Counting Down the Moments that Shaped Reality TV in 2023

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Catch Up on 25 Days of Reality TV (and the Scandals That Shape Them)

25 Days of Reality

On March 3, 2023, reality-television fans stood still. Midway through Vanderpump Rules tenth season, news broke that series leading man Tom Sandoval cheated on his longtime partner and co-star Ariana Madix with another co-star, Raquel Leviss. The scandal wouldn’t be addressed on the show for at least two months, when an episode named after the hashtag that dominated offscreen conversation (#Scandoval) finally aired.

The cameras didn’t document the affair, but they managed to capture the slow motion collision of unscripted TV and real life — of what happens when the Bravo edit slams into a narrative already built, struck down, and refashioned by TikTok scholars a hundred times over.

2023 felt like crash after crash, from Love Is Blind to The Real Housewives of New York City to Below Deck: Down Under to Squid Game: The Challenge, all of which reckoned, in various ways, with what constitutes reality and how much intervention goes into documenting it. In celebration, Vulture has rounded up 25 moments — one for every day until Christmas — that shaped reality TV in the year of the lighting-bolt necklace.

EXPLORE 25 DAYS OF REALITY

Catch Up On Vulture’s Reality TV Advent

Day 1: Anatomy of a Scandoval

There is life before Scandoval, and there’s everything that followed.

Day 2: Death by Squid Ink

Yearbook Superlatives With the Cast of Squid Game: The Challenge

Day 3: Bake-Off’s Delight

The Great British Baking Show Cracked the Co-Host Code

Day 4: Claim to Fame Said No T-Hanks

Tom Hanks’s Niece Doesn’t Regret Her Claim to Fame Calamity

Day 5: Free Willy!

Where Were You When Drag Race’s Anetra and Marcia Did That?