Yesterday, I started watching a French reality competition show on Netflix, with the aggressively American title Don’t Hate the Player. (The literal translation from French is Bad Players.) It’s an easy way to improve my listening French, especially since French dramas have not been capturing my attention lately in the same way that kdramas have. (And kdramas have made me realize how quickly I have gone from a wall of sound to picking out words in a language I have never studied, whereas French I’ve been learning on and off in one way or another since I was an infant. Not kidding. My mother was obsessed with French, but fluency eluded her, and it eludes me.) Anyway, when I pressed play, I realized that this was a French version of a show I’d watched a few months back called Surviving Paradise, also on Netflix.
The basic premise of Don’t Hate the Player/Surviving Paradise is that a group of people in their 20s and early 30s rock up to a gorgeous beach area somewhere. None of them have been told what the rules are, or what the competition is going to entail. As they arrive, they see a stunning villa. (In Surviving Paradise, they all convene in front of the villa. On Don’t Hate The Player, they see the villa from the beach.) And what they swiftly learn is that their goal is to be in the villa when the game ends for the chance of winning a cash prize, but they will all start down at camp, which has very meager accommodations and supplies. Rustic would be a generous description. None of them knew they were going to be on a survival-style show, and few are prepared for scant rations of beans, murky water, outhouse facilities, and no toothbrushes. Through a series of challenges, voting, strategy, and alliances, people will make their way up into the villa, and then at some point the game ends and the money is handed out.
If that all sounds vague, that’s as the producers intended. In other competition shows like Survivor or even last year’s grim Outlast, enough basic mechanics are shared that contestants know basically what they’re in for. But here, people don’t really know how eliminations will happen, when they’ll happen, who is voting and for what and when, whether more food will arrive for those stuck at camp, whether more contestants will show up, and so on. They strategize aggressively, some fully confident they know how the game will play out, only for these strategies to be meaningless because the next elimination is a game, rather than a vote, or key allies in the villa end up back at camp unexpectedly.
It feels to me like there is a new crop of reality competition shows, mostly on Netflix, that want to be a different kind of social experiment. They want to see how people react when it isn’t entirely clear how to play the game. But I’m increasingly wondering whether the creators of these shows realized that the inevitable result of creating games where people have to rely most on their own innate ideas of who is trustworthy would offer such full-blown insight into how much our societies are glued together by prejudice.
Weirdly, Surviving Paradise (the US version) suffered from this the least. Black contestants did well, and they each played the game differently. A nonbinary contestant played an aggressive game that was unpleasant to watch because they were overly confident that they understood all of the game’s permutations, but their gender identity did not seem to have much bearing on how people received their gameplay. If anything, they unnecessarily squandered their own strong alliance by assuming everyone would understand that the moves that seemed like backstabs weren’t backstabs, and they weren’t the only one to pull that move. This was also the first reality competition show I’ve seen where everyone used this contestant’s they/them pronouns without hesitation. (Gen Z cannot move into the general age window these shows tend to select from fast enough.)
I first started to notice this dynamic where social prejudices were showing up unannounced and unidenfied as snap judgments of trustworthiness in the second season of the Traitors (UK). For the unfamiliar, a group of 20+ people descend on a hotel and early on at a ceremonial roundtable, three or four of them are made Traitors, people who try to run the game by engineering eliminations without being detected. The audience knows who the traitors are, the contestants don’t. If at the end, there is a single traitor left, that person gets all of the money. If there are no traitors left, the remaining “Faithful” split the money among themselves. It’s full of snap decisions and questionable logic that’s so much fun to watch. Ultimately, these people have just met each other. Are someone’s actions shady or is that just their personality that’s coming out now as they get both more comfortable with the group and more stressed with the game play?
In the second season, a contestant makes a sudden and snap judgment about a Black contestant from something that happened when they all first arrived on the castle grounds. At this point, Traitors had not been designated yet, so anything that the Black contestant did could not have been a sign he was a Traitor. But the stakes were high. They had to put themselves in a line based on where they thought they would come in the game. In the previous season, the same setup had cost the contestants at the end of the line dearly, so this man was understandably not interested in being moved toward the end. The white woman, on the other hand, wanted to be near where he was, and she was angry that he wouldn’t move to accommodate her. Despite the fact that nobody was a Traitor yet, she decided his actions - to recap, his deciding not to give up his space for her in a situation where there was risk in being moved toward the end - were signs of suspect character and she held onto this for several rounds. There were other instances too: as one Traitor’s gameplay was falling apart, he held on for several more rounds because his middle-class affect made him seem trustworthy to many. (Indeed, many thought he was another contestant’s son, that’s how familiar and familial he seemed to some people.)
Then there was The Trust: A Game of Greed, where all of the contestants who enter the show could leave with a share of $250,000 if only they don’t vote anybody out over the course of the game. This descended shockingly quickly into alliances of men vs women, in particular women of color. In general, the men wanted to trust each other and then were appalled (and acted ruthlessly) when the women didn’t reciprocate that trust.
What I watched yesterday in this French version was stark. White contestants taking an instant, strong, and entirely unexplained dislike to a Black contestant and a queer contestant, to the point of trying to pit them against each other during the first elimination, though that backfired to an unusual degree. Alliances forming swiftly that always have contestants of African descent on the outskirts. One queer white contestant was described as a “dark force” (technically “breed” in the literal French translation), a description so strong it startled another player.
What I feel like I’m seeing is a growing number of shows where production generates a situation where contestants feel like there is no time for trust to be earned, so they substitute their own subconscious ideas of who feels trustworthy for a slightly slower set of observations that might have taken place over several rounds of play. Racism, misogyny, and homophobia rise forcefully to the surface in this scenario. How much of this is game mechanics? Racism and misogyny shaping trust isn’t some new idea, but these shows require so much less meaningful collaboration than something like Survivor, where teams have to build shelters and gather or win food. How much is producer naivete? It doesn't feel like producers are expecting things to shake out this way. (Here’s an interesting interview with the producer of Outlast, a survival show in Alaska where a few contestants turned feral and began destroying other teams’ shelters and stealing sleeping bags when temperatures at night were nearing 30F. Production wanted the social experiment, but was not prepared for what might happen.) And how much is that in a moment, after the pandemic, after Trump/Johnson/Brexit, after the backlash to Black Lives Matter and the suppression of so much protest, seeing the unpalatable mechanisms of trust laid bare is what we want to watch right now?