. Other industries have a higher suicide-rate – in farming, according to the Office of National Statistics, 44 suicides were registered in England and Wales in 2020 alone. Peretti's thesis, however, is that reality TV's 41 deaths, over those 16 years, are a direct result of producers' decisions. Peretti, a broadcaster and self-described reality-TV obsessive, traces the roots of the genre to two famous psychological studies. First, Stanley Milgram's electric-shock experiment from 1961, in which the Yale psychologist tested people's capacity for obedience by seeing how far they were prepared to inflict shocks of increasing voltage on another person just because they were instructed to do so by an authority figure. Second, Philip Zimbardo's 1971 Stanford Prison experiment, in which students role-played guards and prisoners during a two-week simulation, but ended up treating each other with such violence that the trial was called off on day six. This, Peretti argues, is the kind of entertainment that reality TV is manufacturing. He claims that it pairs victims with a){kind=link}
Jacques Peretti’s eye-opening book traces the rise of the divisive genre, and the chaos linked to it – but the book’s arguments go too far
Reality television, that veritable carnival of fools, has given us a staggering number of memorable moments. We’ve seen George Galloway purr like a cat while licking milk from Rula Lenska’s hands, Matt Hancock crying for forgiveness in the Australian jungle and an outraged Sharon Osbourne throwing a glass of water in Louis Walsh’s face after he questioned whether she was “on Ozzy’s drugs”.
Recently, however, it has prompted more sobering thoughts. Since Love Island was revived in 2015, four people linked to the show have died by suicide, including presenter Caroline Flack in 2020. In fact, as Jacques Peretti reveals in Edge of Reality, his thoroughly researched new book, there have been 41 suicides of contestants, producers and presenters involved with reality shows around the world since 1997 – the date he defines as the genre’s birth, thanks to the Swedish show Expedition Robinson (a precursor to Survivor). Other industries have a higher suicide-rate – in farming, according to the Office of National Statistics, 44 suicides were registered in England and Wales in 2020 alone. Peretti’s thesis, however, is that reality TV’s 41 deaths, over those 16 years, are a direct result of producers’ decisions.
Peretti, a broadcaster and self-described reality-TV obsessive, traces the roots of the genre to two famous psychological studies. First, Stanley Milgram’s electric-shock experiment from 1961, in which the Yale psychologist tested people’s capacity for obedience by seeing how far they were prepared to inflict shocks of increasing voltage on another person just because they were instructed to do so by an authority figure. Second, Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison experiment, in which students role-played guards and prisoners during a two-week simulation, but ended up treating each other with such violence that the trial was called off on day six.
This, Peretti argues, is the kind of entertainment that reality TV is manufacturing. He claims that it pairs victims with abusers, that it knowingly recruits psychopaths, and that it employs psychologists to monitor contestants’ vulnerabilities not for protection, but exploitation. Psychologists tell him about producers pushing abuse victims into contact with abusers. Private investigators add that their warnings about psychopathic contestants are ignored while damaged ones are given alcohol on air. One show, The Moment of Truth, included a lie-detector challenge requiring couples to answer personal questions in front of each other. When one contestant, Ruth Sanchez, confessed to infidelity, her boyfriend poisoned and strangled her before dumping her in a well.