‘Watching any of it made you feel grubby' – the most notorious reality TV families ever

The Guardian

24-02-2025

Today sees the debut of The Baldwins, a reality TV show about Alec and Hilaria Baldwin and their seven children. According to TLC, the show will demonstrate 'what life is really like for the Baldwins – chaotic, funny, exhausting and filled with love. Alec and Hilaria's dynamic as a couple will also take centre stage, with moments that showcase their deep partnership as they navigate challenges hand in hand.' Which, given that it is still not long since Alec Baldwin fatally shot Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust, is quite a lot of challenges.
But however you view The Baldwins – either as a moneymaking necessity for a family in trouble, or something less edifying – they now join a long line of other reality show families that have opened themselves up for the public to gawp at. Here are 10 of the most notorious.
Such was the rush for celebrity reality shows in the early 00s that they would give anyone a series. Witness 2004's seven-episode Til Death Do Us Part, in which Baywatch star Carmen Electra prepared for her marriage to Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. And it was just that. Seating arrangements, location scouting, cake buying; nothing was too mundane for these hellcats. Spoiler alert: the couple filed for divorce less than three years after filming wrapped.
It's important to note that nobody wanted a reality show about Bobby Brown. But he was married to Whitney Houston, and by 2005 she was in such freefall that she had nobody to advise her against it. The resulting show was almost gratuitously unedifying. Watching any of it made you feel grubby. Watching the episode where Brown explains how he helps Houston relieve her constipation, you found yourself actively wishing for an intervention.
The Kardashians have reached such a point of cultural saturation that it is easy to overlook just how weird it is. It's a reality show about a bunch of identical-looking Stepford Wives – trapped inside a loop of only being famous because they've got a show – strutting around a warehouse-sized mansion saying absolutely nothing of note. The patriarch is, retrospectively very clearly, transitioning. Kanye West drifts in and out. There is no identifiable content whatsoever. It's bizarre.
In the US, the channel TLC carved out its own genre of competitive breeding, where your chances of landing a show directly correlated with the number of children you had. Jon and Kate Plus 8 was a good start, but they were soon eclipsed by the Duggar family, who inexplicably had 19 children. That was exploitative enough. The fact that the show was eventually hauled off-air after sexual molestation allegations against the oldest son were revealed just makes it worse.
For a while there, there was no reality TV show Gene Simmons wouldn't enthusiastically consent to. He was on Rock School. He was on Criss Angel Mindfreak. He was on the child trauma psychology show Shrink Rap. And yet his greatest contribution to the medium was Family Jewels, which ran for six years until 2012. A reality show that followed Simmons, his wife, Shannon Tweed, and his two children, it was standard enough reality fare, save for the episodes where Simmons had to take a lie detector test to see if he'd been sleeping around or not.
Whenever there is a change in government, it is inevitable that recently unelected ministers will find themselves scrambling for work. But none have been quite as desperate as Jacob Rees-Mogg, who signed his family up for a reality show the instant he saw the writing on the wall. Meet the Rees-Moggs was an attempt to show Jacob and his clan as a normal family, which is especially hard to do when you live in a mansion full of portraits of yourself and local people keep spray painting the phrase 'Posh Twat' around town.
Sometimes reality shows are deliberately structured to make their subjects look more exciting. In retrospect, Hogan Knows Best – a VH1 series about Hulk Hogan and his family – did the exact opposite. Onscreen they came across as a cartoonishly oversized and bright orange sitcom family, wayward but ultimately protective. Offscreen, Hogan's marriage was deteriorating due to his infidelities (his wife would soon shack up with a 19-year-old) and their son crashed his car while drunk, causing his friend to be in a vegetative state.
Arguably a family born for reality TV, the Wahlbergs are a clan of intensely high-frequency roughneck Bostonians, comprising one Hollywood actor, one member of New Kids on the Block and an array of peripheral biological and honorary Wahlbergs including Jenny McCarthy and the guy they based Drama from Entourage on. Together, of course, they decide to start a burger franchise. The whole thing is really a shameless commercial, but an entertaining one nonetheless.
Future historians will one day write books about Totally Scott-Lee, a one-off 2005 reality series about the attempts of former Steps member Lisa Scott-Lee to launch a solo career. This was a show with real stakes, since Scott-Lee – flanked by her brother and husband – made the early wrongheaded decision to announce that she would quit the business if her first single didn't go Top 10. Spoiler: it did not go Top 10. The moment she discovered this remains one of the most compelling of the entire genre.
How could it be anything but? Aside from Anna Nicole Smith's show, which was altogether more ugly and exploitative, The Osbournes is the original and best reality TV show. Essentially a live-action Simpsons, if Homer had also been a world-renowned rockstar, it was a full-tilt bananas show about a dysfunctional (but unquestionably loving) family. The show made stars of every member, and every reality show that followed owes it a great debt.