The first time I consumed any reality TV content was when I was really young, and my grandmother was visiting us. It was a summer afternoon, and she was sneaking in an episode of Bigg Boss Kannada, because nothing aggravated my father more than seeing Kichcha Sudeep (Kannada Bigg Boss's Salman Khan) on screen. I'd sneak into the hall as she watched the episode, eyes glued to the television like it was the most important thing after her children's weddings. And of course, she'd get caught and hear an earful from my dad about how superficial the show was and how he didn't want me exposed to media like this.

And well now, I understand why my grandmother was sitting at the edge of her seat, like her life depended on it. Somewhere between doomscrolling and actual willpower, I have become a connoisseur of watching strangers implode over absolutely nothing. I didn't choose this life; the algorithm chose it for me, fed it to me in fifteen-second clips until I caved and watched the full episode. But if I'm honest, I'd have gotten here eventually anyway, because watching people fall apart on camera is possibly the most human pastime there is, right after gossip and worse than both, watching people implode on camera is gossip, just with better lighting.

Reality TV in India used to be a fairly modest affair. Bigg Boss, since 2006, has been the reigning monarch of the genre, a Hindi adaptation of the Big Brother format that essentially invented the Indian reality show template: house, cameras, forced proximity, weekly eviction, and Salman Khan looking mildly disappointed in everyone. For over a decade, this was pretty much it. You had Roadies for the youth-hostel energy, Splitsvilla for the situationship chaos, and Bigg Boss looming over all of it like a strict landlord. The format didn't need to evolve much because there wasn't much competition. Appointment television meant appointment content, one channel, one slot, one national obsession at a time.

Now? We have options. OTT has broken the pile open, where everyone can pick their poison. Streaming means no censor board breathing down anyone's neck, no watershed hour, no pretending the fights are about "personality clashes" when everyone can see they're about something filthier. The genre got let off its leash.

Take Lock Upp, where sixteen "controversial celebrities" were stripped of comforts and shoved into a jail-themed set, competing for basic necessities like food and freedom. On paper, it's a format about incarceration. In practice, it's Hunger Games cosplay with better catering and worse impulse control. Contestants have to earn what should be baseline dignity: water, a proper meal, a place to sleep, while the audience watches from the safety of their sofas, occasionally voting on who gets punished. It's not subtle and it's very obvious class anxiety turned into content. The fantasy of deprivation performed by people who will absolutely be fine once the cameras stop rolling, consumed by an audience that is very much not fine and finds a strange, guilty comfort in watching someone else's temporary poverty be gamified. There's something almost too on-the-nose about a show that literally puts people in a jail and calls the fight for resources entertainment, except it works, because we've always liked watching people scrap over scraps, we just used to call it a cooking show.

Then there's The Traitors India, which arrived in 2025 on Prime Video with Karan Johar as the ringmaster, an adaptation of the globally viral Dutch format that has now been remade in over thirty countries. Contestants gather in a literal palace, Suryagarh Palace in Jaisalmer, split into 'Traitors', and 'Innocents', and spend the season lying to each other's faces for a shot at a crore. It's Mafia, the parlour game, if Mafia had a production budget and Karan Johar's eyebrows doing half the narrative work. What's fascinating is how the Indian version leans harder into the Bollywood ecosystem than its Western counterparts, stacking the cast with actors, comedians, and industry insiders who already have para-social relationships with the audience, so the betrayals land harder.

This is really the story of Indian reality TV's second act. The global Traitors format works everywhere because deception is universal, but India's version needed Bollywood royalty and a palace instead of a castle to hit the right register of aspirational chaos. Global formats get an Indian remix, which apparently means more melodrama, more moral policing built into the editing, and more emphasis on family and izzat even when the show is ostensibly about a game.

And then there's the influency-nature of it all, which might be the single biggest shift in who actually becomes reality TV's product. It used to be that reality shows were a launchpad for the semi-famous, using the show as a resume line. Now the contestants often arrive with an audience larger than the show's own viewership. Bigg Boss OTT has practically become a farm system for content creators, with people like Abhishek Malhan going from being "someone with a YouTube channel" to a reality show mainstay who then gets cast into The Traitors precisely because of the fanbase he brought with him. The economy has flipped: shows used to make stars, now stars, of the algorithmic variety, make the shows relevant by bringing their following in with them.

There's also a more calculated bit of strategy behind all this that has nothing to do with content and everything to do with scheduling. These shows increasingly seem to be timed so they don't actually compete with each other, one wraps up its season just as another is gearing up to premiere, so the transition from one binge to the next is frictionless. You finish the finale of one, wipe your tears or your judgment, and by the time you've recovered, the next contender is already dropping its trailer. It's less a programming coincidence and more an ecosystem designed for zero downtime, engineered so your feed never actually lets you leave the genre, it just hands you off to the next show like a relay baton.

None of this makes reality TV good, exactly, in the way we mean when we say a thing is good. It's manipulative, it's dramatised, it thrives on class spectacle and manufactured betrayal and the low hum of humiliation as entertainment. But it's also an oddly precise mirror, showing us exactly what we'll watch and what we'll pretend is "just a game" as long as someone else is losing. Anyway, I'll be back next week, judging everyone involved while being no better myself.

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