Is 2000s reality TV facing an overdue reckoning?

A warts-and-all documentary about “The X Factor” is to air on Sky later this year. Produced by the makers of “Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story”, it promises to tell the “definitive” story of the show, which drew audiences of close to 20 million during its late-2000s peak.

Creator and judge Simon Cowell, infamous for his brutal put-downs of hopefuls, will be among those appearing in the three-part series, alongside former producers and contestants.

It comes as a new Netflix documentary promises to tell the inside story of “America’s Next Top Model”, the 2000s reality contest whose treatment of aspiring models has come under an increasingly unflattering spotlight since the show went off the air.

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“Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model”, which comes to the streaming service later this month, will “unpack how a ‘cultural juggernaut’ became synonymous with allegations of toxicity, exploitation and harm”, said Grazia.

The two new documentaries follow similar exposés on weight-loss contest “The Biggest Loser”, and “There’s Something About Miriam”, a 2004 Sky dating show revolving around the hidden identity of trans woman Miriam Rivera, who took her own life in 2019.

Humiliation and manipulation

Cowell had plentiful “power over the audience” because we “related to” the contestants but we could “simultaneously” join him as “judge, jury and executioner on the panel”, said The i Paper’s culture editor, Sarah Carson. However, now “the very idea of this kind of influence feels absurd” and Cowell comes across as a “relic”.

Talent shows as a format are outdated – “social media and streaming have given musicians platforms to make themselves famous” – but, crucially, the audience “no longer” enjoys them. “Much of their value lay in humiliation”, and viewers now are “wise to the sob stories”, the producer manipulation, and the “welfare risks to every hopeful nobody launched through the fame machine” – cast into stark relief by the “tragic death” of One Direction singer Liam Payne in 2024.

Similarly, “America’s Next Top Model”, which ran between 2003 and 2015 (followed by a short-lived reboot) “garnered a global audience of 100 million”. But when clips from the show made their way onto social media “it wasn’t quite the nostalgic escape many remembered”, said Grazia. “From assigning models different ethnicities for photoshoots to having them pose as victims of violent crimes”, the show has come in for intense criticism.

Theatre of cruelty

The mid-2000s were a “peculiar time in television”, said The Guardian. It became clear that using the “travails of so-called ordinary people as fuel for small-screen entertainment was an idea with legs”, leading to a “mini goldrush”, as programme creators realised that “conflict, extremity and dysfunction would always sell”.

“Even contemporary critics baulked” at the “ugliness” of shows like “There’s Something About Miriam”, said The Independent. And now, thanks to social media, “horrified and bemused Gen Z-ers” can recoil at “soundbites of ‘Fat Families’ host Steve Miller branding obese people disgusting losers”.

TV in the early 2000s was “ruled by cruelty”. Shows like “Wife Swap”, “Supersize vs Superskinny”, “The Jeremy Kyle Show” and “Benefits Street”, seemingly created with “the express purpose of punching down”, and it’s hard not to be appalled by the “bear-baiting that Noughties audiences were taught to expect in their prime-time offerings”.

Several of the “TV villains” who rose to prominence on the wave of 2000s reality are attempting image rehabilitation in “soft, self-produced” documentaries, said Olivia Ovenden on The Observer. Presumably, they are hoping that “footage of them with their families and talking about how much they have changed” will “erase what came before”.

Talking to The Times, Cowell admitted he had “probably gone too far” on “The X Factor”, and its predecessor, “Pop Idol”, and said “What can I say? I’m sorry.”