Viewers have been keeping score, predictions of how the reunion will play out abound, and every move will be closely watched and later analyzed.
Reunions are even sometimes described as the Super Bowl of a given season. But while coming together to watch sports in a bar is a time-honoured tradition, watch parties for reality TV shows are a relatively new phenomenon.
“It’s not typically how we consume media today, it’s not like appointment television,” Lindemann says.
“I’m sure all these people have access to these shows on their own, they don’t need to go to a venue to watch it, but it’s all about that sort of communal experience of consuming that show together.”
Jason Sulyma, marketing director for Good Co., says the venue is on the forefront of hosting watch parties for both scripted and unscripted TV shows in Vancouver and will be holding watch parties for all three installments of the Summer House reunion.
“It’s still punk in my world,” he says. “It’s very novel. We just turn on the TV and make so many people happy.”
The watch parties have drawn bigger crowds than a lot of sporting events and attracted new clientele to the venue—often packing the house on a weeknight.
“It’s usually just like me as the token guy who organized it, and 300 to 500 women like screaming at the top of their lungs—confusing my staff in the most wonderful ways,” Sulyma says.
A guilty pleasure?
A reality TV watch party makes sense, according to Lindemann, given what is known about why people seek it out and enjoy it. But it’s also noteworthy given the “stench” and “stigma” she says still surrounds being a fan of the genre.
“Research shows that one of the reasons that people tune into reality TV, paradoxically, is for social connection, so we talk with other people and make connections around these shows, she says.
“But at the same time, we’re not supposed to admit that we watch these shows because they’re seen as a guilty pleasure.”
Lindemann, along with Travis and King, notes the popularity of reality TV among women as one of the likely reasons it is seen as frivolous and unserious. The content is also female-coded—centering relationships and emotions, often set in the private realm.
“We tend to devalue cultural artifacts related to women and femininity,” Lindemann says.
Travis, for her part, sees nothing wrong with publicly and proudly embracing her love for reality TV and can’t wait to meet others, mostly women, who feel the same.
“I don’t think it’s a guilty pleasure and the more I get shamed about it, the more I push back,” she says.
“I don’t think the genre deserves the level of disgust that it has, and I just think that’s the ignorance of people who haven’t spent the time to see what is shared on these shows.”
