Australian reality TV is screen culture whether the industry likes it or not

I need to say something that will annoy a specific group of people, and I am going to say it anyway: Married at First Sight is Australian screen culture. The Block is Australian screen culture. MasterChef Australia is Australian screen culture. Survivor Australia is Australian screen culture. And the Australian screen industry’s refusal to engage with this fact is not a principled stand about quality. It is a failure of observation.

Let me put the numbers on the table. In 2024, the final commitment ceremony of MAFS drew 2.1 million metropolitan viewers, with consolidated national figures above three million. The most-watched episode of the AACTA-winning drama that year drew approximately 340,000. That is not a gap. That is a different country. The people watching MAFS and the people watching the prestige drama are living in different media landscapes, consuming different screen cultures, and the industry bodies, the funding agencies, and the critical establishment have decided that only one of those landscapes counts.

The industry’s blind spot

Screen Australia’s annual drama reports track hours of drama produced, budgets spent, and audiences reached. Reality television is excluded from these reports. The AACTA Awards have no reality categories. The Screen Producers Australia conference panels about “the state of Australian content” are, almost without exception, about scripted content. The assumption, sometimes stated and usually implied, is that reality television is a commercial product, not a cultural one, and therefore falls outside the scope of institutions whose job is to support Australian screen culture.

This assumption is wrong on its own terms. Culture is not defined by quality. Culture is defined by participation. When three million Australians watch the same television event on the same night and then spend the following morning discussing it at work, in group chats, and across social media, that is a cultural event. The fact that the content is unscripted, or semi-scripted, or produced to a formula that prioritises emotional confrontation over narrative sophistication does not make it less cultural. It makes it a different kind of culture, and the refusal to examine it is a choice that reveals more about the examiner than the examined.

The crews are the same people

Here is something the industry knows and does not talk about enough: the crews who work on MAFS and The Block are the same crews who work on Total Control and The Newsreader. The camera operators, the sound recordists, the editors, the post-production houses. Australian screen production is a small industry, and the freelance workforce moves between reality and scripted with the regularity of a tide. A gaffer who lights a prestige drama in March is lighting a reality competition in July. The industry treats these as separate worlds. The workers know they are the same world, because they are the same workers.

This matters for policy. When Screen Australia and the federal government discuss workforce development, training pathways, and the health of the production sector, they are talking about an ecosystem that is sustained, in large part, by reality television production budgets. The scripted sector alone does not employ enough people year-round to maintain the workforce at its current size. Reality production fills the gaps. It keeps crews employed between dramas. It keeps post-production houses solvent. It keeps the infrastructure running. To exclude it from the conversation about Australian screen culture is to misunderstand the economics of the culture you are trying to protect.

You can think it is bad and still take it seriously

I want to be clear about my own position, because I suspect it will be misread. I am not arguing that MAFS is good television. I am not arguing that The Block represents the pinnacle of Australian storytelling. I am not making a populist case that audience size equals quality. I have spent years writing about Australian drama, documentary, and film with the conviction that quality matters and that critical attention is worth spending on work that rewards it.

What I am arguing is simpler and, apparently, more controversial: you cannot claim to care about Australian screen culture while ignoring the screen culture that the majority of Australians actually consume. You can critique it. You can analyse its formulas. You can examine why certain reality formats succeed in Australia when they fail elsewhere, or why Australian audiences have a particular appetite for renovation shows, cooking competitions, and structured social experiments. These are interesting questions. They tell you something about the country. And nobody in the critical or institutional establishment is asking them, because the questions require engaging with content that has been pre-classified as unworthy of engagement.

What would engagement look like

If the AACTA Awards introduced reality categories, it would not diminish the drama categories. It would acknowledge an industry reality. If Screen Australia included reality production data in its annual reports, it would not redirect funding away from scripted content. It would give a more accurate picture of the sector. If critics wrote about reality television with the same analytical seriousness they bring to drama, asking how the shows are constructed, what they reveal about audiences, and how the production choices shape the emotional dynamics, it would not lower the standard of criticism. It would expand the field.

None of this will happen soon, because the institutional resistance is not rational. It is aesthetic. The people who run screen industry bodies, who sit on awards committees, and who write for screen publications (I include myself in this group) have a set of assumptions about what counts as serious screen culture, and those assumptions were formed by watching drama and documentary and film, not by watching Survivor. Challenging those assumptions feels like a concession. It is not. It is an observation, and observations are supposed to be what critics do.

The numbers are the argument

I will end where I started, with the numbers. Three million people watched MAFS. Three hundred and forty thousand watched the AACTA Best Drama winner. The ratio is roughly nine to one. You can build whatever critical framework you like around Australian screen culture, but if your framework excludes the thing that nine out of ten viewers are actually watching, your framework is not describing the culture. It is describing what you wish the culture were. And wishes, however well-intentioned, are not criticism.