It's Called Reality

Season 5 of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives just dropped, and with it comes a massive cast shakeup.

This week, Willow and Briana do a quick rundown of what went down in S5, but this episode is less about the tea and more about the whole pot: a full retrospective on five seasons of the show, using religious deconstruction as our lens.

We break down how the different cast member's relationship to their faith seems to have shifted since Season 1, and what it looks like to try and dismantle patriarchal structures when the doctrine itself is...

Stassi Schroeder, star of Vanderpump Rules, is back on TV, and this time she's the one in charge.

House of Stassi is a reality show about making a reality show, and we love the meta-ness of it all. We're digging into what happens when a woman who survived a brutal era of reality TV decides to return on her own terms, and why "being the next Kris Jenner" might not be the feminist win she thinks it is.

We discuss: what the show's meta-format reveals about the machinery of reality TV; the Stassi-Beau dynamic, why...

For our tenth episode, we're zooming out and reflecting on how making this show has changed how we watch reality TV, and then get into the current state of reality TV. There's a massive drop of shows coming out this fall, and we're doing everything we can to keep up.

We start with some takes on what we've already been watching: Project Runway Season 22 (Willow is a lowkey defender of Joseph McCrae), Earle Meets World (unfortunately not the next Kardashians), Big Brother with two Survivor players running the house, and the superior banter of Love Island UK.<...

This week, we get into all three seasons of America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, from the audition process that breaks your heart, the five-year ceiling, the pay fight, and the slow transformation from Season 1 to Season 3 of women who were reflections of a brand becoming individual stars the brand can no longer control.

Also discussed: whether the DCC is a cult, beauty standards, and parallels with K-pop.

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Love Island USA Season 8 ran for 32 episodes, set records on Peacock, and somehow still felt like something was missing. Will Willow feel this way about every new season because she just can't let go of Season 6? Perhaps.

This week, we're breaking down our Top 10 most important moments, takeaways, and cultural flashpoints of the season. From the Gen Z puritan paradox to the parasocial power trip of public voting, to two consecutive seasons of racial slur removals and what that says about Love Island's casting pipeline, our big question is: why weren't we really rooting for anyone?

Rhode Island: it's the smallest state in the US, and it also just delivered one of the most compelling first seasons in Real Housewives history, and we are here for it!

This week, we're breaking down the cast, the drama, the reunion, why showcasing stories about menopause is so important, and what the "slam pig" incident reveals about how women police each other.

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This week, we're getting on the therapist's couch -- specifically, Dr. Orna's couch -- to dig into what Couples Therapy is really about.

We're breaking down the three couples at the heart of Season 2 to look at anxious-avoidant spirals that are hard to watch and deeply relatable, navigating relationships that life thrust upon them, and how to navigate recovery in a relationship.

Then we zoom out to discuss what Orna's supervision sessions reveal about therapists being human, why the show matters for normalizing therapy, what Season 5's chatGPT-using-husband says about the loneliness epidemic, and why...

America's Next Top Model ran for 24 cycles, launching a generation of girls into a modelling fantasy world.

This week, we're digging into what ANTM was really selling: the makeover myth, the beauty-is-pain narrative, the contradictions of a show that claimed to expand beauty standards while simultaneously reinforcing them. We get into Tyra as a complicated figure, why Janice Dickinson on the judging panel was never going help, and how the Wild West of early reality TV meant nobody was protected.

From heroin chic to GLP-1 ads on every billboard, from girl boss hustle culture to...

This week, we're getting into the iconic hit reality franchise, The Traitors.

We analyze the actual origins of the game (it started as a Soviet social psychology experiment, no joke), who's actually good at playing it and why, and the unhinged joy of watching people lie to each other for entertainment.

Then we get into groupthink, confirmation bias, and why everybody at the round table should take a media literacy course.

⚠️ Spoilers ahead for all aired seasons of The Traitors.

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This week, we get into the machine that made Taylor Frankie Paul, and what happened when it couldn't contain her anymore.

From MomTok to The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives to The Bachelorette season that has yet to air, we break down her redemption arc, the gamble ABC made, why Dakota is still on our screens, and the question underneath it all: what do we -- audiences, networks, and media -- actually owe the women we watch?

Note: episode was recorded April 18th, 2026, as information was still...

This episode contains Survivor 50 spoilers! You've been warned.

This week, we dig into Season 50 of Survivor: the twists that overshadowed the players, the fan participation that wasn't, the gendered edit that disappeared some the season's top players, and what Christian Hubicki's elimination tells us about what happens when production stops trusting its own show.

Plus: Who we were rooting for, how we'd play Survivor, our hot takes on how to make Survivor better.
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LINKS

Listen to It's Called Reality: itscalledreality.tv

Welcome to It's Called Reality!

In our inaugural episode, we get into our origin stories with reality TV, and the argument that's going to drive every episode of this show: reality TV isn't just a guilty pleasure, it's a kind of mirror. And if you look closely enough, all the same forces that shape the world show up every week on these shows.

We get into why/what we started watching, what we love about it, what we're watching now, and how we'd play if we were cast on a reality show.

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