In 1946, the radio critic John Crosby coined a phrase for a genre he despised: "human misery programs." Shows like Goodwill Court paraded real people through their legal and domestic catastrophes decades before the rise of Judge Judy, while audiences listened in shock. The format offered, in Crosby's words, "life in the raw without poetry, without art." This raw, artless entertainment was the subject of many moral panics throughout following decades as it evolved from radio to television, and now into our political norms.

As I’m not one to partake in moral panics, I’ll avoid falling into the same trap of screeching about reality TV rotting our brains and poisoning the minds of the youth. Sometimes, this stuff can just be mindless fun. But while it may just be a good time to enjoy spoiled and talentless celebrities sling insults at one another, the moral calculus changes when one of them gets elected President. Frankly, I’m not going to lose a ton of sleep over the daily lives of reality stars. What I do lose sleep over, however, is the changing moral codes of a society which looked at the excesses of reality TV and made them the foundation of our modern political landscape.

In The Modern Thumbscrew, Crosby writes:

With the rise of audience participation radio, Crosby argued, came a decline in the care we have to offer our fellow man. Eighty years later, the programming has broadened. And so has our debasement.

When federal agents arrested Jen Shah on camera during the third season of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, the episode drew 823,000 viewers—a season high, with the strongest 18–49 year old demographic performance in show history. The production framed her arrest as high drama: the Feds "stormed the bus," her castmates reacted in real time, and audiences watched a woman's life implode as thrilling entertainment. This rise in viewership wasn’t due to audience concern for the elder victims of Shah’s wire fraud scheme; it was driven by schadenfreude.

Shah had spent two seasons being positioned as a villain. The editing, the confessionals, the narrative construction of her as volatile and dishonest—all of it trained viewers to experience her downfall as deserved. When the arrest aired, audiences weren't merely learning about alleged crimes. They were consuming her legal peril as televised "just deserts," the payoff for hours of programming that had built toward this moment. For many, her conviction and sentencing were not about justice for her victims, but were instead the conclusion of an enthralling story arc.

But the machinery doesn't always require a villain. Sometimes it just absorbs tragedy wholesale. In August 2011, Russell Armstrong—husband of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member Taylor Armstrong—died by suicide, days before the second season was set to premiere. Taylor had spent Season 1 hinting at marital troubles; she would later reveal that Russell had been physically abusive throughout their marriage. His death was real. The abuse allegations were real. The tragedy visited upon a family was real. And audiences ate it up.

What followed was remarkable in its shamelessness. Taylor's grief, her revelations about abuse, her journey as a survivor and single mother—all of it became storyline. The network framed its decision to proceed as honoring Taylor's wishes, as giving her a platform to speak about domestic violence. Perhaps it was. It was also a business calculation. The publicity around Russell's death had made the season unmissable. A real suicide had become a ratings hook, and Taylor's trauma became content that viewers consumed and discussed over wine and appetizers. The show didn't manufacture her deservingness. It simply metabolized her catastrophe into entertainment, no justification required.

The pattern repeats across franchises. When Vanderpump Rules imploded in the Scandoval affair—Tom Sandoval's infidelity with Raquel Leviss exposed in real time across social media—the audience response followed the same trajectory: a massive spike in engagement, a collective permission to gloat, and a rapid normalization of contempt. Sandoval became the most hated man in reality television, a status he leveraged into a villain tour and a spot on Special Forces and later The Traitors. The machinery of reality entertainment doesn't just tolerate humiliation; it monetizes the aftermath.

When Love Island contestants face public disgrace, when Below Deck crew members get fired on camera, when any of a dozen franchise "villains" encounter real-world consequences, the response follows the same emotional logic. The audience has been trained to see certain people as deserving of what happens to them. The worse it gets, the more satisfying the viewing experience becomes.

But it’s not all bad.

Emily Nussbaum's history of reality television, Cue the Sun!, captures something that Crosby and his fellow critics missed: these formats, for all their exploitation, also "made visible the sort of people that television had historically ignored, from the working-class single moms on Queen for a Day to Cuban American activist Pedro Zamora, a young gay man with AIDS who turned into a national star on The Real World." In spite of their flaws, Nussbaum explains, these shows had and have their redeeming qualities. They serve to destigmatize sensitive topics and reach audiences that no government outreach initiative ever could.

Queen for a Day, which ran from 1956 to 1964, invited women to compete for prizes by narrating their hardships—illness, poverty, marital abandonment—to a studio audience that selected winners by applause meter. The show was, by any reasonable standard, exploitative. Critics at the time called it vulgar programming, created by vulgar people, for vulgar people—and it was insanely popular. But it also gave women permission to speak publicly about struggles that respectable society preferred to ignore. Some real relief followed, both emotional and material.

This is the central ambivalence that haunts any serious analysis of the genre. The old silences—around poverty, illness, sexual identity, addiction—were often cruel, enforcing shame where solidarity was needed. Reality television broke some of those silences. When Pedro Zamora appeared on The Real World: San Francisco in 1994, he reached an audience that public health campaigns couldn't. When Intervention documented addiction and recovery, it humanized people who had previously been invisible or reviled as demonic street scum. The genre's willingness to show "life in the raw" creates genuine moments of recognition and compassion.

Some stigmas deserved to die, and reality programming has helped seal their coffins. The question is what inhibitions died with them, and what norms are at risk today.

There's a distinction worth preserving between stigmas that deserve to fall and taboos that deserve to hold. The taboo against discussing poverty in public was cruel. The taboo against reveling in someone's poverty—against treating their hardship as entertainment—served a different function. It maintained a floor of human dignity that made solidarity possible.

Human misery programs erode that floor. They train viewers to toggle quickly between horror, curiosity, and amusement—to feel morally superior to the people on screen, to enjoy watching them get "pulled down." The confession that once created empathy becomes, through repetition and commercial incentive, a spectacle that licenses contempt. The programming broadens; the debasement deepens.

LiveLeak, which operated from 2006 to 2021, represented the next iteration: not sanitized studio suffering but raw footage of accidents, war, and street violence, served up as shock content. The site became notorious for hosting videos of real deaths—car crashes, combat footage, executions—framed as "must-see" clips. Its successors continue the tradition across platforms that nominally prohibit such content but struggle to enforce their rules. Many my age—myself included—saw men torn to pieces in industrial accidents or riddled with holes in some far off desert before we even graduated middle school. This reality has not gone away; it has only expanded with the increase in phone and social media usage among children.

Media ethicists have described the YouTube-style compilations of crashes, wipeouts, and fights as inviting viewers "to take pleasure from someone's misfortune"—schadenfreude industrialized and algorithmic. The recommendation engines that serve this content don't distinguish between curiosity and cruelty. They optimize for engagement, and engagement spikes when the footage is shocking. The psychological effect of habituated exposure to real violence in short video windows is not mysterious. It dulls moral discomfort. It trains the eye to scan for impact without registering the human cost.

And then the footage becomes political.

Watch the discourse around Charlie Kirk's assassination and Renee Good's killing by a rogue ICE agent, and you see the same emotional machinery at work. Kirk was shot by a political opponent; Good was shot by a federal agent who'd positioned himself in front of her slowly moving car. One death was condemned across the spectrum; the other was defended by the administration that employed her killer. The circumstances could hardly be more different, but the audience response was identical: parse the footage, search for narrative cues, determine whether the victim "had it coming," and license yourself to mourn or gloat accordingly.

In Kirk's case, the search for deservingness took a familiar form: Was he a provocateur who'd spent years dehumanizing his opponents? Did that make his death a tragedy or a comeuppance? Online, a minority celebrated; a government-backed campaign to punish insufficient mourning followed. The footage of his death became content—parsed, memed, used as inspiration for an AI slop tribute song—while the administration used the killing to crack down on "political extremism." Tragedy metabolized into spectacle, then into political weapon.

In Good's case, the calculus inverted. Did she deserve to die for not perfectly complying with agents under pressure? Did she deserve sympathy as a victim of excessive force? Partisans parsed the same footage and reached opposite conclusions, each side certain the video proved their case. The same pseudo-juridical calculus that determines whether we're permitted to enjoy a Housewives villain's arrest was being applied to a woman being shot three times in the head seconds after telling her killer she wasn’t mad at him.

Our brains, trained by a media diet of setup and schadenfreude, process political assassination and government sanctioned murder through the same moral calculus they bring to reality television. The instinct to search for deservingness—to determine whether the victim earned their fate—is the instinct that decades of human misery programming have cultivated and rewarded. The discourse around actual death now operates on the same emotional infrastructure as the discourse around whether Jen Shah deserved her arrest.

As audience participation shows and reality TV continued to rise, so did their opposition.

The Federal Radio Commission, in the era of Crosby's complaint, held content-based licensing power and occasionally wielded it. In the case Trinity Methodist Church South v. FRC, the D.C. Court of Appeals warned that unregulated broadcasting would make the nation "a theater for the display of individual passions." The Mayflower doctrine (and the Fairness Doctrine that followed) attempted to limit one-sided controversial speech. Critics screamed and howled, as one contemporary article put it, yet audience participation shows "go on and on and on." The attempts to regulate or morally discredit the genre never erased audience demand.

The parallel to contemporary debates over content moderation, platform liability, and political incitement is almost too neat—and equally futile. Section 230 shields platforms from liability for user-generated content. The First Amendment constrains government regulation of speech. Private content moderation policies are inconsistently enforced and easily circumvented. Despite periodic panics and reforms, the structural incentives to monetize spectacle persist. The platforms that host real violence are, in the aggregate, too profitable to regulate out of existence. The political actors who benefit from transforming tragedy into tribal marker have no incentive to dial back the temperature. And those who seek to address the negative impacts of these programs often seek a regulatory solution rather than a cultural one.

To be clear, I am not calling for an end to any of the wonderful rules that protect our rights to free speech, assembly, and petition for redress of grievances. Rather, I am outlining just how futile attempts at regulating away our new reality really are. Without a cultural change, regulation is useless.

And here's the deeper problem: schadenfreude is not an aberration. It's a feature of normal human cognition, located at the intersection of social comparison, envy, and self-esteem. Psychological research has consistently found that people with low self-esteem or threatened self-evaluations report stronger enjoyment of others' misfortune. Watching someone else fail—especially someone perceived as arrogant, successful, or morally compromised—offers a way to soothe one's own insecurities. The pleasure is real, even when we know it's ugly.

Human misery programs—whether broadcast, streamed, or posted—offer an efficient way to access this pleasure. The formatting does the moral work for you. By the time Jen Shah gets arrested on camera, the show has already established that she's a villain who deserves what's coming. By the time a political figure's death circulates as content, the partisan framing has already established whether mourning or gloating is appropriate. The viewer doesn't have to do the psychological labor of justifying their reaction. The content has pre-justified it.

Reality formats and outrage-driven politics both exploit this dynamic. They offer viewers the satisfaction of watching someone "pulled down" without the guilt that might otherwise accompany such pleasure. The victim deserved it. The footage proves it. The audience is vindicated.

Our suffering is tragedy. Our neighbors’ suffering is a bummer. The suffering of strangers is entertainment. The only reason that our media ecosystem rewards this content is because we reward it.

We have, over eighty years, broken down many stigmas that deserved to fall. The silences around poverty, illness, addiction, and identity were often cruel, and breaking them was a genuine good. But in the process, we've also eroded a different set of inhibitions: the taboos against open contempt, against treating human ruin as spectacle, against the pleasure we take in watching people we've decided deserve it.

The programming has broadened—from radio sob stories to reality TV arrests to political assassinations and jackbooted tyranny circulating as memes. And our debasement has kept pace. The same neural pathways that fire when we watch a Housewives villain get arrested fire when we watch footage of political violence. The same moral calculus that determines whether we're permitted to enjoy a reality star's downfall determines whether we're permitted to enjoy—or at least not mourn—a political figure's death.

Without a cultural reckoning with schadenfreude—without rebuilding some of those taboos against open contempt and glee at others' pain—regulatory fixes will fail. The machinery—our machinery—will keep turning real lives into fuel. The footage will keep circulating. We, trained by decades of practice, will keep watching.