The 'Guilty Pleasure' Label Is a Scam and My Reality TV Habit Proved It

It started innocently enough. I told myself I was going to pick one show — just one — that I would watch without a single disclaimer attached to it. No "I know it's trash, but..." No preemptive apology to whoever was in the room. No self-deprecating caveat dropped into conversation before I mentioned it. I was going to own it, flat out, the way people own liking a really good sandwich.

The show I picked was a reality competition series. I'm not naming it specifically because that's not the point, and also because the moment I name it, half of you will have an opinion about it that has nothing to do with me. What matters is that it was loud, it was dramatic, it had people crying over things that objectively did not warrant crying over, and I loved every single episode.

What I did not expect was that this little experiment in shameless enjoyment would unravel about fifteen years of assumptions I didn't know I was carrying.

Where Did the Shame Even Come From

At some point — I think around middle school, maybe high school — I absorbed the idea that certain kinds of entertainment were worth defending and others were not. Prestige dramas with bleak cinematography and ambiguous endings? Legitimate. Anything that aired on a network with the word Real in the title? A character flaw.

Nobody sat me down and explained this. It just sort of osmosed in, the way a lot of cultural hierarchies do. You pick it up from the way people talk at the lunch table, the way a film critic uses the word elevated, the way someone raises an eyebrow when you mention what you watched last night. Taste, I learned early, was a social currency. And some shows were counterfeit bills.

The problem is that I never really interrogated where those categories came from or who made them up in the first place. I just accepted them and then spent years either quietly watching the "wrong" things and feeling vaguely bad about it, or loudly watching the "right" things and feeling vaguely performative about it. Neither situation was particularly fun.

The Internet Made It So Much Worse

Here's what the internet did: it gave everyone a podium and a scoreboard simultaneously. Suddenly, taste wasn't just something you navigated in your immediate social circle — it was a public declaration with a comment section attached.

I've watched people get roasted online for liking things that are, by any reasonable measure, completely harmless. A pop song. A franchise movie. A comfort sitcom that never won an Emmy and never tried to. The discourse around entertainment has gotten so aggressive that even enjoying something has to come with a defensive posture pre-loaded. You don't just say you liked something anymore. You say you liked it ironically, or you know it's not perfect but, or you frame it as a guilty pleasure so that you've already acknowledged the imaginary court's jurisdiction before anyone can file charges.

That framing — guilty pleasure — is doing a lot of work. It's essentially a preemptive plea deal. You're admitting some kind of wrongdoing in exchange for being allowed to enjoy a thing without full social consequences. Which is wild when you think about it, because what is the actual crime here? Watching television?

What Happened When I Dropped the Disclaimer

So I watched my show. All of it. I texted friends about it without apologizing first. I brought it up in conversation the same way I'd bring up anything else. And something interesting happened: nobody cared as much as I thought they would.

Some people had opinions, sure. A couple of friends had their own takes on the show, some positive, some dismissive. But the catastrophic social fallout I had been unconsciously bracing for? It didn't materialize. The invisible judges I'd been performing for apparently had better things to do.

What I noticed instead was how much mental energy I'd been spending on managing other people's imagined reactions. Every time I'd watched this show before — before the experiment — there was a low-level background hum of self-consciousness running alongside the actual experience of watching. Like I was watching it and also watching myself watching it through someone else's eyes. That's exhausting. That's also not really watching at all.

Dropping the disclaimer didn't just feel like freedom. It felt like finally sitting down after standing for a long time.

Taste as Identity vs. Taste as Experience

I think the core issue is that somewhere along the way, taste became less about what you actually enjoy and more about what your preferences say about you as a person. Entertainment choices got recruited into the project of identity construction. And once that happened, every show you watch, every song you admit to liking, every movie you defend becomes a statement about who you are and who you want people to think you are.

Which is a lot of pressure to put on a reality competition series about people crying over things that do not warrant crying over.

When I stopped treating my viewing habits as a self-portrait and started treating them as just... things I do because they're enjoyable, the whole experience shifted. I wasn't performing taste anymore. I was just watching TV.

And honestly? The show got better once I was actually present for it.

Letting Go of the Invisible Judges

I'm not saying taste is meaningless or that all entertainment is equally valuable or that critical thinking about media is a waste of time. It isn't. Thinking carefully about what you consume and why is genuinely worthwhile.

But there's a difference between thoughtful engagement and performing sophistication for an audience that exists mostly in your own head. One of those is enriching. The other is just exhausting in a way that quietly hollows out the experience of enjoying anything at all.

The guilty pleasure framing, when you pull it apart, assumes that pleasure itself requires justification. That enjoyment is something you have to earn or defend. And I'm not sure I buy that anymore.

You don't owe anyone an explanation for what you watch. Not your friends, not the comment section, not the part of your brain that spent too long reading cultural criticism and came out the other side slightly insufferable.

Watch the show. Text your friends about it without the disclaimer. Let it be good because it feels good, not because it clears some external bar you didn't set and don't have to clear.

The shame was never really yours anyway. You just picked it up somewhere and forgot to put it down.