Reality Check

By Emily Watkins

Everything is melting. The line between lives off- and online, reality and ‘reality’, grows blurrier with each swipe. On platforms like Instagram, polished perfection has given way to artful artlessness: photodumps, typos, yapping, posts confected to convey flippant immediacy – no matter that they take just as long to create as their manicured predecessors. 

"How many strangers care what you say? Will they buy what you shill?"

Ten years since Wendy’s started the trend for businesses tweeting like hungover teenagers, hungover teenagers are producing professional-level content about their Wendy’s orders, and earning money from it too. How many strangers care what you say? Will they buy what you shill? If so, congratulations: you’re not just a content creator, but an influencer. And in this era of video-supremacy, that makes you a reality star – or as good as.

While they’ve been stops on the same conveyor belt for a long time, today influencers and celebrities are interchangeable, osmotic. I’m old enough to remember a time when TV shows (Big Brother, Love Island) birthed C-listers – now the contestants are famous(ish) before they even start, established influencers with existing audiences poised to swell with every episode. It makes sense, of course – producers get a cast with readymade fans, who can follow their stories long after the show wraps. Much like the controversial endless scroll, in 2026 the credits never really roll – there’ll always be another post tomorrow.

"people who are good at Instagram don’t make for good television"

Everyone wins, except the viewer – because people who are good at Instagram don’t make for good television. See: Gen Z influencer’s Alix Earle’s insipid Netflix series; the latest season of once-inimitable Below Deck. Luckily, that’s not to say that they don’t make for interesting art: this autumn in London, artists Martine Syms and Lizzy Deacon both mine reality TV for parts, bringing yet more dizzying layers of mediation and authenticity to bear on its dazzling wreckage. 

At 243 Luz & Co, Deacon presents Ad Victorem Spolias (2026), comprising footage filmed with a spy camera over hours as an extra in an episode of Made in Chelsea. Entirely unedited, only cutting when the camera battery runs out and running on a loop in the gallery, the film lays bare the artifice (producer interventions, repeated takes) that go into crafting the UK’s most notoriously un-real reality show.  

If Made in Chelsea is smooth plastic, then this is the crude oil. Radical in the spirit of the genre’s earliest origins, Ad Victorem Spolias has the air of an unattended live stream or CCTV footage; a thrillingly mundane exposée. With her own face occasionally pictured as the wristwatch camera moves, Deacon’s physical presence on set both highlights and problematises the influencer ouroboros: I am filmed, so I am famous. I am famous, so I am filmed. Footage of people on this set is enough to launch careers – so what about this footage of me? 

More uncomfortably, the fact of the film itself asks: where does an artist end and a content creator begin?

"the influencer ouroboros: I am filmed, so I am famous. I am famous, so I am filmed"

In Knot Eye at Sadie Coles, meanwhile, Syms presents RW-LO (2026), a 22-minute ‘docu-fantasy’ set in the year 2000. Blending reenactments with vintage camcorder footage, the film follows a teenager obsessed with one Melissa Howard, an outspoken Real World castmate. Per the show’s press release, RW-LO is an inquiry ‘into what happens when people start being celebrities, and they stop being real’ – a vital question, given the state of reality TV today, not least because the gap between celebrity and ‘realness’ is hurtling shut before our eyes, or even inverting. 

Back in 2000, shows like Real World were radical because they catapulted their subjects from famelessness to world-renown. Today, the transition is much less stark – glamorous influencers with audiences of millions move frictionlessly from TikTok to ITV and back again, part of carefully mapped career paths curated by agents. The resulting TV is the equivalent of Sartre’s waiter in bad faith; what’s my character arc? How will fans react if I turn right instead of left? All too often, you can almost see the wheels turning – as such, Deacon’s film is not only evidence of what we already knew, but as she is directed around the set, her video becomes exemplary of it in its own right. 

Both works hark back to reality’s heyday (Ad Victorem Spolias shares its title with Made in Chelsea’s first episode, which aired in 2011, while RW-LO’s Real World storyline reaches back to the noughties) – but in mediating the genre via visual art just as influencers mediate it through social media, Deacon and Syms perform reality’s cannibalisation as well as analysing it. As such, they prove that its latest evolution can reveal as much about who we want to be and see as ever.

Thank God too, because even (or especially) at its most unreal moments, ‘reality’ – TV, social media – remains a vital theatre for our all-too-human messes. The standard of yesteryear – with its self-sabotage, squabbles, moments of breathless connection – might be gone, but it’s buried beneath layers of self-reflexivity rather than swept away altogether. As spontaneity gives way to storylines, friends to followers, individuals to impenetrable brands, artists to content creators, a unifying question emerges from the morass – was there ever a difference, anyway?