Suspicion, As Seen on TV

On August 23, 2000, in the finale of the first season of Survivor, as over 51 million people1 watched, Wisconsin truck driver Sue Hawk cemented herself in reality television history by delivering what would come to be known as the "snakes and rats" speech. In a diatribe that the Washington Post claimed "captured the ethos of our own less heroic era," Hawk took her moment in the TV spotlight to deliver a speech that would reverberate through the next two decades of reality programming, describing the showdown between the final two contestants competing for a million dollars — Richard Hatch and Kelly Wiglesworth — as a battle between a snake and a rat:

This island is pretty much full of only two things—snakes and rats. And in the end, with Mother Nature, we have Richard the snake, who knowingly went after prey; and Kelly, who turned into the rat that ran around like the rats do on this island, trying to run from the snakes. I feel we owe it to the island spirits that we have learned to come to know to let it be in the end the way Mother Nature intended it to be. For the snake to eat the rat.2

Hawk's speech posits the world of Survivor as not only reflective of human behavior, but also as analogous to or even indistinguishable from the workings of the natural world. Survivor, like the food chain, merely represents the ways of "Mother Nature." According to Hawk, people are snakes (knowing predators) or rats (untrustworthy sneaks), and the fate of the rats—as well as of the various other contestants, not savvy or ruthless enough to be either—is to be eaten by the snakes. For Hawk, it's better to be the snake than the rat: the snake survives because it knows itself to be a predator and doesn't pretend otherwise.

Even though Hawk bluntly denounces Richard Hatch as "a bit of a loser in life,"3 she sees him as a winner in the "natural" order of reality television. It's not only Hatch's snakiness that propels him to victory — it's his canny performance of authenticity, his choice to "knowingly go after prey," his ability, in the immortal words of fellow reality TV icon Tyra Banks, to take responsibility for himself.

The one who really knows what's happening here (despite being taken down in-game by Hatch and Wiglesworth), however, seems to be Hawk herself. Though she doesn't place first, she presents herself to her peers as a good interpreter, a good reader able to ascertain the dynamics of what's really going on — to use her suspicions to determine which performances are authentic and which are not — and persuade others to see it her way too. And, according to Hawk, what she has "learned to come to know" is that on reality television, you can't trust anyone. 

Hawk's "snakes and rats" speech, alongside Hatch's type-establishing tour-de-force performance of now-run-of-the-mill reality TV villainy, helps to inaugurate reality television as we know it today: an arena of dubious claims to social truths, of outsized antics, and, perhaps above all, of suspicion. Hawk's dog-eat-dog (or, snake-eat-rat) vision of reality TV sociality marks the genre as a cutthroat, competitive milieu, depending upon winners and losers, on TV and in life. In diagnosing her fellow players as untrustworthy rats or cutthroat snakes, Hawk lays out a functional baseline for the reality genre going forward: suspicion not only as a route to knowledge, but as a mode of social relations. The only way to survive is to remain appropriately suspicious of everyone around you, to use your suspicions to accurately interpret "reality."

But perhaps this sense of suspicion as a way of knowing has come to feel unremarkable, to feel obvious. After all, twenty years later, reality television is replete with a form of self-focused semi-delusional ruthlessness that requires a baseline suspicion of others' motives and truthfulness for how others account for themselves. To make it in reality television, you must suspect everyone else of being as self-serving as you feel you yourself must be. Think, for instance, of Kim Kardashian accusing her sister Kourtney of "stealing her wedding country" on the current season of Hulu's The Kardashians, or of Peacock's The Traitors, which effectively turns the playground game of mafia into an elaborate murder mystery reality TV roleplay. On reality television, paranoia is often the name of the game.

As conventional as social paranoia now may be on reality TV, the first season of Survivor hearkens to a different vision of reality TV sociality. Watching it back now, it feels almost charming in its naïveté; it seems, for instance, to never even occur to most of the contestants besides Hatch to have any strategy at all. But Hatch's ultimate victory over his fellow contestants — credited, in part, to Hawk's speech — helped to institutionalize suspicious cunning, as well as an atomized player-vs-player social milieu, as dominant structures of the genre.

As Amanda Ann Klein describes, reality programming in the early 2000s (and for her, MTV's reality programming specifically) "engaged, either implicitly or explicitly, in debates about what identity means; what it entitles the individual to say, do, and have; who has the right to claim an identity for themselves; and who has the right to be labeled with a particular identity by someone else."4 For Klein, this emphasis on identity functions as a kind of "workbook" for viewers to follow in order to "govern the self and to self-brand,"5 to find and cast themselves with or through an array of available subjectivities or types. I would add that the space between those stock subjectivities, particularly in reality competitions but also across the reality TV genre more generally, is mediated primarily by suspicion, both as an epistemological and as a social mode.

As reality television pits its participants against each other—for the prize, for audience affection, for camera attention—it constructs its subjectivities as predicated upon an atomized and atomizing suspicion. If you don't want to get eaten, you need to be able to tell the snakes from the rats. The world of "Mother Nature," according to Hawk, rules that you can only be predator or prey, and you can only assume that everyone around you is out to get you. The scene requires your suspicion—all the better to shore up your own selfhood and inure yourself against the market-logic machinations of others, for whom you may become mere collateral in their quest for money and/or fame.

Reality television's narrative structures engender suspicion as an epistemological-social mode: they figure suspicion as a central way of knowing and being in relation to others. Competition programs like Survivor, The Traitors, The Mole, or Claim to Fame (to name only a few of a vast subgenre), especially competitions that imagine themselves as "social experiments,"6 are obvious places for suspicion to emerge as a mode of social being. The very structure of the game depends upon winners and losers, and often upon manipulation and deceit. Under conditions where one inherently cannot rely upon others to tell the truth or keep their word, suspicion is the way to know anything—it serves an epistemological function, especially in relation to others according to the social rules seemingly enforced by the genre. One must always believe that the accounts of others (both how they account for their actions and how they give accounts of themselves) are suspect: compromised or unreliable at best, adversarial at worst. Reality television's participants then relate to each other based on this axiomatic thinking. Suspecting the words and actions of others becomes the only safe way to relate to others — but of course, this safety comes with costs.

These epistemological-social structures of suspicion are not limited to competition formats, which inherently foster suspicion as a route to conflict. Reality TV docusoaps like Bravo's Real Housewives franchises, romance formats like Netflix's Love Is Blind (which also determinedly describes itself as a social scientific experiment) and TLC's 90 Day Fiancé (where the stakes amplify to the level of national citizenship), and other subgenres also rely upon similar visions of subjectivity and social relations. As I have argued elsewhere in relation to Real Housewives,7 part of the show's core thematic terrain is the question of authorship, of whose account of reality can be trusted (both by the other cast members and by viewers). Who is telling the truth and who is lying remain active and endlessly debated questions, absorbing viewers into an affective economy that translates into the program's ratings economy.8 Under this generic form, suspicion comes to produce profit. Similarly, The Bachelor's endless diegetic debates about who is there for the "right reasons" — the right reason being, for love rather than for clout — point to the ways that reality television requires that its participants, as well as its viewers, relate to each other via suspicious assumptions. Everyone's intentions must remain in doubt.

By involving not only its cast members but also its audiences, reality television's epistemological-social logic of suspicion leaks beyond the program's diegetic bounds, encouraging the viewer to be and know in the same way that the figures onscreen be and know. As Alison Hearn has described, "the labour of watching television is intensified as audiences watch in order to learn how to be seen by television cameras."9 We "play along" with reality television, not only attempting to ascertain who the cast members are, what they can know, and how they know it, but also to imagine ourselves under the same conditions—to self-brand and to self-govern, certainly, but also to imagine such suspicious surveillance as desirable for our accounts of ourselves.10

If this all feels a bit abstracted, let me offer an example. As a viewer of Bravo's notorious (and notoriously deranged) Vanderpump Rules, I found myself drawn into the exuberantly trashy exploits of its core cast — a motley crew of servers and bartenders at former Real Housewife Lisa Vanderpump's West Hollywood restaurant SUR, unrivaled in their willingness to bare their abject lives, petty jealousies, and unhinged antics before the camera's gaze. At the core of Vanderpump's early seasons is the relationship between Stassi Schroeder, a bratty blonde waitress, and Jax Taylor, who John Paul Brammer describes as "a two-timing, good-for-nothing, perfidious slinger of martinis."11 Taylor is a liar and a cheat, and this is obvious from the jump. And yet Vanderpump manages to manufacture a substantial amount of plot out of Schroeder's suspicions of Taylor betraying her (in season one, by cheating on her with, and impregnating, a woman in Las Vegas, and in season two, by cheating on her with close friend and fellow cast member Kristen Doute).

Again, as a viewer, it's obvious that Taylor is a louse. But it's hard to stop yourself from feeling involved anyway. Despite Vanderpump's standard reality-soap plotlines, you come to watch it in a kind of detective-story mode, looking for clues, analyzing body language, and reading between the lines. We know Taylor can't be trusted, and in a bizarre inversion of dramatic irony, so does most of the cast. But the storyline chugs along anyway. And, when Taylor finally admits to what he's done at the end of the first season, and again at the end of the second, it's strangely cathartic, even pleasurable. You, the audience, like Schroeder, have finally had your suspicions confirmed.

This pattern repeats in the tenth season, where longtime cast member Tom Sandoval cheated on his partner of nine years with another cast member. After TMZ broke the news of what has been dubbed "Scandoval," Vanderpump's ratings spiked to an unprecedented degree, almost certainly saving the show from cancellation. Viewers not only tuned in to watch the drama go down; they also rewatched older seasons, hunting for clues and searching for early signs of Sandoval's suspiciousness. The ratings spike, of course, suggests that viewers crave drama, but it also suggests the particular power and pleasure of reality TV's sociality of suspicion. I myself couldn't help but rewatch the most recent season after the entire thing aired, following breadcrumbs and searching for signs.

As far as reality TV aesthetics go, Survivor and Vanderpump couldn't be more different. The former traffics in mud and grime, in night-vision camera shots of bugs crawling on contestant's faces, in faux-tribal props and soundscapes, fire, and B-roll footage of wild animals, while the latter effuses chintzy glamor, its opening credits a montage of low-back dresses, overflowing champagne, and slow-motion hair flips. But they share suspicion as an underlying structuring principle, a kind of formal bedrock enabling their social microdramas and their audience engagement. On much reality TV, suspicion punctures any other possible mode of social relation; even when an explicit prize isn't on the line, you can never trust that those around you don't have their own agendas — to inflate their Instagram following, to parlay their way into 15 more minutes of fame, to capture more camera time, or simply to use you for their own enjoyment — at play.

But when put that way, these dynamics of doubt, uncertainty, and suspicion no longer feel so strange. After all, to be skeptical, even paranoiac, of the motivations of others and their intentions in relation to you can feel increasingly necessary to "make it" under conditions of scarcity, even for those of us who don't live our lives in front of professional television cameras. Most of us, though, do live our lives under conditions of surveillance and self-surveillance, and under varying conditions of precarity and uncertainty. Perhaps we are justified in suspecting others of not having our best interests at heart, and if reality TV shows us anything, it shows that they rarely do.

This, then, must be part of reality TV's durable appeal over the past three decades. In imagining suspicion as the epistemological-social mode, reality television literalizes and legitimates suspicion and even paranoia as perhaps the truest modes of socially relating to others. Not only does reality TV allow viewers to play detective and ascertain who is worth rooting for (often —but not always! — according to who is telling the truth), it also dramatizes the pleasure and satisfaction of having one's suspicions confirmed. You, the viewer, can always marshal evidence to confirm your suspicion, and therefore are always right, always safe. In doing so, reality TV amplifies and legitimates everyday, mundane forms of social suspicion endemic to the contemporary moment in the US, where it is nigh-impossible to opt out of constant surveillance, from the state, from corporations, from each other.12 As Achille Mbembe points out, "through big data in particular, surveillance is expanded into the emotional registers of domestic and embodied experience," taking "raw material plumbed from intimate patterns of the self — our personality, our moods, our emotions, our lies, our vulnerabilities, every level of our intimacy"13 and transforming it into data to be mined from our most mundane actions and interactions.

It's understandable, then, even justified, to be suspicious, to live and know suspiciously. We, like the cast members of Survivor and Vanderpump Rules, don't want to be dupes — or, sometimes more importantly, to feel that we are being perceived as dupes. If those around us aren't "here for the right reasons," we want to be the ones who can see through them — to puncture their performance, and to establish our own authenticity in contrast. It's an understandable feeling. But reality TV shows us that this instinct can often lead to social fracture. When the space between subjects is over-occupied with suspicion, moving collectively is fraught — as the song goes, we can't go on together or build our dreams with suspicious minds.

But the current moment in reality television suggests another way of thinking. As some reality TV producers move to unionize with WGA, as prominent reality cast members call for a reality TV cast union despite industry challenges to doing so, and as reality contestants sue Netflix for labor law violations and sexual assault, the industry faces a moment of reckoning. Though how these moves will affect the industry still remains in question, it suggests a crack in the atomizing formal logic of suspicion, at least at the level of industry and production.

What would it mean to turn our suspicions on those we actually ought to be suspicious of, to turn our suspicions away from each other and toward the systems that grind down our labor, our relationships, our bodies, our planet, for profit? To undo our attachments to individualist, winner-take-all structures that depend on thinking of others as adversaries rather than allies? To transform our suspicious gazes and minds into critical tools, to imagine how collectivity can function as an openness to relations, rather than fragmentation? To look at each other and not see snakes or rats? Perhaps then, the current form of suspicion as an epistemological-social mode would not hold. To do so, we would have to leave certain workbooks of subjectivity, certain pleasures, certain certainties, behind.

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Olivia Stowell (Twitter, @oliviastowell; Bluesky, @oliviastowell.bsky.social) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan, where she studies discourses of race in contemporary popular culture, particularly investigating the construction of racial identities and narratives in reality TV. Her scholarship has appeared in Television & New Media, New Review of Film & Television Studies, and the edited volume Feminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media (Bloomsbury, 2023); her public writing has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, ASAP/J, Post45 Contemporaries, FLOW, Avidly, and elsewhere.

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