Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images (Monty Brinton/NBC, Euan Cherry/Peacock), MTV
When you think back on all the TV you watched this year, sure, you’ll think of Hacks and Severance and — if you have good taste — Andor. But you’ll likely also be thinking about The Traitors or RuPaul’s Drag Race or The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey were thrilling in that jaw-dropping episode of The Last of Us, but our jaws also dropped when Genevieve Mushaluk and Andy Rueda pulled off the “Operation Italy” maneuver on Survivor. Would our year in TV have really been as rich and satisfying without Gabby Windey becoming a star on The Traitors or Suzie Toot stretching the limits of delusion on Drag Race?
So why, then, are Pascal and Ramsey and half the cast of The White Lotus fixing to get Emmy nominations while reality stars Lexi Love, Mary M. Cosby, and Dr. Orna Guralnik don’t even have a category to get nominated in? Isn’t it long past time the Emmys introduce a category for Outstanding Individual Performance in a Reality Series?
On a level of simple fairness, the answer is obviously yes. Reality TV is the only kind of television program where the people we see on TV aren’t eligible for awards from the industry. (With the exception of sports; we are not counting the ESPYs.) The industry treats reality stars like the animals in a nature documentary: They can be compelling as we observe them in their habitat, but the true talent must come from the people behind the camera. There are currently 17 Emmy categories specifically for reality TV (not including those marked merely as “nonfiction”), including a category for Outstanding Host, but none for the contestants themselves. On a labor level, something is amiss when the executive producers and directors and hosts are all Emmy eligible, but not the people whose talents are what the viewers are watching for.
“It’s very much giving the short end of the stick to the contestants,” says Mike Bloom, who covers reality TV for Parade and at Rob Has a Podcast. “You might have the cast of Drag Race season 16 storm the stage [if the show wins the Competition Series Emmy], but they’re not getting the lion’s share of the credit there.”
The discrepancy makes a kind of anthropological sense if you go back to when reality TV first broke out as a concept with the debut of Survivor in 2000. Reality as a genre wasn’t nearly as diversified then, and the most prominent series were competitions that felt like they’d evolved from game shows. The contestants on Jeopardy weren’t competing for Emmys, after all, but for a cash prize, just like the contestants on Survivor, Big Brother, The Amazing Race, and Fear Factor. Moreover, the idea of “authenticity” was so crucial to the earliest reality shows that any notion that the contestants were “performing” was antithetical to the expressed purpose of these shows, which was to showcase real people and unvarnished interactions.
Of course, over the intervening two and a half decades, reality TV and the way we understand it have evolved. Most people both inside and outside of the industry have come to accept reality-TV stars as engaging in some level of performance, anywhere from a simple awareness of the cameras (the authenticity of the Love on the Spectrum cast still includes frequent breaking of the fourth wall) to full-on “life-is-a-cabaret”-style self-producing (Kyle Richards, Countess LuAnn — name a Housewife, really). This adjustment from seeing reality stars less as subjects and more as collaborators comes, not coincidentally I’d say, at a time when there’s a push for reality stars to unionize.
“What changed it for me,” Survivor alum and winner Ethan Zohn tells me, “was the season of Survivor with Mike White. There’s one moment where Mike was in the water and he’s talking about Christian Hubicki. He’s like, ‘Listen, everyone, we need to get Christian out, because everyone at home [is going to] love him so much.’ Right there, he was playing the game like a producer, not like a player.”
On some level, reality stars have always been in business for themselves. From the moment Survivor’s Colleen Haskell got cast in a Rob Schneider comedy (stop laughing, it was a big deal back in 2001), reality-TV contestants and cast members sought opportunities to transcend the genre. Laguna Beach’s Stephen Colletti starred on six seasons of One Tree Hill; the Oscars’ Best Supporting Actress category has American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance to thank for Jennifer Hudson and Arianna DeBose. But the last few years has seen a rise in reality stars hopping from series to series, even platform to platform, in order to extend their reality careers. By the time Survivor alum Cirie Fields returns to the show for its landmark 50th season next spring, she’ll have spent the past five years starring on four other reality shows (Snake in the Grass, Big Brother, an upcoming season of Australian Survivor, and The Traitors, which she won).
Parvati Shallow, another legend in the reality-competition sphere, has starred on Survivor, The Traitors, Deal or No Deal Island, and that same upcoming season of Australian Survivor. She’s seen the way popular opinion on reality stars has tracked over the years. “It’s this antiquated idea of reality stars as grubby little urchins who will do anything for fame,” she told me over FaceTime. “All those fame whores! They just want their moment in the spotlight! Well, there’s probably a lot of people like that everywhere, in every arena. But I do think we’re late to the game in recognizing that the gamers and competitors and performers, the Housewives, etc., are exhibiting elements of acting that are unique to the genre of reality.” (Not everyone agrees, of course. Shallow herself ended up getting on the wrong side of Real Housewives of Atlanta’s Phaedra Parks during their season of The Traitors by claiming that the Housewives are familiar with acting. “For me,” Shallow says, “everyone is performing in some capacity.”)
“Now we have people making careers off of being a reality-TV contestant,” Bloom says. “In the very beginning, the idea seemed to be, Okay, I’m going to do reality TV, and it’s going to catapult my TV career, and I’m going to become this movie personality. Now, the free-agent metaphor is incredibly appropriate: getting to play for all these different teams, like the Odell Beckham Jr.’s of the reality world, and appearing on all these random shows for a one-season contract because you can bank on their talents.”
In moving from show to show, we see the ways in which these reality stars bring their essential qualities and shape them to the new game they’re playing. This isn’t entirely dissimilar to what actors do! Shallow, in fact, compares it to improv comedy: “You know what the container is,” she says. “You know there are challenges and rules to the game. Then you’re thrown into it with a bunch of other unknown actors, characters you have to work with. And then you have to say, Okay, what do I do with this?”
“I don’t know if people take into full account how much our contestants do day after day, week after week,” says Tom Campbell, executive producer on RuPaul’s Drag Race. He thinks the queens would be “in great contention” for an individual performance Emmy. “They have to do improv comedy. They have to do impressions. They write their own lyrics, they style their wardrobe, and they actually make things from scratch on the air.”
The Emmys have embraced reality as an expanding and evolving genre in recent years. During the Survivor-led reality boom of the 2000s, the TV Academy seemed to reflect the overall TV industry’s ambivalence about reality TV, establishing the Outstanding Reality Competition category in 2003, but then awarding the same shows over and over — suggesting voters were incurious about the wider array of reality shows. But recent years have seen the reality categories and eligibility rules expand to be more inclusive, with the TV Academy designating structured and unstructured reality series and creating categories for cinematography, editing, casting, and directing. In 2018, the Outstanding Choreography category was split into separate categories for scripted and reality, so the Dance Mom scenes in Hacks don’t have to compete with the ballroom routines on Dancing With the Stars.
The campaign to establish an Outstanding Performance in a Reality Series category wouldn’t be seamless, of course. Many of the people I talked to for this column expressed bemusement at how to differentiate among the many types of reality performers. “The cast members are so different from one another,” says Andy Dehnart, creator of Reality Blurred and president of the Television Critics Association. “Someone who goes on a single episode of a game show is very different from a Real Housewives cast member is different from someone on The Challenge is different from someone on Survivor. How do we categorize these performances? The levels of production, the levels of authenticity, the levels of reality in each of those spaces — that’s what feels difficult to me.”
The last thing the Emmys need is another controversy over genre classification. Let’s make it three categories: Outstanding Individual Performance in a Structured Reality Series, Outstanding Individual Performance in an Unstructured Reality Series, and Outstanding Individual Performance in a Reality Competition Series. That ought to get everybody on an even playing field, right? Of course, then there’s the matter of who votes for the categories. Emmy nominations are determined by votes from peer groups — what peer groups would vote for the reality stars? We’d have to start inducting reality-TV performers into the TV Academy in order to facilitate this, right?
Shallow suggests casting teams would be good judges of reality-TV performance, as well as story producers, hosts, and EPs — all the people on set who see how a reality performance comes together. “And, yeah, the other contestants, too. Though I think that would make it a little bit more gamified,” she says.
If there’s one thing everybody I talked to agreed on, it’s that campaigning among reality stars for an Emmy would be intense. “I don’t know if we can ever say that some reality stars can’t become even bigger monsters than they currently are,” Dehnart says. “But I think dangling an actual Emmy statue in front of them might cause those traits to become severely [exacerbated].”
“Drag queens are also masters of self-promotion,” Campbell adds, noting their skill with social media. Then there’s the “traditional” actors showing their appreciation for reality stars. Campbell noted a recent Today show segment where The White Lotus’s Leslie Bibb was serving as guest co-host alongside Jenna Bush Hager. “Jenna was like ‘Coming up tomorrow, Jinkx Monsoon’s gonna be here with a very exciting surprise.’ And Leslie was like, ‘Why aren’t I here tomorrow?! What’s going on?!’ I mean, White Lotus, Drag Race, it’s the same juice.” To paraphrase Sasha Colby (who would have made a great Emmy winner in this category), they’re your favorite TV stars’ favorite TV stars.
And the Emmy goes to … Gabby Windey!
To take the idea of an Emmy for Outstanding Individual Performance in a Reality Competition Series to its logical end, you have to consider who would win such an award in 2025. That answer could not be more obvious: It’s The Traitors’s Gabby Windey. Coming to the show from Bachelor Nation, Windey had no natural allies in the Traitors mansion, but she quickly struck up the Bambi alliance with Chrishell Stause and Nikki Bella. She was the first person to throw suspicion onto Survivor’s Tony Vlachos, getting the ball rolling on eliminating a huge threat, and she ultimately won the season alongside Dylan Efron, Dolores Catania, and Lord Ivar Mountbatten. But it was her unparalleled skill with a talking-head interview — a gift also reflected on her podcast and in her social-media presence — that made her the star of the season. (“I love smoked salmon, I love goat cheese, and I love talking shit” is one of many scenes that could be part of her Emmy clip.) I reached out to Windey via email to get her take on the award that rightfully belongs to her.
You brought a good deal of panache to your most memorable moments on The Traitors. What elements do you think go into making the kind of reality-TV performance that should win an award?
I think cast members or characters of reality TV who we fall in love with are also characters in their real life. Some people know when to turn it the fuck on, on-camera or not. The people we fall in love with on reality TV are interesting people with or without a camera, but a camera is a medium to highlight their already unique and special traits. I’m not sure how you can objectify something that’s intangible — someone’s charisma or likability. Some people just have it and others don’t. What can you do? I’m speaking broadly here, You’re the one who said I brought “panache.”
How much “self-producing” do you see when you’re making these shows? Do contestants attempt to craft their own story lines or drama? Any examples you could cite?
I really can’t say I pay enough attention to anyone else to recognize if they are self-producing. I’m just trying to survive the long, grueling days of filming in whatever country with whatever questionable food and plumbing are offered. I think it would be safe to assume people have their own agendas, but I can’t really speak to it as I lack the kind of energy it would take to create something like that.
The Emmys aren’t a fan-voted award — it’s the TV industry voting for their own. Who would you want to see casting votes for a hypothetical reality-TV performance award? Producers? Crew members? Your fellow reality-TV stars?
Anyone who likes me.
Let’s say you’re campaigning for an Emmy nomination in this category this year. What would that campaign look like?
I wouldn’t campaign. I feel that would detract from the integrity of something as prestigious as an Emmy. Begging for votes or attention feels desperate, and I like to save that for thirst traps on Instagram.
Besides yourself, who from The Traitors would you vote for in a Best Individual Performance in a Reality Show category?
Bob the Drag Queen. No one will have an exit like his. He accurately and passionately talked shit about everyone at that table, even people not present — Zac Efron and God (Bob said he didn’t believe in God and that’s why he swore on him/her) — all in a desperate plea to be saved as a Traitor. Iconic.
