Five Reality Shows That Should Be Rebooted
POV: The year is 2021. You are a powerful television executive. A global pandemic has shutdown entertainment everywhere and media companies have been unable to start up production on many of their shows. The genre that had the easiest time getting into production was reality tv — with The Bachelorette and Love Island being the first two American shows ready to film after the global shutdown. You don’t nearly have enough content to fill your fall 2021 slate so you need to invest in something quick and fast that can be filmed with a quick turnaround time and brought to air quickly, so your first thought is reality TV.
Keep in mind, the year is 2021 and everything is a reboot or adaptation of something that used to exist or exists in another country, it’s clear that you — a powerful television executive, are just looking for your local unemployed-reality-tv-obsessed-twenty-three-year-old-with-no-experience with your multi-million dollar production decisions.
Well, you are in luck. I’ve spent a large portion of my developing years neglecting my social life and watching hours and hours of reality, variety and game shows, even the short-lived, the foreign and the obscure — making me the perfect person for the job.
Here are five shows that I think would work well for the new post-COVID television landscape:
Whodunnit? (2013 — ABC)
Whodunnit is mostly remembered for the fact that actually (real-life) human beings believed that people were actually being murdered for a reality tv show — to the point where the show needed to add a disclaimer on future episodes.
However, the show could better be described as CSI meets The Mole, a surprisingly complex strategy game where teams need to pool together information to solve a larger scale puzzle every week, all set within an Agatha Christie-inspired manor house allowing for maximum campiness and ridiculousness week-after-week. On top of that, “the killer” was one of the contestants — adding a little bit of distrust and intrigue to every single episode. Throw in an amazingly campy host (Giles, the Butler, portrayed by Gildart Jackson) and unique and visually interesting death scenes, you have the perfect recipe for a cult classic one-season reality tv show.
I was a big fan of Whodunnit? and this show is still one of my sisters’ favourites, however, I am not blind to the fact that the show had many, many issues. The cast all had different ideas on how “in-character” they were supposed to be, with some people completely refusing to commit to the bit. The “scared-or-spared” ceremony takes approximately one-fourth of the episode is literally just watching thirteen people opening envelopes. The identity of the killer had no impact on the result of the show, making much of the intrigue feel hollow. However, all of these issues are one that could easily be improved upon in a second season.
If I were in charge of a Whodunnit? Season 2, I would have just given “the killer” a financial incentive to make people fail the quiz — making allying with the killer an extremely risky option which would hopefully make the gameplay a lot more interesting, and potentially make the audience actually invested in figuring out the identity of the killer.
Especially for a 2021 audience, I can imagine “the mystery killer” aspect of the show would definitely work well with social media, with The Mole or The Masked Singer-Esque Easter Eggs hidden throughout the episode ready to be torn apart and analyzed by viewers. Furthermore, the success of Knives Out and the million serial killer documentaries on Netflix prove that there’s definitely a revived interest in the murder mystery genre in 2021 — meaning that a Whodunnit? Season 2 could potentially have a much wider audience than the first season.
MTV’s Next (2005–2008 — MTV)
One show that I was genuinely surprised to put on this list, just because this show feels like something that would’ve been rebooted on YouTube or Quibi or Snapchat was MTV’s Next.
Next was a dating show where a series of contestants take turns going on dates with the suitor. For every minute they spent on the date, the contestant earned 1$. However, at any point, if the suitor wasn’t feeling it, they could “next” the contestant, eliminating them. Once one contestant made 100$, they would win and would have the choice of going on a second date or taking the money.
Everything about this show was equal parts trashy and cringe-y in a way that was 100% beautiful. The budget of this show was basically non-existent. Every line read was so staged and badly performed, your average porn actor would find this show demeaning. The show has aged like already curdled milk in the desert, from popped collars and puka shells galore to contestants bragging about “big milk jugs” or calling each other “metrosexual” as an insult. Watching this show is like peering through a time portal to the vapid, shallow and ugly parts of the mid-2000s — but isn’t that kind of charming? This content was meant to be consumed and then never thought about again.
So, what I’m saying is that this is absolutely perfect internet content. Have a quick search for “dating show” on YouTube, Instagram, Netflix, Snapchat, Quibi, MySpace, Peacock, and you could literally find dozens of imitators. However, none of them has ever properly lived up to the shadow cast by the original. A reboot of Next could definitely be a cheap, easy-to-produce, easier-to-binge guilty pleasure watch on literally any streaming service, with the literal truckload of memes that are produced in a single episode being able to generate a ridiculous amount of attention to whatever service is willing to host it.
The Chair (2014 — Starz)
Finnish director Renny Harlin once said in an interview that a director’s job is “to be the last man standing”, and nothing has made me believe that as much as the Starz reality show The Chair. The Chair at its core is a relatively basic concept — two first-time directors direct the same script with the same budget, producers and time limit. Fans will then vote online between the films and the best film will win 250,000$.
Where the show truly excels is as a character drama for both directors, as we watch them struggle with funding, getting notes from producers, scheduling conflicts and script rewrites as both directors slowly become the worst versions of themselves. I would liken The Chair to more of a docu-drama than a reality tv series, with the production crew becoming a very visible part of the show and even getting into fights with one of the director’s family. Both of these films are singular expressions of their director’s respective personality and the struggles that they went through in the process of making the film. In that respect, The Chair is a definitive statement on the role of a director — and the toll that filmmaking has on them.
However, the show’s biggest mistake was within it’s casting. One of the directors featured on The Chair is “controversial” YouTuber Shane Dawson, and his film Not Cool has spent a lot of time on IMDbs “Worst Films of All Time” list. Shane is an absolute monster on this show with his hair-trigger temper going off seemingly at random on anybody who seems to have any dissenting opinion from his. Not Cool is basically a game of MadLibs with random racist, homophobic and gross-out humour inserted randomly into the script.
So, obviously Not Cool won. Shane had an audience who voted for him to win, while his competitor did not. Despite the edit gearing for a storyline where an overlooked female filmmaker (Anna Martemucci) can finally have her shot in her limelight, she once again is overlooked for a mediocre man.
I think The Chair deserves a reboot more so because I think the production team deserves a chance to tell a story with a satisfactory ending. Both the concept and the execution of The Chair absolutely delivers and is compelling throughout the entire mini-series, and the production team deserves a chance to tell a story with a different ending, not one where the serious character drama is upstaged by the film where a man eats faeces through a glory hole.
My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss (2004 — FOX)
Prank shows have never been my favourite. Prank’d. Prank Encounters. Revenge Prank. Prank Academy. Prank Patrol. Rank the Prank. The Prank Crank. To Prank a Prank-a-tor. If you ignore all the samey-ness within the genre, you still have a central ethical question on whether or not the unsuspecting random deserves to have their emotions played with on national TV.
However, in the year 2021, there’s definitely a lot of people who people would think “deserve” to be mocked on national tv, and for those who don’t know what I’m getting at, My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss was a The Apprentice parody.
The first task of The Apprentice was selling hot dogs on the street of New York. The second task of My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss was selling hot soup on a hot summer day in Chicago. The host “sexually harasses” actresses who play his secretaries and daughter. Eliminations seem arbitrary and random until a twist on the final episode reveals the real reason behind them all.
I think the satire on My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss cuts surprisingly hard for a 2004 reality television show, whether it’s contestants pretending that sleeping on a bed literally stuffed with money is comfortable, or the same contestant’s eagerness to create a children’s mascot for Agent Orange, My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss parodies a “desperation” within the American psyche. The desperation where the signifiers of wealth and the upper class are worshipped, the same desperation that led to “Paul N. Todd” becoming the President of the United States.
Recontextualizing this show and its satire for a post-Nathan For You and post-Borat Subsequent Moviefilm unscripted comedy landscape, if in the hands of the right comedians could be absolute gold. The best unscripted satire is capable of disarming their subjects to give them enough rope to hang themselves and in the era of Donald Trump, that’s not a lot of rope.
The Genius (2013–2015, TvN)
Putting this on this list seems unfair. Not only was this one of the most successful shows in Korea, but I know for a fact that this is a lot of people’s dream project. The fact that a “legally distinct” fan version hasn’t happened out of pure interest alone is absolutely shocking to me. I would much rather talk about a weird, obscure deep cut like Santa’s in the Barn or a show that just screams “this could’ve only happened in the early 2010s” like WCG’s The Ultimate Gamer or King of the Nerds — however, I’m just so surprised that no country has even attempted adapting it that I have to put this on this list.
That’s because, at its core, The Genius is a simple format. Every week thirteen celebrities play a social-strategy game, the loser picks somebody to go against in a one-on-one “deathmatch”, and the loser of that is eliminated from the game. I would compare the appeal of The Genius as a combination of Taskmaster and Big Brother, a show that on its surface is an elimination-based reality show that enables celebrities to banter and outwit each other.
The real star of The Genius isn’t the celebrities — but the games that the show features, all managing to be strategically complex and multi-layered but still clear to the contestants and told well to the audience. The show’s editing knows how much to tell the viewer at any given point, dropping reveals, twists and turns whenever they please, chronology be damned. Every contestant on The Genius comes off as either intelligent, humorous or endearing — and the harder or more complex games do more to show off the smart contestants and rarely makes fun of the dumb ones. As somebody who has spent an embarrassing amount of my life binging foreign or obscure reality tv shows, my binge of the first three seasons of The Genius is to this day my favourite.
While it may be hard to envision an English-speaking market for this show, the success of “celebrities-play-strategy-games” shows like Taskmaster and the worldwide success of originally-Korean The Masked Singer indicate that shows similar to The Genius can succeed. Add in the show’s insane popularity in Korea, with ratings equal to 51% of all South Korean households watching the finale live, there’s a high ceiling to the success of a potential English-language version. The fact that this show hasn’t been adapted to another country is absolutely bewildering to me, and considering that the Korean version hasn’t had an episode in five years, this forever will be the number-one on my reality-tv wishlist.
