Dr Rebecca Trelease is a senior lecturer at Auckland University of Technology’s school of communication studies in New Zealand, and during the first year of her PhD, she was also a participant on The Bachelor New Zealand. She’s been a “massive fan” of reality television since the early Big Brother days, and believes many fans engage with popular culture in a critical, scholarly way – regardless of their formal qualifications. But of her time on camera, and the media coverage surrounding it, she says: “It was really fascinating to see it first-hand, but it was also really awful at times and I wouldn’t recommend it.”
Alyx: Tell me a bit about the media cycle surrounding romance reality shows, and the connections that viewers are encouraged to develop with the cast?
Rebecca: In romance reality, in some shows we want to see a main hero looking for love across the season, while in others, we want to see two individuals come together and follow them from meeting at the altar, to “are they gonna stay together at the end?”.
But we’re watching a person who’s put their face and their voice to a character that they don’t have a lot of control over, because you have a story producer with more power who is going to present what you do. Then you have an audience, and the way they perceive your story as well. So you have the participant, you have the audience and you have the producer. For a show to be believable, those three angles need to align.
Alyx: I’d love for you to talk to me a bit about what we as viewers don’t get to see.
Rebecca: It depends on the filming setup. The show I was on, and you could put something like Married at First Sight into the same category, the contestants or participants are having conversations with producers in the moment. In those interviews where they’re saying “right now we’re on a date”, you have people and a camera crew and lighting set up, and we don’t see any of that in the show.
Having someone with a giant camera in your face has to have an impact on participants. Whereas watching something like Love Island is amazing, because you’ve got those surveillance cameras and you have the mics around their necks. They’re wearing them 24/7, so I can imagine it would be much easier to forget that you’re actually being recorded.
Alyx: Can you tell me about the reaction from viewers after the cameras stop?
Rebecca: When a show is about a fundamental human thing, like falling in love, how you were presented is going to stick around for a very long time. From my experience, as a participant, there were viewers who would tell me who I was. Even men sending DMs who believe that you would be their perfect partner, because of what they saw of you on a show. It’s very strange, but that’s what happens.
When you watch 40 hours of something across a season – it’s a long time. You as a viewer have invested so many hours and you believed this. And so if you were wrong, would you want to blame yourself as the viewer for getting it wrong? Would you blame the show for presenting it in the wrong way – which isn’t encouraged by production because the show has a lot of money on the line?
Alyx: What advice would you offer to people who are upset about what has happened this week?
Rebecca: I don’t think I have any advice to offer, but to keep in mind that when you have one man who is ultimately positioned as the hero of an entire season, you are, as a viewer, meant to be invested in his journey. Producers tell you he is so worthy, and he is so swoony and romantic – it is a really massive pedestal to put someone on.
Photograph: Marcus Cooper
