‘It’s satisfying to learn the wealthy have problems’: why is reality TV obsessed with the super-rich?

In the first episode of reality TV show Bling Empire, heiress Anna Shay commits to an excursion so globe-straddlingly audacious it would make Greta Thunberg weep. Los Angeles resident Anna asks a friend and her objectively awful boyfriend to go to her favourite restaurant with her – in Paris. They chart a private plane, eat their dinner and head back to LA the next day. It sets the scene for a series that luxuriates in the lives of the super-rich, and the candour, conflict and rule-breaking that such an existence affords.

Bling Empire, which follows the fortunes of a wealthy pocket of LA’s east and south-east Asian-American community, is not an outlier; in the last few years networks have commissioned a host of similar shows, capitalising on the popularity of series such as the Real Housewives franchise and the enduring appeal of the soon-to-end Keeping Up With the Kardashians (Bling Empire is produced by Jeff Jenkins Productions, the company led by Keeping Up With the Kardashians’ exec producer). On this side of the Atlantic, the new (and 21st) season of Made in Chelsea – which is known for its own late-notice getaways to New York and Argentina – is set in the somewhat less glamorous climes of the Cotswolds, because of Covid regulations, but is still bejewelled with wealth: the cast isolate in a grand house and guzzle champagne while adorned in mink coats.

Traditionally, we think of reality TV as portraying ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances – think Orwellian contests such as Big Brother.

Shows like the Up series, which began in 1964, mapped the chequered lives of its everyday participants from youth to adulthood, while in the 2010s Benefits Street and Skint tapped into our complicated curiosity about poverty and government welfare.

Recently, however, working-class stories on reality television have fallen