‘Aspirational – and aggressive’: are black reality shows peddling a problematic narrative?
While reality television is a guilty pleasure for many, it is something I indulge in with un-ironic pride. Even so, there is a type of reality show I watch with a quiet shame, buried under my duvet as if scoffing ortolans. My favourites – black-led series such as Love & Hip Hop, Black Ink Crew and Bad Girls Club – are the ones I feel most conflicted about enjoying.
A dearth of black leads in romantic comedies led to a 90s boom in African American chick flicks. Similarly, the black reality TV industry thrives concurrent to a mainstream that renders black cast members decorative. Over the years, black media has thrust its own reality stars into the spotlight, and provided less fusty takes on shows such as the Bachelor, in the form of 2006’s Flavor of Love starring Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav, and subsequent spinoff I Love New York, fronted by former contestant Tiffany “New York” Pollard. However, the visibility provided by these shows is a double-edged sword. Most series unapologetically exacerbate the worst stereotypes that plague the black community: toxic relationships, absent fathers, financial irresponsibility. Glamorous reunion episodes quickly descend into ruckuses, as cast members in red-carpet-worthy gowns square up to one another.
The Love and Hip Hop franchises, various Real Housewives spin-offs and Basketball Wives series depict aspirational, entrepreneurial black women – who are also portrayed as aggressive and physically violent. Married to Medicine, a show focused on black, female doctors was the subject of a petition calling for its removal, for associating its participants with “materialism, cat fights and unprofessionalism”. “[Black women] only compose 1% of the American workforce of physicians,” it read. “The depiction of black female doctors in media ... highly affects the public’s view on the character of all future and current African American female doctors”.
My worry isn’t about the existence of these shows – rather, the lack of diverse programming that counters their unrelenting narrative. Already battling stereotypes of aggression and greed, it is difficult to absentmindedly enjoy them without a nagging worry about the wider implications of their popularity.
This tension made the 2018 announcement of the subscriptionbased video streaming service Zeus, which focuses on black-led reality shows, a bittersweet one. The platform was founded by the social media personalities DeStorm Power, Amanda Cerny and King Bach, all of whom gained notoriety on the six-second video app Vine. Helmed by reality producer Lemuel Plummer as CEO, they hope it will become “the Netflix of influencers”. Its creator-first approach has given online celebrities creative freedom, along with the resources to produce slick, serialised content and has culminated in a platform showcasing some of the most racially diverse