What Was I Watching?

I’ve spent the past two weeks with one of my best friends, Kaitlyn, and almost every night, without fail, Love Island goes on. This is my first real exposure to the show. A group of attractive single twenty-somethings are placed in a villa, where they pair up, unpair, and get rearranged by new arrivals the show calls bombshells.

The whole thing is absurd, and for the first few episodes I mostly sat on the couch with my mouth open, asking questions. Not who would end up together. Questions about the show itself. About why anyone loves it. About why I was suddenly unable to look away.

And somewhere in there I noticed something that should have occurred to me a long time ago. I have spent most of my life watching reality television. Not casually. Consistently. And I had never once stopped to ask why.

The thought sent me backward. To elementary school. To a guest room television. To MTV’s Newlyweds. I was probably nine. My parents would not have approved, which was most of the appeal. I kept the volume loud enough to hear the show but low enough to hear footsteps. I couldn’t have told you what I was watching for. I didn’t understand marriage. I didn’t understand relationships. I barely understood adulthood. I watched anyway.

A few years later I was babysitting. The kids would go to bed, and their mother had a TiVo full of recorded television. One of the recordings was a new show called The Real Housewives of Orange County. I started watching. Then I kept watching. Then, without ever deciding anything, reality television became part of my life.

Not a phase. Not a guilty pleasure. Just something that was there. Year after year. Show after show. Cast after cast. The strangest part isn’t that I watched for so long. The strangest part is that I never thought it required an explanation. It was simply there. As ordinary as the news. As ordinary as reruns playing while someone folds laundry.

For most of my life it was too familiar to look at directly. And what I was looking at, all that time, was people. Not actors playing characters. Not musicians performing. Not athletes doing something measurable. People. People dating. People fighting. People making up. People embarrassing themselves. People revealing things they hadn’t meant to reveal.

I watched the same casts come back season after season and grow older. I watched them reveal themselves slowly, one season at a time. And it never once occurred to me to turn the same attention toward the habit itself. The watching was the one thing I never thought to examine.

The easy answer is that it was entertaining. And it was. But entertainment isn’t a complete answer. Plenty of things are entertaining.

I have dropped shows, movies, podcasts, hobbies, and whole interests over the years. Reality television stayed. Not one show. The category. Long enough to follow me from a guest room into adulthood. Long enough that I stopped seeing it.

It turns out people study this. For years. Somewhere a person defended a dissertation on why we watch strangers fall in and out of love on television. Somewhere a person with an advanced degree has spent years thinking about why we watch strangers on television. A DVR full of Housewives on one side, a peer-reviewed journal on the other.

I had assumed the answer was simple. That we watch because people are endlessly interesting. The people who looked into it found it wasn’t quite that simple. And past that, the explanations stopped agreeing with each other. I came away with the question I started with, plus one mildly humbling detail. Serious people had been at this for years and come back no surer than I was.

But the research wasn’t actually the thing that stayed with me. The stranger observation was much closer to home. Because somewhere along the way, without ever deciding to, I had mostly stopped watching. Not entirely. I still know what’s happening in Salt Lake City. Some habits die harder than others. But the relationship had changed. And I hadn’t noticed the change while it was happening.

Around late 2024 a lot of things in my life were changing. For most of my life the television was simply on. Now, most of the time, it isn’t. Most days there’s music instead, more silence, more writing, more time sitting with my own thoughts, more attention turned toward my own life. Drinking was one of the things that quietly left during that period. Reality television may have been another.

The timing is hard to ignore. The cause is harder to name.

The obvious story writes itself. I spent years watching strangers, and then I turned the camera around and started watching myself. It’s a clean line. It might even be true. But it’s exactly the explanation I would reach for because it’s tidy. And tidy is not the same as accurate.

The honest version is smaller. The habit arrived without my noticing. It stayed without my examining it. It left without my deciding anything. And I only saw any of it once it was gone.

I don’t have a reason. What I have is the shape it left. And somewhere between a guest room with the volume low and a couch at Kaitlyn’s with Love Island on, I stopped taking the habit for granted long enough to wonder what it had been doing there the whole time.

I still don’t have an answer. But for the first time, I have the question.