Paraded naked in front of millions, FAKE videos of cheating partners and brutal makeovers… reality TV’s cruellest shows
IT was supposed to kickstart his comedy career – instead he was left abandoned, half-starved and naked in an apartment for almost a year.
Japanese comedian Tomoaki Hamatsu – better known as Nasubi – was driven to the brink of madness after competing on the reality show Susunu! Denpa Shōnen in 1998, where he was made to live in isolation for months on end.
Tasked with gaining his freedom by bizarrely winning prizes from magazine competitions, Nasubi was forced to eat raw rice and dog food as he lived in increasingly squalid conditions.
But in a Truman Show-esque twist, he was unaware that every day his ordeal was being streamed to millions of viewers until the walls of the apartment fell around him and revealed a live studio audience after more than a year.
Nasubi, who was forbidden from bringing anything with him and was even stripped naked as he entered the flat, went on to become one of Japan‘s most famous faces, but spent six months traumatised by the show.
Now, his unbelievable story is being told in a new documentary, The Contestant, which premieres on Hulu on May 2.
He later said of the experience: “My mental condition was at its worst.
“I was like, ‘Why only me? Why do I have to do all these things? I’d rather die than feel like this.’
Throughout the years that reality TV has beamed into our living rooms contestants have been sleep deprived, starved, operated on, bullied and manipulated for our entertainment.
Deep Fake Love (2023)
Netflix is working hard to corner the market on dating shows, but one of its latest offerings may have pushed the format too far.
Deep Fake Love is a Spanish reality show which aired on Netflix in July last year.
It takes five couples, splits them into different villas and then introduces sexy new singles into each house to party with the separated lovers, trying to catch them in compromising positions.
The catch is contestants are frequently taken aside and shown videos of their significant other cheating on them – but the videos could be faked using AI.
It is up to the players to figure out if they’re really being cheated on, or just being forced to watch a hyper-realistic fake. The more videos they guess correctly, the better chance they have of winning €100,000.
The show has received some pretty damning reviews, with people calling it “chilling”, “absolutely cruel” and “psychological AI torture”.
“Nothing in this show makes people feel good,” one person wrote on social media. “It’s everything wrong with human beings. Terrible show.”
The Swan (2004)
Beauty pageants have always been popular viewing, but what happens when the format is used on two self-proclaimed “ugly ducklings”?
That’s the question the 2004 Fox reality TV show The Swan tried to answer.
The Swan took two less than conventionally attractive women each episode and gave them extreme makeovers – which extended up to cosmetic surgery in some cases.
Whichever contestant was voted to have the greatest transformation won the episode and would join the other winners in a beauty pageant at the end of the season.
The show received a frosty reception with multiple journalists blasting it as “sadistic”, “repellent” and “hurtful”. It lasted just one season before being canned.
In 2010 it was ranked by Entertainment Weekly as the worst reality TV show ever produced.
Who’s Your Daddy? (2005)
Fox produced another clanger just one year after The Swan face-planted into the zeitgeist, with the aptly-named Who’s Your Daddy?
The show starred actress J.T Meyers, an adopted woman who had not met her biological father, and eight men trying to convince her it was them.
The catch? One of them really was.
If J.T guessed which contestant was her father, she would win $100,000 – but if she got it wrong, the man who she thought was her dad would take the money instead.
The show was supposed to run for an entire season, but after the pilot episode bombed, Fox scrapped the rest of the show and let the one episode run as a “special”.
T.J said in an interview that the overall experience was positive, as it meant she was reunited with her birth father, but she felt a lot of stress around guessing the right man.
“I remember praying to God ‘please let me pick him please’ because if I didn’t pick him it would be like letting him down and I wanted to be everything I could be in my birth fathers eyes. I wanted to make him proud.”
There’s Something About Miriam (2004)
Hot on the heels of the success of The Bachelorette the year before, the British reality TV show There’s Something About Miriam had six men compete for the affections of 21-year-old Mexican model Miriam Rivera.
Throughout the show the men competed in physical challenges and went on dates with the stunning model to try and get her to fall in love with them.
In the final episode of the show, when Miriam picked the man who she wanted to be with, she also revealed she was a transgender woman who had not yet had surgery.
Even though the man she chose initially accepted both the prize money (£10,000) and a holiday with Miriam, he later joined the five other contestants in a lawsuit against the show.
Tragically, Miriam died in 2019 aged 38 in what was ruled a suicide – however, her husband Daniel Cuervo insists she was murdered for refusing to work as a prostitute.
The Moment of Truth (2008)
Everyone lies occasionally – just little white ones.
But if there was $500,000 riding on telling the truth, you might be a little more inclined to stay on the straight and narrow.
The Fox reality TV show Moment of Truth banked on that exact reasoning to force contestants to answer increasingly personal and awkward questions about their lives and relationships, while in front of their family and friends.
Contestants were required to sit a polygraph test before filming, where they would answer 100 questions.
Without knowing the results of the test, they then sat in front of the host Mark L. Wahlberg, and a panel of family and friends where they were asked the questions again. If they lied, they lost the money.
It sounds simple enough, but the show drew intense criticism for certain episodes, including one where contestant Lauren Clementi admitted she thought she should be married to her ex-boyfriend instead of her new husband, who she had married two days prior and was sitting in front of her.
She also admitted to having sex with another person who was not her husband, and that she had stolen money from her work.
Despite telling the truth on every other devastating question, Lauren lost the prize money when she answered the question “Do you think you’re a good person?” by saying yes.
Shattered (2010)
Watching paint dry doesn’t make for particularly exciting television – but what about watching someone who hasn’t slept for days watch paint dry?
That was the premise of Channel 4’s Shattered – a reality show which forced ten contestants to go for as long as they could without sleep, whilst periodically being tortured by the sleepiest situations imaginable.
These ‘You Snooze You Lose’ challenges included forcing the sleep-deprived contestants to cuddle teddy bears, listen to bedtime stories in overheated rooms and, yes, watch paint dry whilst sitting in a comfortable chair.
Whoever stayed awake the longest would win the £100,000 prize – but every time someone drifted off, money would be docked from the prize pot.
The winner of Shattered, 19-year-old police cadet Clare Southern, took home £97,000 after staying awake for 178 hours.
Are You Hot? The Search for America’s Sexiest People (2003)
Sometimes it’s the simplest things that are the cruellest – and this show is no exception.
The premise was to find America’s sexiest person – and to do this, supermodel Rachel Hunter, stylist Randolph Duke and actor Lorenzo Lamas would decide in a split second whether contestants were hot, or not.
At every decision a neon sign flashed overhead the posing participants with either “hot” or the devastating “not”.
The hotties from this round then strutted their stuff again, this time in swimsuits so they could be judged on their face, body and “overall sex appeal”.
The definitions of what makes someone hot, and overall sexy, were never defined. You either have it, or you don’t.
The criticisms were brutal with contestants being blasted by the judges for having too much jiggle, or their boobs were too low – or they had “too much teeth”.
The show only made it one season before it was canned by ABC, but was later spoofed by SNL in a cartoon version, where an animated Lorenzo judged various cartoon characters.