The 10 Darkest Reality TV Shows of the 2000s

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. And we were there for every moment of it...

Yes. Early 2000s reality television. The wildest time in the Wild West. From Flavor of Love to Bad Girls Club, and Jon and Kate Plus 8 - the brand-new world of reality television showed us things we had never seen before. And then some.

Behind the scenes, though, there was serious scandal going on. 

In this episode, I'm counting down my list of the 10 darkest reality TV shows from the early 2000s? Does your favorite show make the list? Find out! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:21

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of Scandal Queens. It is me, the D-influencer Detangling the Twisted World of Hollywood, and we're off to the races today with a fun episode for a change. Hoi, did we, did I need a change of pace? And I'm sure if I'm I'm feeling grim, you must be feeling grim with all the heavy stuff we've been covering as well. So we're we're we're flipping it up today. We're going easy, we're going fun, we're we're doing it differently. That's right, you and I are gonna be diving into one of my secret passions, one of my hyper focuses, my fixations. 2000s reality television. Yes, as a card-carrying member of the Elder Millennials Club, I was there at ground zero when it happened, and you won't get any personal grandstands from me. I'm not one of those people online who pretends that I've always been some intellectual angel my whole life. No, ma'am, or sir, or they them. Uh, I reveled in the mess that was early 2000s television. And I had my uh happy butt right there in front of the TV when some of the biggest scandals and controversies changed the face of reality TV and in some instances state laws uh forever. So, you know, you you name it the Flavor of Love, Bad Girls Club, Johnny Kate Plus 8, The Swan, The Girls Next Door. I've seen them all, some of them from the very beginning to the very end. And I could tell you about some of their scandals, some of those big moments inside and out, sitting and watching them as it happened in real time, some of the craziest things that none of us had ever seen before. And I could tell you one thing the 2000s was the wild freaking West when it came to television, reality television. Like genuinely, it was a no-holes barred, kind of wacky and unpredictable nightmare. I mean, yeah, producers were trying to, they would create things, they would take things to the extremes, but then you had these like on-edge personalities that were ready to do anything for a buck and didn't have the threat of Twitter ready to, you know, gear up behind them. So it was a time of antics and the start of viral fame for many people, but it was also an exploitative time, full of a lot of pain, trauma, and chaos. And that's what we're gonna be talking about today: the most scandalous, wild, and dark-sided reality television of the 2000s. My definitive and personal list of the top 10 worst offenders, along with a couple of honorable mentions. You love them, you hate them, and most of you probably watched right along as I did. The scandals were never ending in 2000s reality. So let's see if your worst offenders make the list. Before we get started, though, let's switch things up just a little bit and have a light-hearted, fun temperature check with the weirdest and wackiest news going on. Right off the top, Gracie the giraffe is still missing at the time that I'm recording this episode. That's right, an adult female giraffe named Gracie has wandered off of a ranch near San Antonio, Texas. And now officials, nearly a week into searching for her, say she's nowhere to be found. Uh, I genuinely don't know how this happens. The rancher said that she went up on the side of the ranch, that the giraffes aren't normally on, and she basically wandered around a gate. Uh, someone got pictures of her a few days ago, but since then she's just not been sighted like at all. They've had helicopters up, drones, all kinds of stuff. But it it the whole story's weird. It just seems to get stranger and stranger and stranger by the day. Like I said, despite being a huge animal, there have been little more than a handful of sightings. Uh, someone came forward and said that they had captured the giraffe. The police are now saying that that was categorically a lie. I'm not feeling great about it, right? It's not really that animal's natural habitat. People in that part of the world, when it comes to animals, don't really have a great track record and just not feeling great. There's lots of ways she could hurt herself. You know, it's been so long, it's so hot. It's just it's awful. So hopefully, by the time you hear this episode, Gracie has been found and she is happy and healthy and good, and she's enjoyed her little Bonnie and Klein moment out on the road, and everything will end out peachy keen. That's what we're gonna hope for. That's what we're gonna hope for. Next up, oh my gosh, I know this story is bad, but it's also so fun. It's so fun that no one got hurt, so it's very, very fun. Uh, an 85-year-old driver was clocked going 110 miles per hour in an illegal street race. That's right, an 85-year-old Florida man was arrested, of course, it's a Florida man, was arrested at the end of June along with another driver after being clocked flying down a Lake County Road at more than 100 miles per hour in a 45 mile per hour zone. The man, William Bosworth of Leesburg, Florida, was driving a gray Nissan 350Z convertible, while the man he was racing against, 57-year-old Philip Signorino, was driving a red Chevy Corvette. When police spotted the two in the race, Signorino was clocked in his Corvette at 125 miles per hour, while Bosworth, the 85-year-old, was clocked at 110 miles per hour. When the pair were stopped on State Road 48, Bosworth claimed the Corvette had swerved toward him, causing him, forcing him to accelerate faster. He denied any claims of street racing and instead told officers, and this is crazy, the video is hilarious. There's body cam video. He's sitting there, he's sitting in his car smoking a cigarillo, and they are like, What it what is this? And he says, Oh, I was having a ride in my favorite car while he's smoking this cigarillo. It's just absolutely no fucks given. Uh Signorino, the man he was racing, uh, he also denied the street racing claims after arrest, telling officers his car wasn't capable of reaching those kinds of speeds. So they were absolutely full of shit. The pair were booked for street racing regardless, as well as dangerous excessive speeding, and were both later released after posting Bond. It is a funny story and it's admirable in a way. Like part of me loves this story, but then you do have to, you know, you got to acknowledge, you know, who else was put in danger. I'm not sure what time this was. Uh, I'm not sure. I don't, I don't remember. I must have been down that road because I used to live in that area at one time. But uh yeah, it, you know, if you have bail money, you have money to rent a drag strip, you know what I mean? There's no no need to be out on public roads. Um, drag strips would be happy for your business. I'm sure it's much more affordable to rent rent some time on a drag strip these days than it used to be. So um, you know, if if that's the kind of thing you want to do, stop street racing and go check out your local drag strip. But yeah, 85-year-old man just said, ah, fuck it. Who cares? Let's do it. Let's see how fast I can get this bad boy to go. And he did it. And last but not least, I don't know if this is fun news, but I thought it was absolutely fascinating. And I figured a bunch of you that listen are probably also wired like me, so you would probably also find this fascinating. But they have done a study and they have come to conclude that the 2007 launch of the iPhone led to lowered birth rates. Yeah, I figure since we're talking about the 2000s today, why not mention this new study that's come out, which claims that the 2007 iPhone launch actually led to lower birth rates across the United States. It's new research that's coming out of Middlebury College. According to their findings, the iPhone launch directly contributed to between a 33% and a 52% decline in the fertility rate among women under the age of 30. The launch, they said, perfectly coincided with the start of a long-term drop in birth rates across the country. Now, they concluded the study. Um, they I'm sorry, they conducted the study and tested their theories by using the natural geography of the iPhone release, which was pretty interesting. They basically went, the iPhone came out with ATT first. So we'll track ATT, women who were ATT in that area of the country, birth rates. Cool. So where did the iPhone go next? And then they tracked the birth rates and wherever the iPhone expanded. And every time, basically right across, they said it perfectly coincided with lower birth rates in that area. Now, the iPhone's contribution to the lower birth rates is thought to occur along a couple of factors. Uh, number one, less in-person socializing. People got sucked into digital connections in their phones. Number two, increased access to pornography. So they got instant gratification without the burden of human relationships and expectations. And three, greater contraceptive education. Women basically found out how to not get pregnant, how to get rid of a pregnancy that they didn't want, how to prevent pregnancies, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. So lower pregnancies. The researchers did, I know I can already hear some of you be like, that's inequality. Yes, they they did actually acknowledge everything. The researchers point out that the iPhone is only a casual factor. They're not saying that is the factor. They're just pointing out that that is something that occurred at the same time. And they do make the point that it pales in comparison to things like rising child care costs, housing costs, um, pay uh income stagnation, and broader shifts like women waiting to have children into their 30s and their 40s. So still, it's very, very interesting stuff. All right, it is time for the fun and not so fun, the 10 darkest reality shows from the 2000s. Are you ready to do this? Because I have been waiting, I have wanted to do this episode for so long. And I figured since the next thing I'm gonna get into is gonna be thick and heavy and dark and take lots of research from me that I've already already been working on. Um, let's do it lighter this time. Let's have, let's, let's have an easier time. So, this is genuinely one of my special interests. I'm not gonna lie, I think this list is pretty airtight. I think it's pretty solid. So, before we jump in though, there's a little bit on how I qualified these, okay? Just so you kind of know what my criteria was to go into this list. How did they get on this list? How did one thing get ranked above or below another? And that basically comes down to just two things: exploitation level and production controversies. Is the show literally centered on exploitation? Spoiler alert, all of them have that to some degree. Uh, does the show trigger or target dangerous things like physical or mental illness? And then outside of that, how did production get their casts, right? Like where did they get these people? How did they get these people? How did these how do these cast members get their shots? What kind of allegations are there against production? All of that kind of thing. So those are the questions I asked myself as I made this list. So do you think I nail it? You're gonna have to let me know. Let's jump in and find out. Starting strong with number 10, one of the more fun ones on the list. It's actually a tie. This one's gonna be a tie. It is a tie between The Flavor of Love from 2006 and The Rock of Love from 2007. Now, I will admit I loved these shows. I talked about them all the time. I watched them all the time. I watched the rewatches. I've rewatched Flavor of Love recently. And I will tell you, these two shows hit a lot different uh in the hashtag MeTooAge of Consent. Uh, the Flavor of Love and The Rock of Love were essentially, if you haven't seen them, they were two bachelor-style reality television dating shows. They were produced by VH1 in this kind of like little golden age of celeb reality that VH1 have, and they drew huge numbers in viewership. I mean millions of people's per episode, right? Between like 2006 and 2009, both shows were huge, and then they both wrapped down basically around the same time. The Rock of Love was a dating show where 25 women lived in this big mansion together and competed to become the girlfriend of poison frontman Brett Michaels. And it was wild. It was wild. It was so trashy. It was great. The whole theme was centered around just bimbo trash, just bimbo trash, which was like a big thing in the 2000s. It was just bimbo trash. It was great. I'm saying that complimentary. I don't want you guys coming at me saying I'm trying to be derogatory. I loved that shit during that time. I strove to be that kind of stuff for a while, you know. I loved it, loved it. Um, but essentially they got all these women, lived in the house, uh, and they would be given challenges. And the winner would get a date with Brett Michaels, is ultimately what it would come down to. And each week he'd eliminate someone, and then in the end, he would pick a woman, and then they'd all get together months later for this like really trashy reunion show where there was always like fights and really bad sound audio. Like it was so, so good. There was a lot of bimbo behavior on the show, for those who remember. The women, with the exception of Jess, Jess was one of the ones that she that's what she was kind of notorious for. She was the one who, spoiler alert, won season one, but she didn't put out the other girls from like day one were like, right, if I can just get him alone in the bedroom, I'll get him. If I can just get sex with him, he'll pick me. And Jess was a little bit different. Um, I think she did kind of get there towards the end, but she was she was like this holdout. She just played the hand balanced, right? But overall, the show basically got more and more outrageous and aggressive and slutty every episode to basically try to get camera time or to get more time with Brett, is how the women were. So outside of your usual behind-the-scenes personality flare-ups, though, there wasn't really a lot of drama. I did, I did go and look. I was like, all right, I know that I enjoyed this show in the early 2000s, so it's probably gonna be absolutely horrible, right? But it's really not. There was not a lot of controversies, especially not where the women were involved. I think there was like some catty personal dramas between them. There was obviously production being like aching on stuff, and you know, girls would get attention for acting certain ways more than others. But there didn't seem to be a lot of really crooked shit that was going on behind the scenes. There was a crew member who was involved in a fatal accident on the way to filming. Uh, two people died in the accident, two other people were injured, and the crew member was fine and ended up being released from the hospital. I didn't say that it was the crew member's fault. That was never insinuated. That was just one of the only big things that happened while they were producing it. The biggest thing that appeared to happen in the three seasons that they had the show was that in the first season, they got sued for $380,000 worth of damages to the mansion by the girls and production. They had taken doors off, they had painted stuff, there was all of this kind of stuff that they weren't supposed to have done. So they got sued for $380,000 worth of damages, which explains why they ended up going on a bus for the next season. So um, yeah, not a lot, not a lot. The real, the I think probably the most concrete controversy or scandal of it all is just really how the women were used used to make television, like how they were pitted against each other for fights on TV or how they were encouraged to be sexualized. But again, these were all adult women, right? I mean, yes, they were given alcohol and they were poked and prodded to get them to have poor behavior and to make poor sexual decisions, but they were all adults. Even Daisy De La Jolla, as hard as that is to believe. But yeah, as far as 2000s reality TV goes, it was trashy. The Rock of Love, it was trashy, but it was not wholly evil. It just, it just didn't seem to be evil behind the scenes, like truly, truly bad. Now, the flavor of love was a little bit of a different story. It wasn't evil, but it was a little bit of a different story. Uh, the flavor of love was a show that was a spin-off of Strange Love, which was the show that followed the relationship of Flava Flav and his then lover Brigitte Nielsen. Didn't isn't it Brigitte? I thought it was Brigitte Nielsen, but I've heard people say Bridget Nielsen. I thought it was Brigitte Nielsen. Anyway, that show, of course, that Strange Love was a spin-off from the Surreal Life, an even earlier reality show that put a bunch of failed D-list celebrities in a home together during which chaos always ensued. Like if you've seen the meme of drunk Vern Troyer peeing on the walls, that I was, oh, that season was insane. Uh, that's where that came from. This, the surreal life. Very, very, very. I actually I should have probably should have put that on here. The surreal life's not officially on this list, but it probably should have. But, anyways, the flavor of love came before the rock of love, and it was supposed to be all about former um, is it a public enemy? Is it public enemy, right? Flavor Flav was like the hype man, or was it Wu-Tang clan? Anyway, flavor flav um and him finding love again after the collapse of his relationship to the former 80s fitness model, Brigitte Nielsen. Okay. The format was the same as we just talked about in The Rock of Love. There was 20 living, 20 women living in a mansion, competing for dates with Flav. It was crazy. It was wild, it was messy, it was over the top in every single way. It launched the careers of characters like Tiffany, New York Pollard, who I, you know, I don't know what I actually have a fallen, I don't know if she's what she's doing politically these days, but I used to love her, man. I loved her because she was just an open villain, and you could tell it was fake, but she she played it so well. I thought she was such a good villain. Um, and and then that you had these like epic moments with her as well, like when pumpkins spit in her face, which is just crazy, crazy, crazy. Um, here's a little clip of the kind of chaos you could expect in an episode of The Flavor of Love featuring one of the first, like one of the earliest fights, confrontations between New York and who I just mentioned, her arch nemesis pumpkin.

SPEAKER_09 17:09

You're going to be able to do it. I said, you know what? I might have a few wrinkles, but at least I look like a woman. I don't look like a transfester with my fruit.

SPEAKER_03 17:49

Yeah, so you can see why it was truly a wild show, truly controversial, had some uh pretty non-PC elements to it, and stirred up a lot of controversy pretty much as soon as it hit television. Critics rightfully called out the flavor of love for its trashy racial stereotypes that it liked to reinforce all the time, as well as the violence and aggression it normalized and platformed. There was and continues to be also outrage over the colorisms between contestants, which also seemed to be encouraged time and time again by production. The real scandal, however, came at the end of season three when Flav ultimately revealed that the whole thing was a scam, basically, and he was getting with the one of his baby mothers. He has like seven kids, and I think it was the last mother of his last child. Uh, her name was Liz, and he was basically like, I'm in love with her, been in love with her the whole time. He was never with any of the winners of any three seasons, and he picked Liz in the end. It was really controversial into the show, and it remains one, but it's hard to deny the cultural chokehold that it had on America. Everyone watched The Flavor of Love or they watched clips of The Flavor of Love on some television show, and anyone who said they didn't is lying. Okay, they were lying. Still, the reason it's number 10 on the list and not higher is that at the very least, everyone involved was a consenting adult, not 18 either, in their mid to late 20s and 30s. And I couldn't find any production scandals like rape cover-ups, which we'll see in some of the shows later on down the list. So, as problematic and troublesome and not PC and bigoted and hateful and potentially racist as all of these shows, both within the Rock of Love and the Flavor of Love could be. Uh, I guess thank you to production for not being complete and total rape and abuse factory scumbags, even if you were cringe and problematic on pretty much every other level. Next up on the list, a truly twisted show, The Swan. One of those shows that if you hadn't watched it with your own eyes, uh, you may not think it exists. It sounds crazy when you try to explain this to people who aren't American or Australian and who didn't live during the time. Uh, this was a show in which, like, I think it was three. I only watched a couple episodes of this because I was horrified from the first episode. But The Swan was essentially the show where like three ugly ducklings, usually women, were put in an apartment together and given total extreme makeovers. I'm talking extreme plastic surgery, extreme exercise, extreme diets, all done in three months with the goal of turning them into the ultimate beauties. The idea was: hey, you're ugly and super insecure. Why don't we make you hot and uh make people want you sexually and then maybe your life will be better, right? Completely scummy and awful from top to bottom. And Dr. Terry DeBro is in it, by the way, if if anybody's gotten interested in that little that little connection. But after the participants were put into an apartment together and encouraged to bond through the pain and the trials of their transformations, because uh it's pretty bad getting your whole face and body worked on, and then you have to exercise and go to therapy and all this other stuff in three months for a television show while they film it all. These people would bond and they would form these connections and then get this. This is so crazy. They would pit them together against each other in challenges. Like once they had a beauty contest, they made the women compete against each other in a beauty contest, just absolutely horrific. And everything about it was dangerous. The surgeries they did were incredibly dangerous, the exercise was dangerous, and the mental anguish that the production team put participants through was also potentially psyche shattering. I mean, it's fucking nuts. It feels like you're watching an MK Ultra experiment. If you've ever gone through and watched those old declassified videos, they encouraged eating disordered behavior on the swan. They promoted extreme, unrealistic beauty standards, uh, insecurities in women's bodies. They normalized plastic surgery as just this casual thing that you could do to be wanted by others. Like, absolutely awful. And from the second the swan came out, it was ripped apart. I mean, The Guardian, Variety, Us Weekly, you name it, every resource was like, what the fuck? Even tabloids, even American tabloids during the time are like the this is too far. I think that this is a I think that this is a little bit too far. Let's listen to a clip of one of the Swan contestants from the first season talking about how she felt about herself when she was targeted and picked for the show.

SPEAKER_06 22:08

But first, let's flash back to the Marsha we met three months ago.

SPEAKER_07 22:14

I just don't want people to notice me. I don't want people to see me. I've got hair. I feel completely unbearably disgusted with myself.

SPEAKER_06 22:26

It makes me feel really unfeminine to have to shave my face every single day.

SPEAKER_07 22:32

My biggest fear is probably being alone, not having any friends, not give anything to not want to be invisible.

SPEAKER_03 22:42

So yeah, I think uh that's pretty self-explanatory, right? And while that's sitting at number nine, uh there is insane. The whole premise of the show is oh, you have really low self-esteem. A lot of terrible things have happened in your life. You might have a hormonal condition that no one has bothered to treat in you. Let's dangerously overhaul your looks instead, so that men want to give you sex and you can equate that with love. Like just very twisted show. Very, very, very, very twisted. And for that reason, it's number nine on the list. Again, these are all adults. This is not yet the exploitation of like literal children, but pretty freaking bad. Moving on to one of my favorite shows of the 2000s. I did not miss an episode of this. I swear to God, and I used to joke with my friends. If any of you are still listening to this out here, uh out there, uh, my friends from high school, you will know that I used to joke like, if college doesn't turn out, I'm just gonna go to this place. I'm talking, of course, about the girls next door, that bubbly pink fantasyland peaked behind the walls of the infamous Playboy Mansion. Now, for those that didn't watch the show, this show followed the antics of three girlfriends of Hugh Hefner in the early 2000s: 21-year-old Kendra Wilkinson, 34-year-old Bridget Marquardt, and the head girlfriend, 25-year-old Holly Madison. It seemed like a dream life of parties and celebrities and wealth and big boobs and glitter, but behind the scenes, we would later find out, uh, it was basically hell on earth. It was basically hell on earth for at least two of the women have admitted it. Kendra, not so much. Uh, all three women, Kendra, Bridget, and Holly, were strictly controlled by Hef. They had 9 p.m. curfews. He controlled how they dressed, what they did, what they got to do. I think that's probably part of the reason why Bridget was, you know, getting, she was getting like two master's degrees or something at the time when this was going on. She was like always shooting in and out to go to college. And she was probably doing that so she can have some freedom. You know what I mean? Like she was, she was, Bridget knew what she was doing. Bridget knew what she was doing. Um, but it was basically awful. This high control, abusive, abusive, abusive environment. And then Holly, as the head girlfriend, kind of got it the worst. Like she was the most tightly controlled. She had to stay around the house the most. She was not allowed to go out and pursue a lot of these like promotional and entrepreneurial things because she was Hugh's top girlfriend. So she was Hef's top girlfriend. So she had to, you know, she had to be home and be the little missus, as it were. Now, what we found out in later years, since Holly and Bridget especially have talked about their story, is that the women, as it turns out, weren't even paid for the first 15 episodes. The three of them carried the whole show. The whole show is about them. It went on for like four or five seasons. Um, they didn't get paid. Playboy got paid, Hugh got paid, they didn't even get paid for the first 15 episodes. And then after, once they got that renegotiated, they basically got paid like nothing. They basically got paid absolute pittance, probably not even what was being spent for their like looks to make sure they had new outfits and stuff, because he wanted them to wear like different clothing in every single episode, every single scene, kind of it. There was like a lot of weird, weird stuff. The real nightmare, however, was the sexual demands on the women who were forced into group sex by Hef in order to stay in the mansion and to stay on the show. Production would have undoubtedly known about this, and I'm sure they got themselves their little tips uh as a part of it. Even more horrific truths about the world behind the Playboy Mansion have been revealed in the years since Hef's death, including predatory behavior and alleged photo albums containing graphic images of minors and unconsenting women engaged in sex acts, aka being raped, a lot of them under the influence, allegedly. Bridget and Holly have shared their stories over the years, along with other women who survived the horrors of the Playboy Mansion, in their books and their podcasts, which I highly recommend. Anyone else who may been sucked into this whole kind of like the girls next door playboy glitter trap of 2005, like I was, definitely go and go and follow Holly Madison. She's on TikTok, she still speaks out quite a lot. Um, Bridget as well, but they were my favorites anyway. So I'm I'm very happy to see them kind of recovered and doing their own thing and doing really well. It's really, really good to see. But yeah, the girls next door coming in strong at number eight. Pretty horrifying and hard to imagine a list of dark-sided reality TV where this one doesn't make the list. Moving on, when you're talking evil 2000s reality television, it's hard not to talk about the biggest loser, which is gonna come in strong at number seven on this list. Now, I'm not gonna spend too much time on this one because there's a Netflix documentary that goes way deeper into this than I'm ever would want to go into it on here on any podcast. I'm just not that interested. Um, and I didn't watch the show. My mom did sometimes, but I didn't watch the show. But it you the you can't you cannot deny that if we're talking about like dark reality television shows, the biggest loser has to be up there. Now, this show right off the bat was sold as this empathetic, we're gonna help America with its weight struggles. There's an overweight pandemic in America, there's an obesity pandemic in America, and we're gonna make this show and teach people the right way to lose weight. That's not what it was. The biggest loser was never that. It was never that. And I know people watch the show, try to tell themselves that as well so that they don't have to feel bad about watching it. But the biggest loser was never that. I mean, look at the fucking name of it. The biggest loser, come on. It the the show was always a sideshow exploitation exhibit. It was literally a roadside fucking freak show carnival. That's what they treated those people like. Exploitation. Behind the scenes, producers were screaming at people, giving them drugs, threatening them, manipulating them. In 2016, there was even a study released that went and found basically everyone who had ever been on the show, and they found that they all gained the weight back because the abusive and crazy and insane extreme ways that they were forced to lose the weight. Guess what? It destroyed their metabolisms, and their metabolisms were even slower than they had been. Okay. They like it's horribly, horribly, horribly destructive. The whole show, The Biggest Loser, was marketed as like, like I said, we're gonna, we're gonna help the weight epidemic. And it was never, it was never that. They wouldn't have named the show that if that's what it was about. So it was about shaming people. That was the whole point. It was about shaming fat people, giving them a platform for people to poke at them and point at them and make fun of them and just make them a mockery. It was just creating a sideshow and at the same time triggering as many insecurities and unhealthy behaviors and beliefs in the people watching as possible. It was for so that people could sit and go, well, at least I'm not that fat fuck. Look at that fat fuck. That's what that show is. Okay. It's just disgusting. It's disgusting. Thankfully, everybody on it is adults. Uh, I'm sure their children paid the price at home when they left the show. But yeah, exploitation central, the biggest loser, which is why this exploitation factory is gonna be number seven on the list. Since we're already in the realm of sideshow exploitation, let's move on to number six, which is gonna be another tie. We got another tie going um between the 2009 series Hoardez and the 2012 series My 600-pound life, another TLC creation. Now, I don't have a lot of words for these two. They both make me sick when I realized that I had to put them on the list and talk about them. Like I had a bit of a like rock in my throat, in my chest and my stomach a little bit. Um, because I I was the child of a hoarder who had a binge eating disorder and weight problems that she battled her whole life, but it was mostly the hoarding that was the problem for me. Um, so I am gonna manage to say a lot here because when it comes to that sideshow, again, exploitation that I keep talking about, this is this is kind of top of the pile on 2000s reality TV for the freak show thing. Hoarder's uh has always been controversial since its release, and it's easy to understand why. It's this unflinching focus on the most unimaginable, disgusting homes you can imagine, all inhabited by people with severe and untreated mental illness. And they they're usually like poor people who don't have any other options. They don't have the option to go and get their mental health treated, even if they could find someone to treat like the mental illnesses that surround hoarding, which are incredibly complex. Like the biggest loser, hoarders claim to be an empathetic look at a horrible reality, but the actual reality is that it's just about exposing sick people and all the sick and horrible things that they are capable of doing while they're sick and have no support and have no options. And that includes child neglect and animal abuse, which are two common, common features of the show. It's just like just they're always like, look, we found 18 dead cats under these 47 piles of human feces. Just it's awful. People who end up on hoarders, they they don't get offered any long-term care, uh, nor are their victims offered any long-term care. The show is just filled with these graphic scenes that are meant to shame the person with mental illness, which is an element you need if it's like my mother, where this hoarding is a part of the like narcissism and other things that are going on. But it like when the person doesn't have an option or access to treatment and they don't have support and they're living on like a little isolated rural corner of Kansas, like what is nationally shaming them on TV going to achieve? Everyone in town knows what's going on, is gonna scream at them, bully them, you know, do everything but offer them help. You know, families on this show are pushed to the edge. CPS is brought in as dramatic leverage for like towards the end of the show, we're calling CPS. Like they do all these things to drive ratings and push participants even further towards the edge. It's just it's exploitation central, truly hard, if not impossible, to watch. And again, I came from a hoarder. My mother was a hoarder. I lived in a house that was very much like the houses on that show, like very, very, very close. It was we didn't have bags of human feces and we didn't have dead animals in the house, but it was not far from that, right? Like everything was soaked in animal piss and shit. So um it even with that and the anger that I will always have over that, I still look at these people and go, this is not the right way to do this. This is not the right way to handle this, even though I lack like the extreme. Some people take the empathy for these people too far, the sympathy and compassion too far. You know, that I I don't, I'm not saying that they should not receive shame because some of them need to be shamed for allowing things to get that bad without seeking help. But at the same time, there are people that just don't have the option. They just don't have the option. So it's just gross and it's dangerous for people watching at home too, because experts have found that there are people with mental illness hoarding that watch the show and then they go, oh, well, I don't have dead cats in my house, so I'm fine. The way I'm treating my kids in this house, that's literally you can't walk in because of all the things I've collected everywhere. It's all stacked up, so it's fine. Like it it creates this kind of denial bias or something. I can't remember what it's called. It's like a denial trap. And it's just all around hoarders is bad. But hoarders isn't alone on this spot. My 600-pound life is right there in the in the tied spot, right? For what is truly graphic piece of exploitation porn. Uh, literally, this to me, my 600-pound life feels like Todd Browning's 1930s freaks. If you haven't seen that, go and see it. We all know this show. We've seen the clips. Morbidly obese people get filmed trying to lose weight for a lap band surgery. It's horrific to watch. People in truly dire straits, okay? Most of them just completely, you can tell, financially destitute. And what's crazy is they get paid next to nothing for this show, right? They get filmed for a year trying to lose this weight so that they can get this surgery, right? And they get paid almost nothing. There's a girl on TikTok who talked about it, and she got as far as getting the contracts put in front of her before she said, Yeah, absolutely, I'm not gonna do this. And they were basically gonna pay her like $5,000 to film for a whole year, and they were gonna be in and out of her house all the time. And then they would say things like, We'll pay you two grand extra if you film a shower scene naked, which, right, it's just humiliating, right? Really humiliating. So very fucked up, very, very, very, very fucked up. In recent years, critics of the show have called it a human zoo, which I think echoes my sentiments of the turn of the century carnival exploitation sideshow, freak show kind of thing. It's truly awful. And it's no surprise that the show has been buried in lawsuits over the years, including from families of former cast members who have died after the stress of filming, after complications, after not having the support, the long-term support they need after filming a show like that. Production has also been accused repeatedly of unethical practices, including threatening the cast when they don't want like threatening the cast members, when the cast member says, like, I don't want to film that, I'm not comfortable with that, they get threatened. Um, cast members have had like catastrophic losses in their families, or they go through like a really crazy serious health scare and they don't want to have that filmed. And production basically says, throws the contract in their faces, like, we will again to these mostly poor people, hold up this contract and say our lawyers will destroy you, right? It's just, it's just, it's just awful. It's truly dark show filled with dark energy, not in a woo-woo way. I'm not talking about like a psychic, like a spirit, like that girl who what was it, Alex Reads Tarot, who's got all Christian. Just I just mean this in like a suffering, misery, abuse kind of way. Here's a clip of one of the show's darkest and genuinely most disturbing cast members, Stephen Asante. Um, and in this clip, he's throwing a fit after being kicked out of the hospital for demanding painkillers because it turns out he's a junkie, uh, super aggressive, abuses his brother, steals painkillers, just an awful human being. Awful. And he was on and off this show for years. So let's listen to a clip of Stephen Asante throwing a fit in the hospital because they won't give him painkillers.

SPEAKER_02 36:03

What are they doing? They go on the ambulance.

SPEAKER_07 36:06

No, the ambulance isn't authorized to take you home.

SPEAKER_02 36:09

So who's gonna fing take me home?

SPEAKER_07 36:11

I I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 36:12

So what do I gotta do? This is gonna be another story in the press. I am already in the press. So if I call and tell them what's going on right now, it's gonna be a whole nother story in the news that's gonna be worldwide. Guaranteed. I want the news number now. Because I'm not gonna be stuck here. They're gonna threaten me and tell me the ambulance is not authorized to pick me up. I want I want the number then. Do you wanna go to jail? No, no, sir.

SPEAKER_00 36:47

But they're not gonna put you in jail if you raise your voice for them in here. If you don't behave, call the police department. Get the security done here.

SPEAKER_03 36:57

Yeah, so genuinely it's dark, and the only reason it's not higher on this list is because, again, the exploitation is primarily uh directed at adults. But that's not gonna last long, so enjoy it while it lasts. Now, next on the list is another one of my personal favorites. I watched this show religiously as a teenager, and I rewatched the whole thing from start to finish during all the COVID lockdowns of 2020. And as much as I love this show and some of its golden moments, I have to admit that the Bad Girls Club was one of the more exploitative shows in 2000s reality television. Uh, it was one of those uh isolated in a mansion shows, right? We loved those uh where they would get like 10 girls or so together and they put them in a house for three to four months to see what happened. Now, the twist with Bad Girls Club is that all these young women, usually just old enough to drink, came from pretty rough backgrounds. The majority of them, the majority of them. A lot of them had abusive and traumatic upbringings. A lot of them came onto the show with kids already back at home. Some of them had multiple kids, the result of teen pregnancies, most of them. Uh, a lot of them came in whom they were already working as strippers or sex workers or relying on men or dating drug dealers, like really, you know, troubled backgrounds. It was troubled backgrounds. And the first handful of seasons are basically just drunken brawls for that very reason, right? The women are living in luxury most have never experienced before. And they take the opportunity of zero responsibilities and plush settings as these little like they they treat them like they're celebrities almost in a way, as they go on these tours of bars across LA and they just raise absolute hell in and out of the house and in the VIP sections across all these Los Angeles bars. And ultimately it was really exploitative, right? Like you were taking these young women who were coming from these awful backgrounds who had all these this high stress, high pressure, a lot of trauma. Like I still follow some of these girls, and there was um, oh, what was her name? I can't remember. I still follow her. She just she just posted the other day there was this one girl who came in, she was like really tall and skinny, and she already had a daughter back at home. And she you could tell she just came from absolute hell. She had absolute hell with her her father and her brother, and they would just give these people who were in the middle of obviously trying to sort through these really traumatic lives, tons of alcohol, and then they would push them to make these really awful decisions, which would then of course ruin their lives after the three or four months that they were filming the show, and they went back to the real world with probably very little money. Um, just really it was exploitation central, okay? They exploited young, poor women, essentially. Now, the show did try to change this by bringing in jobs and therapy, but it was it was just a charade. They were just trying to cover up for the criticizing the critics that were rightfully calling them out for exploiting these like traumatized young women, these abused young women. The point of the show was to get working class suffering women to fight each other. That's what it came down to. And monsters like Natalie Nunn, who didn't, I don't think, I think she came from a little privileged background, which is why she she got her start running her mouth on Bad Girls Club. They, these people like her, went over the top as well to try to reinforce racism, sexism, negative body standards, colorism, all of it. And the women were obviously encouraged by production to get as drunk as possible and make the worst possible decisions that they could with men on camera. They would, you know, they would get drunk and then everybody would be like, cheat on your boyfriend back home and then cry about it on the phone and we're gonna film it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We did, of course, however, amid all that exploitation, did get golden moments like this one from Tanisha.

SPEAKER_04 40:19

Look at her phone. Look at it. It's so nasty in this house. I cannot make this house a sticky. This house has this has soap all look, look.

SPEAKER_05 40:34

Who did that to the phone? You know what? I'm tired of y'all bitches in this house. Y'all gonna make me lose my mind, you know?

SPEAKER_03 41:08

Let me say so you can't deny the Bad Girls Club offered some great moments from non-compliant independent women, which I did love. There were there were still some strong women who just like didn't give a fuck and were not gonna be told what to do, which I really appreciated as a rebellious teenager. Still, the exploitation of young women without fully developed frontal lobes, prying them with alcohol to film bad decisions when they're clearly in the midst of trauma. Uh yeah, that's gonna, that's gonna get you a list, that's gonna get you a ranking on the list of the darkest 2000s reality television. Now we're gonna start getting a little bit into the nastier side of things. It's been pretty lighthearted. We've all, you know, we've all had our trashy TV that we've liked so far, okay? So far it's just been trashy adults, ultimately, for the most part, with the exception of the ones who are being exploited, um, who have been sacrificed to this wheel, right? Now it's gonna get a little, a little bumpier. This list is gonna take a turn from here, and I'll warn you the trampy fun, bimbo, good times, pretty much over from here on out. These next four shows, I think, are really the dark heart of 2000s reality television. And if you want to start down that channel, there's no better place to start than Little People, Big World. This show followed the Roloff family, Matt and Amy, two little people who started a farm and a family in Oregon, and their four children, twins Jeremy and Zach. Zach was the only one of their four children who was um who had dwarfism, and then Molly and their youngest son, Jacob. Now again, TLC, pretty much the channel that features at the top of this list for the rest of this list. Uh, they marketed the show as this empathetic look at a non-typical, typical family. Uh, it was really anything but that. The show has been mired in controversy since 2007. It started in 2006, but by 2007, they were already in trouble because that's when the father uh everything started to unravel. 2007 is the year when Matt, the father, got um arrested for a DUI. Yes, he is, he is the mother and father are both little people. Um, he gets arrested for a DUI in 2007, and then that's right around the time that rumors start to circulate for a number of years. He's having affairs, he's getting into all this stuff, he's got drinking problems, yada yada, yada. By 2016, that seems to be confirmed because Amy, who is the mother, she features in the show, she announced she's divorcing him. She she can't deal with it anymore, she can't put up with him, she's off, she's away. But there's way more to that. But here's they've they've had like all these other kinds of things, like the the farm, they've fought over the farm, parts of the farm have been sold, parts of the family have split up over it. But here's what, here's why they are number four on this list, okay? Um, it's because in 2020, Jacob Roloff, the youngest child, revealed that between the years 2007 to 2010, Chris Cardamone or Cardamone, I think it's Cardamone, a field producer of the show, Little People Big World, working for TLC, had groomed and molested him. Jacob claimed that his parents had no idea. Why would they, right? Because Matt's running around getting DUIs, having an affair, clearly like worried only about himself. And I'm assuming Amy was also caught up in her suffering and her misery dealing with a husband like that. And they were too busy, obviously, to notice that their son was being groomed and molested by someone who was in their home all the time, right? Uh this year in 2026, Audrey Roloff, who is the wife of the eldest son, Jeremy Roloff, kicked off a media storm when her extreme physical discipline of her children was revealed. She makes them like run all these laps around the farm and do all this physical labor. And it's like people were like, that's that's a bit extreme. That's like a bit crazy. To which she's shot off and been like, this is the way I raise my children, and it But then wouldn't you know? Wouldn't you know it? Turns out the Roloff family, evangelicals, uh, except for Zachary, I think, is the one. It's the youngest one. It's Jeremy. Jeremy's, is it Jeremy? Jacob. Jacob. Jacob is the youngest one. Jacob is the one who is not evangelical, um, but the rest of them seem to be a part of an adjacent crew to what the Duggars um believe in, right? So not really a surprise then that they like to do physical discipline of the children. Anyway, the show is exactly the same in its exploitation. Uh, it's a sideshow, it's sideshow material. It's made me uncomfortable since it came on the air because I remember specifically, I watched the first season, maybe the first two seasons, and I remember specifically when I stopped watching it was because in one of the episodes they were basically showing how Zachary was like in pain, like he was struggling to do normal things, and he was like having leg cramps and like back pain and stuff, and you could just tell that he was suffering, and they just really wanted to have that camera in his face while he was suffering, and it made my stomach turn. And I thought this isn't right. I didn't necessarily have language for it at that time, but that I was I was out at that point, and I I just never watched it again. Doesn't seem like anything has gotten better with it, right? Um, I I don't think anything was ever, I don't think ever anything was ever good intended to come out of it. Like I said, I think it's just more exploitation porn. All right, moving up the list to number three. This is a show I tell every single person about when they ask me uh about 2000s reality TV or they talk about 2000s reality TV, and most people I talk to about this have no idea what I'm talking about. Um, I was a freshman in college when this show came out, and even then it blew my freaking mind. It is still to this day, I think, one of the craziest shows that's ever been on TV, and that's probably why it only got one season. Yes, that's right, one of the most controversial shows of all time, a show that would never get made today, as hard as that is to believe. 2007's Kid Nation, a Lord of the Flies reenactment live on film. Now, if you haven't seen this show, I don't think there's any better way for me to explain it to you than to uh let's just the we'll just we'll just let's roll the trailer.

SPEAKER_01 47:08

Imagine a world with no adults. Just 40 kids with the chance to build their own society.

SPEAKER_04 47:15

The work is cut out for us.

SPEAKER_01 47:17

Welcome to Kid Nation.

SPEAKER_04 47:19

No one here knows how to cook. I'm a beauty queen, I don't do dishes.

SPEAKER_01 47:22

The only show where kids will do things all on their own. A TV event unlike anything you've ever seen.

SPEAKER_04 47:28

It's dusty, we're dirty, you're just gonna have to keep pushing. We can do it.

SPEAKER_01 47:32

This is our Kid Nation coming this fall to CBS.

SPEAKER_03 47:38

Yeah. When I tell you that show was a wild ride, I mean it. They made these kids butcher live chickens, they had to build a government, cook for themselves. It was like a really crazy, crazy, crazy thing to watch. Now, production basically sold it as a social experiment. They took 40 kids between the ages of eight to 15, which that's a red flag, and dumped them in a quote unquote ghost town and told them to build their own society in the middle of New Mexico. It was as dangerous and as awful as it sounds like it would be. The kids worked 14-hour days, taking extreme hikes to get food and water, doing hard labor. It was not a joke. Man, it was it was a hard, it was hard to watch at the time. They had no contact with their parents unless they won a challenge where that was a specific reward. And most of them didn't even get paid what they thought they were gonna get paid because they had to earn these like gold stars. And they were told each gold star is worth 20 grand. Nah, nah, nah, that's not how it worked out. And of course, the production was downright devious. After a 12-year-old on the production was sexually assaulted by an older boy, she was pulled to the side and told that if she told anyone or she pressed charges, she would be the one who went to jail because she had defended herself with a fork during the attack. Yeah. And it was a female producer that told her this as well. A female producer pulled a 12-year-old girl aside after she had been sexually assaulted and told her, Oh, well, what he did, that's just what boys do. But what you did, that's a crime. So if you want us to take this to the police and if you want us to get him removed, he he won't be on the show anymore, but neither will you because you'll be in jail for what you did. Like truly fucking horrific. There was another incident where kids drank bleach out of unmarked glass bottles. They found these like glass soda bottles and they thought it was soda, so they opened it up and drank it. It was bleach, uh, ended up being hospitalized. There was also endless bruises, cuts, scrapes, burns. I imagine there were breaks, and a series of other injuries that the kids got from being out in the wild doing hard labor with minimal intervention. Behind the scenes, production would gossip about the kids to one another to try to create conflicts between individuals and groups, and families were forced to sign 22-page obedience contracts that essentially took away all right to complain or hold anyone on the production team accountable. The only good thing, I guess, that that that came out of it, and the only thing that got the show stopped was an investigation by the New Mexico state government that redealed revealed the producers of Kid Nation didn't have the required permits for a children's camp, nor had they sought any of the required working permits for such an arrangement, nor had they gotten the insurance necessary for such a project. It was such a big deal, it was such a calamity that the state of New Mexico ended up changing their laws around child labor after the first season. And Kid Nation was thankfully never heard from again. I I can't even imagine. I didn't even realize when I watched it that they had eight to 15-year-olds together in that. Like that right there, that should have been a no-no. Like you should not have had high schoolers in a group with eight-year-olds. That should not, that should not have been a thing. So uh you can go and watch episodes of this on YouTube if you want. They have whole entire episodes. There's huge think pieces all over TikTok and YouTube and Instagram. Uh, truly a wild time to be alive. Um, recommend it if you want to go and check it out. All right, we're getting there now. The final two. Who's it gonna be? The worst of the worst. What was the darkest of dark reality TV in the 2000s? Well, if you guessed for the number two spot that it was gonna be John and Kate plus eight, you are very much right. This is one of the darkest reality reality television shows of the 2000s, and shock surprise, wouldn't you know it? It's yet another TLC show. The series followed John and Kate Gosslin as they navigated life as parents of twin girls, Maddie and Cara, and sex tuplets, Alexis, Aiden, Colin, Hannah, Leah, and Joel. And then after that is when we noticed the gum.

SPEAKER_05 51:40

What's done, Joel?

SPEAKER_08 51:44

No way. No way! You don't roll Oh Lord have mercy. Who would give you gum? Oh, and Jody just doesn't know the power of six three-year-olds. First I saw it on Joel's sock, so I took his sock off and threw it away. And then as I started looking, it was all over the kids' clothes, like little pieces of it.

SPEAKER_03 52:04

Goodness. Who else has gum on them? Now, the Gossins had a couple of seasons. I don't think most people realize this. They're like, oh, John and Kate plus eight. There were other series before John and Kate plus eight. Well, not series, they were specials. It was the same thing as like with the Duggars. There was a series of different one-hour specials. Like they had a special when Kate was pregnant that followed her through that whole thing. It was a whole thing. It was just absolutely crazy. They were a sensation long before the Duggars and Octimom. People loved tuning in to see the iron-wheeled Kate running her household like a drill sergeant. Of course, most of us didn't see what was going on behind the scenes controversy that continues to this very day. Because as picture perfect as things looked on the outside for the Gosselins, which really it didn't, now that we're all aware of the like crazy, narcissistic, traumatic, abusive, neglectful homes that we grew up in. We watch that and we're like, oh God, but the the craziness around them, it's still going on. It's still, still going. But you know, there's a few facts that have held true throughout the story. So in 2009, it gets announced John Gosslin has been caught having an affair with a teacher. It was a huge, huge scandal. And after that, the media was like, look at this fuck boy, DJ, fuck boy, that's just like making fun of him left, right, and center. Shortly after the affair gets announced, Kate files for divorce and she tells the media it's for the, and I quote, safety of my family, which is crazy because John Gosslin, come on, he's a lot of things, but he's not physically dangerous. Okay, look at him. Look at the man. I of I John Gosslin's a lot of things. I do not see him being a physical abuser. He just doesn't have the I just don't think he's got the backbone in a way. If you know, if you've seen John Gosslin over the years, you know what I'm talking about. What followed that was years of back and forth and abuse allegations after the divorce. John accused Kate of being an abusive narcissist, which I tend to believe, and sued for custody of the children at least two times. Kate, meanwhile, labeled John as the primary abuser of she and her children, and she kept them, and she got the show. In 2016, it was discovered that Colin, one of the sex tuplets, had been put into a behavioral institution for troubled children. He was there for two years before his father, John, was finally able to get custody and get him out of the institution. Colin's stories in the years that have followed have been harrowing. According to him, Kate subjected him to years worth of abuse, which included restraints and locking him in closets before eventually abandoning him to a mental institution. Colin has a memoir coming out in October of 2026. I hope you all go by it. Give this kid well-deserved money, because I guarantee you Kate has not given him any money. And he maintains that he's going to tell it all. He's going to share everything that happened to him, and he wants, he's basically like trying to become an activist for kids on TV. He doesn't believe that kids should be on TV, and neither does John. Since his release into his father's custody, Colin and John have been outspoken about what they say is exploitation of the Gosslin children and other children in TV, both by Kate and by the network TLC, who have both violated, they claim, orders from a judge about filming and the well-being of the Gosslin siblings. Overall, it's hard to ignore the realities of what John and Kate was an exploitation machine. Those kids were exploited. The amount Colin's tell-all is the first. There's going to be so many more after this. And it's going to be hard for some of us to consume, to believe, to like internalize what really went on, I'm sure. And I'm telling you, as the days go on, it's getting even harder to ignore the claims that Kate is a narcissist, knowing what we know now. And I'm sure it's going to be harder to deny that after Colin's book comes out. But all in all, truly, truly sad. And it just leaves you hoping that the kids find their way to a better, happier future. It seems that Colin and Hannah, at the very least, have done that as they both now live full-time with their dad, John. All right, it's that time. The top of the list, the top of the pops. Who is going to reign supreme as the 2000s most dark-sided reality reality TV program? Well, for me, it's a tie. I know you're gonna hate hearing that. Yeah, we got a tie. We got a tie for number one. Uh, here at the very top spot, there's two. I I couldn't pick. There are two shows that came out of this like 2000s period that are just disgusting. There's no positive redeeming factors whatsoever about them. And guess what? They both came out the same year. Surprise, surprise, 2009. A particularly poignant year, it seems, for exploitation on reality television. So without further ado, let's rip the band-aid off. At number one for the most awful reality television, it's gotta be Teen Mom and Toddlers and Tiaras. This is Exploitation Central, pals. This is it. Worst of the worst, nothing redeemable about it, awful from the top to the bottom. I don't even need to break this up and go into the nitty-gritty and nasty of this. You know, I know, we all know how horrible these shows were. On Teen Mom, you had, for the most part, poor, uneducated, and unsupported women from unstable families and traumatic backgrounds being coaxed into the spotlight by predatory producers who usually paid them no more than get this. I didn't know this until I just recently watched a documentary on this. They were paying these girls $2,500 to $5,000. That's it. That's it. Best case scenario, most of the girls on Teen Mom were getting paid $5,000 to have the whole of their lives, their births, their coochies put on national television. Unbelievable. If you haven't watched it already, I highly recommend the 16 Impregnant slash Teen Mom episode of the show Hollywood Demons. Uh it's it's very long. It's like it's almost two hours long and it makes you sick. It really makes you makes you sick. Some of these girls were like living in cars and stuff, just no support. The show just exploited them. Teen Mom and 16 Impregnant were essentially early versions of that horrific YouTube channel, Soft White Underbelly, right? Because they were just picking the like, just just the producers went out and literally found the most foolish, simple, vulnerable people that they could find. They brag about it in the documentary. There's one of them who's like, well, yeah, sorry, girls from broken families just make for great TV. And it's a woman who says that. The whole thing's just awful. It's awful. There's not a single good thing that could be said about teen mom or 16 and pregnant, any of the rest of it. It glamorized something that shouldn't have been glamorized. It platformed domestic abusers like Amber Port would. If future generations like were ever to like look back in a time machine and go, show us the worst moment of your generation, like teen mom would have to be one of those moments, right? And it wouldn't be alone, right? It wouldn't be alone. Because also at the top of this list is toddlers and tiaras. And what do I really need to say about that, right? A literal pedophile catalog, a pedophile catalog. Small baby children put on stage and sexualize for the egos of their monster mothers and sometimes fathers. There's not really any other spin on it. You can't spin toddlers and tiaras any other way. Toddlers and tiaras was free home entertainment for pedophiles. Period. End of story. Why go out and get arrested when you can just watch baby girls and bikinis and baby doll hair right there on your television screen, right there for free, for free. All you need is a cable subscription. It encouraged dangerous beauty practices for kids, bad diets, normalized narcissistic parents, the whole shebang. Just awful. Again, top to bottom. And that's why it's at the top of this list with Teen Mom, because toddlers and Tiaras was a sociopath and pedophile fucking factory. I'm not even gonna play a clip on it. I tried to go and like watch an episode of it for this, couldn't do it. Absolutely disgusting. Couldn't make it through a whole episode. The people in the women in it are disgusting. The whole thing is disgusting, disgusting, disgusting, disgusting. So yeah, there it is. Definitely the worst when it comes to reality TV. Toddlers and Tiaras and Teen Mom slash 16 and pregnant, all of the teenage pregnancy, all of the let's exploit underage women category, number one. Now, I do have to say that I have two honorable mentions to add to this list quickly before we wrap, um, for the worst 2000s reality TV show. Now, these are semi-real, they're semi-2000s, semi-2000s, which is why they didn't quite make the list. But they are number one, welcome to Plathville, which I think is genuinely just a dark, horrific show. And number two, stranded with one million dollars, which is dark and guilt-free entertainment. If you just want to rebel in adults being bad, shitty people with basically no consequences because everybody's safe and there's money and there's food and stuff. Stranded with a million dollars, absolute fucking art. I love it. So welcome to Plathville. The that that's a mess, right? The whole thing's a mess. I can't believe the show's still on. They're in this same kind of IBLP cult stuff that the Duggars are, all this right-wing evangelical bullshit. And you could tell the kids are struggling. It's absolutely horrific. The parents have now since divorced now that they've had this show. Uh, everybody is is hates the mother, which I think the mother probably saw her children escape and went, holy shit, what have I been doing? I gotta get out of here too. Uh the kids cannot keep relationships. They all have bad relationships. One of them's just rushed into um marriage with a gay man after knowing him for three months and she's refusing to acknowledge that he's gay. There's nothing wrong with the fact that he's gay. The the problem is he's getting married to a woman who is so sheltered and naive and unworld experience that she doesn't understand that he's gay and that there's gonna be some serious problems in their lives. Um, lots of stuff. Lots of just they all have bad relationships. None of them have healthy relationships because they've never seen one and they have no experience. It's just really sad. And of course, they don't have an education, right? So, other than the TV show, there's not really a lot for them to do. So, welcome to Plathville. Dark, sad, strange, weird, uncomfortable. Um, an absolute example of the types of parents who should be in jail for oversheltering their children and allowing them to be raised inside of cults. Now, stranded with a million dollars, totally different story. It is so dark, but it's also completely safe and ethical for you to watch. Why? There's no child exploitation, first of all. There's no babies being harmed, there's no children being sexually abused, nothing. You can watch it. I still watch it. I'm about to start rewatching it again. It's one of my guilty pleasures to this very day. And let me tell you why. So, stranded with a million dollars, they take a group of people, they drop them in the wilderness, and they tell them, okay, there's a pot of money. You have a million dollars, okay? And whoever survives to the end of this time in the wilderness, you guys all are gonna split that pot of a million dollars. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Sounds like survivor. Stay on the island, get it to the end, you get some of the money. But here's the catch it's stranded with a million dollars. You can order things, right? You can actually call up the producers and go, I can't do this. It's raining, send me a tent. And they will send you a tent, but they'll take the money out of the million dollar prize cash at the end. Okay. And then there's all these little things you have to do. There's challenges and stuff like that. But you can basically run down the money. You can order cheeseburgers, you can order pizzas, you can order tents, you can order like electricity, like all kinds of stuff. So, what happens on the show is that the group essentially splits the people who don't want to spend any money, who want to keep the pot as big as possible, just get through things so they can get the money, go home, and change their lives. And then you have the other tribe that splits, which is the tribe that's like, you know what, I'm just here for the vibes, man. I'm gonna order cheeseburgers and tents, and I'm just gonna enjoy my time here. I don't give a shit about that money. Surviving's too hard. It turns into absolute pandemonium. I'm not gonna spoil anything for you, but biological warfare descends at the end. Uh, and it it is so bad that they cancel the show, there's no reunion, and they never have another season of the show because they can't ensure it because the contestants boil down into biological warfare by the end of the experiment. It is amazing. So if you want to watch like dark, demented, wicked reality television without the guilt of poor people being, I mean, I guess they might be. It's you'll just you have to go watch it. Stranded with a million dollars. It's just good, clean, deviant fun. Okay, nobody's nobody's getting hurt, everybody's safe. Stranded with a million dollars. Check it out. My favorite reality TV show. I think it came out in 2017. Really good time, really crazy stuff. And that's it. How wild and crazy was that, boy. I tell you, this was the 2000s. Wild, wild, wild. I think that's why I liked Housewives because it was like the last kind of the early, the early seasons of the real Housewives, whether it was like Orange County or especially New York and New Jersey, they I think were like the last, the last taste of this kind of unprecedented reality television where you couldn't really predict what people were gonna do and people weren't living entirely for the Twitter judgment that was gonna come on the other side. So you still got people doing wacky antics and they didn't know what the fallout was gonna be. So it was dark, it was twisted, but also sometimes I still kind of miss it. I miss some of it, some of it, not the exploitation part, obviously, but some of it can be quite fun. But yeah, that's it. That's my big scary list of the darkest reality TV shows of the 2000s. Did your favorite show make the list? Do you think that I left something out that should have been there? I would love to know what you guys think. I want to hear what your shows are. You'll see these videos start to pop up on TikTok as this episode comes out. So let me know. You can let me know on social media at the real b Johnson, at the real EB Johnson. Oh my gosh, I can't even talk anymore. At the real eB Johnson on everything that matters. So TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. If you want to get more deep dives into all things twisted Hollywood, head over to Patreon where I have even more Scandal Queens goodness ready to go for you. Uh when you join the Patreon, you get early episodes, essays, deep dives, videos, and special bonus episodes that you can't listen to anywhere else. So if you want to get all of that, you want to keep the fun going, go over to patreon.com slash scandal queens and boom, it'll be right there for you. If you're more into the psychology side of things, join me over on Substack where I have weekly essays and articles about mental health, family, relationships, narcissism, and a lot of other mental goodness. And that's over on the real eB Johnson.substack.com. For everything else, again, follow me on socials. That's where I'll do updates and stuff. And if you loved this episode, if you had a good time, please just think about leaving me a quick five-star review. It's totally free and it just helps the other weirdos find me. And yeah, that's it. That's gonna be it for today. Just another fun, light, take it easy episode. So thank you so much for being here today. I'd love to know what you think. Find me on social media, send me a message, get in the comments, let me know. I'll be back next week with another juicy episode. And trust me, you're not gonna want to miss this deep dive. It's either gonna be one of two things. It might be a it might be a serious look at a certain showgirl, or it might be a little bit darker than that. So we'll see. We'll see. You'll have to show up next week to find out which one it's gonna be. And uh yeah, that's it. So I'll see you next week, or rather you'll hear me next week. Same time, same place. Until then, keep your secrets close, keep your receipts closer, stay scandalous, queens. Bye bye.