Daniel's question this week is basically: reality TV is already a strange genre, but which formats actually crossed into absurd territory? He wants the weirdest ones from different countries, and he wants to know what makes them structurally different from normal reality television. And then the bigger question, why do these get made at all? What does the existence of a show like this tell us about what the industry is actually selling?
And I think the answer to that last question is not what most people assume. The industry isn't selling entertainment. It hasn't been for decades.
It's selling the spectacle of real humans under artificial pressure. And the absurd formats are just the ones that stopped pretending otherwise.
Right. Standard reality TV still wears the costume. It says, here's a competition, here's a journey, here's personal growth. The absurd formats strip that away and leave you with the raw transaction: we put a person in a box, you watch what happens.
So let's trace that spectrum. On one end you've got manufactured conflict and curated authenticity. The Bachelor, Survivor, those shows construct situations and then edit them into narratives. On the other end, you've got something like Nasubi, where the construction is the entire show and the participant doesn't even know he's in one.
Nasubi is the right place to start, because it's the purest version of the hidden extreme. Nineteen ninety-eight, Japanese television, a show called Denpa Shōnen. They take a young comedian named Tomoaki Hamatsu, tell him he's auditioning for a game show, and then they strip him naked and leave him in a small apartment.
And the game is... sweepstakes.
The game is sweepstakes. He has to survive on whatever he can win from postcard contests. No food provided, no clothes, no contact with the outside world. He fills out postcards, mails them in, and waits to see if he wins rice or a bicycle or whatever the prize happens to be.
For fifteen months.
Fifteen months. And here's the structural inversion that makes this different from anything else. He doesn't know the show is airing. He thinks he's alone in a room, waiting to see if he's won some unspecified game. Japan is watching him weekly. The footage is edited into a comedy segment, with his reactions as the punchline. He's the only person in the entire arrangement who doesn't know what the arrangement is.
So consent is the thing that breaks. In a normal reality show, you sign up for cameras. You might not know exactly what's coming, but you know you're being filmed and broadcast. Nasubi didn't even have that. The ethical calculus isn't just about harm, it's about knowledge. He couldn't consent to something he didn't know existed.
And the mechanics get even stranger. The producers told him he needed to win a million yen in prizes to be released. So he grinds away at these postcards, living on whatever he wins, and eventually he hits the target. At which point they move him to a new apartment and tell him he has to win another million.
That's the part where I don't know whether to laugh or just sit quietly. The goal was a lie. The finish line moved. And he still didn't know anyone was watching.
He's said publicly that he was scarred by it. The show was enormously popular. It ran for years. And the format has never been replicated, at least not in that exact form, because the legal and ethical exposure is so obvious in retrospect. But at the time, it was just... variety television.
There's a detail I keep coming back to with Nasubi. He won a television at one point. One of the sweepstakes prizes was a television set. So now he's in this room, naked, filling out postcards, and he has a television. But he can't watch broadcast TV because that would break the isolation. So the producers had to modify it. They removed the receiver or something.
I remember this. They disabled the tuner so it could only play videotapes. And then they gave him... what was it?
I think it was just whatever tapes they provided. Maybe nature documentaries or something. The image of him sitting there watching a nature documentary, still not knowing he's being broadcast to millions of people, is one of those details that sounds like it was written by a satirist.
But it wasn't. It was just the logic of the format playing out. The show required complete isolation, but the sweepstakes could deliver anything. So the producers had to adapt in real time. Every prize he won created a new production problem. How do you give a man a television without letting him see television?
That's the absurdity in its purest form. The format generated problems that only existed because the format existed. And solving those problems became part of the show's appeal. The audience wasn't just watching him suffer. They were watching the producers navigate the increasingly strange logistics of keeping him in the dark.
Which is another layer of the spectacle. The production itself becomes visible in the cracks. You can see the machinery straining to maintain the illusion. And that strain is part of what made it compelling.
Right. And that's a different viewing experience from a standard reality show. Normally you're watching contestants navigate the game. With Nasubi, you're watching two parallel struggles. His struggle to survive on sweepstakes winnings, and the producers' struggle to keep the format intact. The second one is almost more interesting, because it's the one nobody on screen is aware of.
It's the only reality show where the production team is the protagonist and they don't know it. They're not on camera, but they're the ones making decisions that determine everything. And the audience is watching those decisions play out in real time, through the effect they have on him.
There's a version of this where the show is just about a man filling out postcards. It would be unwatchable. The thing that made it compelling was the invisible architecture around him. The audience understood the architecture even though he didn't. That gap in knowledge was the actual content.
So if that's the hidden extreme, what happens when the format stops hiding?
Then you get Fishtank. Live-streamed, cameras everywhere, contestants in a house under constant surveillance. But the key difference is that the audience isn't just watching. They have direct control. Viewers can vote to trigger events. They can make things happen to the people inside. The creator has described it as an experiment in total surveillance with god-like audience power.
And everyone knows exactly what they're signing up for.
Fishtank is explicit about its premise in a way Denpa Shōnen never was. The participants know they're being watched. They know the audience can vote. They've consented to the structure. Which doesn't make it comfortable to watch, but it does change the ethical calculus. You can't say the consent was manufactured or hidden.
But the core mechanic is the same. Isolate people from normal social reality, remove their ordinary reference points, and see what breaks. One version hides the camera, the other version gives the camera a remote control.
And both versions are built on the same bet about audiences. That people will watch humans pushed past reasonable limits. Not because they want to see them succeed, but because they want to see what happens when they can't.
There's a show that sits between those two poles. Solitary. American, two thousand six to two thousand ten. Contestants in isolation pods, up to forty days, and the only thing they can talk to is a computer voice called VAL.
VAL. The computer that tells you when to sleep, when to eat, when to do the challenges. And the challenges themselves are psychological. Sleep deprivation, sensory manipulation, tasks designed to break down your sense of time and self. The isolation pod is the format. There's no social game, no alliance, no jury. Just you and a voice.
And it was cancelled after four seasons. Which is interesting, because by reality TV standards that's a long run. But the format itself anticipated the isolation-heavy streaming era by a decade.
The international pattern is what Daniel's really pointing at. These aren't American aberrations. Japan produced Nasubi. Denmark created the original Big Brother, from a public broadcaster no less. The UK ran Big Brother for eighteen years and generated enough welfare scandals to keep regulators busy for a decade. The US pushed toward formats that blur documentary and exploitation. And streaming platforms have now inherited the experimental impulse without the broadcast regulatory framework.
So why do these keep getting made? Because the industry logic is actually pretty simple. These formats are cheap. One room, one participant, minimal crew. Nasubi's entire show was a man in an apartment filling out postcards. Solitary was a pod with a computer. Fishtank is a house with cameras and a voting system. The production cost is a fraction of a scripted drama.
And the social media yield is outsized. A format that generates moral outrage or rubbernecking curiosity is reliably shareable. Nasubi's story circulates as a can you believe this happened artifact decades later. That's free marketing. The network doesn't have to promote the show. The audience does it for them, by being horrified in public.
There's also the attention economy argument. Viewers have infinite options. A show that makes you feel something, even if that something is discomfort, cuts through. Scripted television can fake drama. It can't fake real human deterioration. You can't act your way through forty days of isolation. The camera captures something that no writer can produce.
And the duty of care shift is real but uneven. Post-Nasubi, post-Big Brother UK's scandals, post-Love Island's participant deaths, the broadcast industry moved toward stricter welfare protocols. Psychological screening, aftercare, limits on isolation and sleep deprivation. The UK regulator actually has enforceable standards now.
But Fishtank exists on a streaming platform. And streaming operates in a regulatory gray zone. The broadcast rules don't necessarily apply. The welfare protocols are voluntary, if they exist at all. So the pendulum hasn't swung as far as regulators might hope. It's just moved the experiment to a different jurisdiction.
What these formats reveal, when you look at them together, is that reality TV's core product was never entertainment. It's the spectacle of real humans under artificial pressure. The absurd formats just remove the middleman. They don't pretend the pressure serves any purpose beyond watching. There's no journey, no prize that matters, no personal growth narrative. Just a person in a room, breaking, on camera.
The geography angle is interesting too. Japan's Nasubi came out of a variety-show tradition with different privacy norms. The Danish Big Brother came from a public broadcaster with fewer commercial constraints, which sounds paradoxical until you realize they were experimenting with what public television could do. The US and UK pushed toward competitive formats that blurred documentary and exploitation. Each country's absurd format is a reflection of what its television culture was already doing.
And the misconception I keep running into is that these are a recent phenomenon. That streaming invented the extreme format. But Nasubi was nineteen ninety-eight. Solitary was two thousand six. The pattern has existed as long as the genre itself. Streaming didn't invent it. Streaming inherited it and removed the guardrails.
There's also the misconception that these formats are purely exploitative with no participant agency. And the reality is messier. Nasubi has expressed complex feelings about his experience. He's said he was scarred, but he's also continued to work in entertainment. Some people actively seek out extreme formats. The agency question isn't binary.
The third misconception is that regulation has solved the worst excesses. Broadcast television has stricter protocols now. But the streaming platforms hosting shows like Fishtank are operating in a space where the old rules don't reach. The regulatory framework was built for a broadcast era and the experimental formats have simply moved to a different distribution model.
So we've got the hidden extreme, the explicit modern version, and the isolation chamber in between. What connects them is a shared bet on audience appetite. And the question is whether that bet is still paying off.
I want to push on the producer intent question for a second. Because I don't think it's purely cynical. The people who made Denpa Shōnen weren't just exploiting a comedian. They were curious about what would happen. That curiosity drove the format. The audience shared it. The exploitation was real, but it wasn't the whole story.
Which is almost worse, in a way. A purely cynical producer would be easier to dismiss. Someone who's fascinated by human limits and doesn't notice when fascination becomes harm... That's a harder thing to regulate.
The audience is complicit in a way the moral panic narrative doesn't capture. Nobody forced Japan to watch Nasubi. The ratings were extraordinary. The show ran for years. The audience wasn't duped. They knew exactly what they were watching and they kept watching.
The complicity is the uncomfortable part. We want to believe these shows are aberrations, that someone somewhere made a bad decision and the rest of us were horrified. But the evidence suggests otherwise. The formats kept getting made because they kept getting watched.
Hilbert: I was in a room once where a broadcaster killed a show with one sentence. This would have been around two thousand twelve. I was doing compliance documentation for a production company pitching a format called The Waiting Room. The premise was that contestants sat in a doctor's waiting room for seventy-two hours and nothing ever happened. No challenges, no twists, no reveal. Just three days of sitting.
Wait. That was the entire show?
Hilbert: That was the entire show. The pitch deck had a section on the psychological toll of boredom. I had to write the duty-of-care documentation for a format where the primary risk was that contestants would be bored for three days. There's a section in there about the mental health effects of unstructured waiting. I remember typing it and thinking, this is what the job is now.
The broadcaster said what?
Hilbert: The broadcaster's response was, then what's the show? We had a clause allowing contestants to leave at any time. Standard welfare provision. The broadcaster read it and said, if they can leave whenever they want, then what's the show? And I remember thinking, that's the entire reality TV industry in one sentence. The show is the fact that they don't leave. The show is the staying.
The show is the staying. That's the structural insight. Every format we've discussed is built on that. Nasubi staying in the room. Contestants staying in the pods. The Fishtank participants staying in the house. The entertainment isn't what happens. It's that they don't walk out.
Hilbert: My company's lawyers circulated the Nasubi story as a case study of what not to do. I remember the memo. It had a section on informed consent and a section on psychological harm. But I also remember the producers in the room reading the ratings numbers. They weren't defending the format. They were just... noting. Quietly. That the ratings were extraordinary.
The industry's relationship to these shows is more complicated than simple exploitation. There's genuine curiosity about human limits driving some of it. And the audience is in the room with the producers, noting the ratings.
Hilbert: The Waiting Room never got picked up. I still have the duty-of-care document in a box somewhere. Thirty pages on the risks of sitting in a chair. I don't know why I kept it.
Because it's the purest version of the format. No game, no prize, no narrative. Just the staying. The fact that it never got made is almost beside the point. The pitch existed. Someone thought audiences would watch it.
Someone at the broadcaster understood that the only thing that makes it a show is the constraint. If you can leave, there's no show. The show is the not leaving.
Hilbert: I think the industry's relationship to these formats is more complicated than the moral panic narrative allows. The producers weren't monsters. They were curious. The audience wasn't duped. They were curious too. And the curiosity produced real harm, real trauma, real people who are still dealing with what happened to them. Both things are true.
The curiosity and the harm. That's the tension the industry has never resolved. The welfare protocols exist because the harm is real. The formats keep getting made because the curiosity is real too.
The open question is where this goes next. Streaming platforms are facing increasing regulatory scrutiny. Audiences are more aware of participant welfare issues than they were in nineteen ninety-eight. Will we see more Fishtank-style formats, or a retreat toward safer ground?
I think the answer is both. The broadcasters will retreat, because the regulatory pressure and the insurance costs make extreme formats less viable. But the streaming platforms will keep experimenting, because they have the distribution and they don't have the same oversight. The format will just move further into the gray zone.
There's a version of the future where the extreme format becomes fully automated. No producers, no crew, just participants and a system. The VAL computer from Solitary was already pointing in that direction. A voice that isn't a person, giving instructions that aren't quite commands. You could run an entire isolation format with no human production staff at all.
That's a disturbing thought. Because the human producer, for all their flaws, is at least capable of noticing when something has gone too far. A system that's been programmed to keep the participant in the room doesn't have that capacity. It just executes the format.
The legal framework is completely unprepared for that. If a participant is harmed in a format with no human decision-makers, who's responsible? The platform? The algorithm? The person who wrote the original rules?
The question answers itself in practice. The platform is responsible. But the platform will argue that the participant consented, that the system was operating as designed, that no individual made a harmful decision. The diffusion of responsibility becomes a feature.
Which brings us back to The Waiting Room. The broadcaster asked what the show was. The answer was the staying. And in a fully automated format, the staying becomes the only thing there is. No producer to notice, no audience member to look away, just the system and the participant and the constraint.
I wonder if Nasubi, sitting in that apartment in nineteen ninety-eight, was already in that future. The producers were there, but they were invisible to him. As far as he knew, he was alone with the rules. The human element was already hidden behind the format.
The absurdity of these formats isn't an aberration. It's the logical endpoint of an industry that discovered real human suffering is the one thing scripted TV can't fake. The question is whether that discovery was a one-time gold rush or a permanent feature.
If I had to name the misconception people hold about this topic, it's that these shows are failures of oversight. That someone wasn't paying attention. The truth is the opposite. The industry was paying very close attention. It knew exactly what it was doing. The shows weren't accidents. They were experiments that worked.
The experiment worked and the participant paid for it. That's the part the ratings never captured.
That's the part the formats were built to ignore.
One thing I keep thinking about. The duty of care documents Hilbert wrote for The Waiting Room. Thirty pages on the risks of sitting in a chair. Somewhere in there is the entire history of reality television, written as a risk assessment.
The genre's whole arc, from manufactured conflict to total surveillance, reduced to a compliance memo. There's something almost fitting about that.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing. This has been My Weird Prompts.
Find us at my weird prompts dot com, or email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
