Death on Daytime

 I've just been watching Death on Daytime, the documentary about The Jeremy Kyle Show, which is pretty damning about the programme and the tv production team culture behind it. 

If you ever saw any of it, you know that Kyle often went after his guests incredibly aggressively and humiliatingly. It was glaringly obvious, both at the time and in retrospect, that a lot of those people appearing were not equipped to deal with any of it. I think that's inarguable. 

In the breaks, 'though, Channel 4 was advertising Married at First Sight Australia, and that feels hypocritical. 

The Jeremy Kyle Show was certainly a less glamorous form of human-bear-baiting, but MAFS is exploitative too. Differences - "class" of people (mostly wannabe actors/models and influencers etc), more scripted - but still, I've watched some of it, and it feels very uncomfortable. The documentary argued Kyle's show deliberately chose an unpopular underclass to exhibit for pillory. And I'm wondering if the wannabes also "deserve" it in a similar way, to people's minds? Sure, it's polished and sanitised, staged in luxurious settings, but it still can be people screaming in each other's faces while so-called experts look on and apparently do very little.

MAFS is far from alone, these sort of  reality tv shows have proliferated and are popular, but they're very problematic. Having the adverts for it right in the middle of a show about someone killing himself after appearing on exploiTV, just makes me boggle.