Harmful Behaviour Shown On Reality TV Can Seep Into Society, And It Needs To Be Addressed

I've been obsessed with reality TV for as long as I can remember. From watching America's Next Top Model in parts on YouTube in my teenage bedroom, to getting addicted to the backstabbing and strategy on Survivor and more recently, watching strangers get hitched on Married At First Sight (MAFS). But lately, it has started making me feel a little uncomfortable — and I'm not the only one. ANTM and Australia's Next Top Model have had a bit of a reckoning, with the Netflix documentary Reality Check exposing the harm the US version had on viewers and participants. While I was watching Reality Check, my husband made the comment about my teen self, saying, "Oh. This show would have really impacted you growing up." Impact is an understatement, as I'm sure ANTM and the media were partially why I developed an eating disorder as a teen, and my relationship with food has never been the same since.

But it's not just ANTM that should be in the spotlight. Last year, MAFS Australia was criticised for allowing Paul Antoine to stay in the experiment after he punched a wall in anger after having an argument with his on-screen wife, Carina Mirabile. Every week, we have copious amounts of bad behaviour being beamed into our living rooms, which can normalise control, dysfunction and violence in relationships.

Michelle Janssen, from Brisbane Couples Counselling, tells Refinery29 Australia that certain events on MAFS "subconsciously" contribute to the discourse around violence being acceptable in relationships, which is problematic. "It's about normalising the idea that if someone commits violence, if someone displays [controlling behaviour], and then they're allowed to stay, then it's okay," Janssen says. "It's about that whatever we continue to see consistently and is reinforced, is what we tend to normalise."

The MAFS format is meant to be entertaining, but there's one glaring problem when it comes to their Commitment Ceremonies. If one person writes stay while the other chooses to leave, the couple are forced to stay for another week. Considering it can take an average of seven attempts for a woman to leave an abusive relationship, this being normalised seems irresponsible to show on TV, at best. At worst, it could cause real harm in our community. "I don't know how healthy or helpful it is," Janssen says. "If I was to apply the most generous assumption to that, it's [the producers are] trying to apply some commitment to a relationship, but at the end of the day, if one person wants to leave a relationship, they're allowed to, regardless of whether the other person wants that or not. So I don't think that that's appropriate."

Even Australia's most "wholesome" dating show, Farmer Wants A Wife, centres around a man dating a plethora of women and choosing his favourite. Producers pit the contestants against each other, and while many successful couples have emerged, multiple women have come forward to share how taxing their experience was. Take Clarette Goodhead, FWAW's 2025 villain, for example. "Polygamy is not legal in Australia, yet the premise of the show I went on is exactly that: one man dating multiple women, while each woman is restricted to pursuing only one man," Goodhead writes in a blog post. "When men do it, it’s ‘tradition.’ When women question it, we are shamed, and labelled. I was branded those things not because of who I am, but because I dared to stand up for myself and for the other women. Because I questioned unacceptable behaviour. Because I didn’t sit quietly when the power imbalance was glaringly obvious."

Could shows like The Golden Bachelor and Farmer Wants A Wife be reinforcing power structures that are starting to take hold in society with the rise of the manosphere? Are we subconsciously learning that men are in charge and expect women to fawn all over them? "It's time for reality TV to evolve. Women are not pawns in a game. We are not caricatures waiting to be villainised," Goodhead says. "Reality TV might think it's in charge of the script — but women like me are ready to rewrite it."

The current reality TV landscape can't be fixed with a snap of our fingers, but Janssen floats the idea of trying a documentary version of MAFS. "I think many of us look back at [ANTM] with seemingly light-hearted entertainment with different eyes [after the documentary and] I think we see some history repeating with MAFS and other such shows," she says. "I wonder what it would be like to have an entertaining show that shows the real, hard parts of dating and marriage without normalising control, violence in some instances, and dysfunction?"

If we view reality TV purely through a critical lens for escapism, that's different. But from the sludge of comments villainising contestants and people getting far too invested on social media, my guess is that the majority of viewers aren't. You could argue that reality TV shows are there to entertain, not educate, but the truth is the lessons we learn seep into our everyday lives, whether we realise it or not. It's not as simple as saying a viewer may copy the exact behaviours they see on TV, but rather, it gets drilled into them over time. We start to learn that boundaries aren't important. Communication might be overrated. And perhaps we don't need to be accountable for our actions, after all.

Currently, we're accepting reality TV for what it is, but that's all we've ever been served. Janssen asks: "What if it could be different?", opening up a world of possibilities. "Now more than ever, I think we have to be aware of what we're communicating about what's okay and what's not okay in a relationship. It's too important not to."