Anyone who has watched Catfish: The TV Show [an American TV series about online dating] will want to know if it is a little more structured than it seems or is life really crazier than anything you could make up?
It’s real. It amazes me how cynical the world has become when we just assume anything that’s a reality show is scripted and fake. We are meeting real people in real places in America, learning about them and walking a mile in their shoes.
Catfish follows people who have fallen for someone online and their journey in discovering that they’re not really the attractive person they say they are.
Occasionally there are bad guys but it’s too simplistic and reductive to paint anyone doing something bad as a bad guy. They generally have a pretty compelling justification as to why they’re doing what they’re doing.
It’s been one of MTV’s biggest hits of recent years. There seems very little M in MTV any more.
In an odd way MTV was ahead of the game in every respect. They were the first music video people, then in the 1990s they did TRL – Total Request Live – a user-generated interactive jukebox, which was doing something like the internet before the internet. They helped usher in that element of fan engagement and interactivity into youth culture which is prevalent online.