The Cult of the Girlboss: How Reality Television Mavens Crush Their Contestants
'The Big Shot with Bethenny' is the latest in a long line of reality competition shows that cruelly cut down their participants under the guise of entrepreneurial empowerment
While watching the second episode of The Big Shot with Bethenny, HBO Max’s new reality competition show helmed by Real Housewives of New York alum and the woman behind an empire of Skinnygirl products, Bethenny Frankel, something strange caught my attention. Riding in the car on the way to a shapewear photo shoot — one of the challenges that five contestants are competing in for a chance to become Frankel’s Vice President of Operations — Bethenny gets on the phone with her friend and fellow former Real Housewife Dorinda Medley to describe the events that happened in an introductory cocktail party in the previous episode. “I fired four off the bat,” she tells Medley. “They were doing shots and got wasted, et cetera.” Over the phone, Dorinda is shocked. “What person drinks the first day of their job?” she asks. “This is like, a work environment!” There’s just one problem: that did. not. happen.
“Why would she say that if it literally did not happen like that?” I wondered to myself, silently. I had to go back and look at the episode again, thinking that maybe I had missed something. Surely, she wouldn’t say that if it weren’t true. But no, I was right. The first episode’s challenge is to see how the contestants perform at a cocktail mixer while Bethenny secretly collects intel before eventually greeting the group and sending them off to do a sample video for social media. Skinnygirl cocktail products and wine are present at the party, but at no point does anyone take shots and get belligerently drunk — in fact, everyone is able to perform the social media challenge with deft capability. So why would Bethenny Frankel be sitting in her car, on the way to see the remaining contestants, essentially retconning the first episode of her show? Well, she, like many feared personalities, thrives in confusion and chaos, and brings those elements wherever she goes — that is what makes her so perfect for reality TV. It’s also what makes her a real-life tyrannical boss.
The Big Shot with Bethenny is just the latest in a line of women-led reality competition shows that exist under the guise of empowerment but are really sustained by creating a sense of lawlessness for their contestants. Perhaps the first, and definitely one of the most famous of this genre, was America’s Next Top Model, the long-running reality show created, executive produced, and hosted by supermodel Tyra Banks. ANTM and Tyra regularly go viral on Twitter for the horrendous things that Banks said and did to contestants during their tenure on the show. Almost every season, or “cycle,” included some kind of fat-shaming, queerphobia, racism, offensive microaggressions, and/or outright cruelty towards contestants regarding their looks, height, behavior, socioeconomic background, you name it.
One moment that always particularly stands out to me is from Cycle 3 when the models were asked to pick a hat from a collection sitting before them that most represented themselves. Yaya DaCosta, having already been vocal about her pride in her African heritage throughout earlier episodes, chose a cowboy hat as opposed to a hat made of Kente cloth, put out by the producers to bait her. When asking her about her choice, the judging panel hurled racist micro and macroaggressions at her with careless flippancy. “Yaya, you’re, I feel, half African-half cowgirl, looks like you’re about to ride a giraffe,” said panelist Nolé Marin. Another judge accused her of being overbearing by “trying to prove [her] African-ness.” DaCosta responded, audibly trying to hold back tears but maintaining her conviction, “I did not choose that hat for the very specific reason that it’s very cliche. The fabric that it’s made from is very artificial, very cheap, very fake Kente.” Banks interrupts her, telling her, “there’s a different way of explaining yourself than being defensive. And you’re being defensive…and it’s not attractive.”
This kind of cruelty and haranguing was so commonplace in America’s Next Top Model that viewers eventually became relatively desensitized to it. Tyra Banks and her fellow judges weren’t trying to create successful models, they were trying to make entertaining television, often at the cost of the young, impressionable women who were auditioning in hopes that they’d be whisked off to fame and fortune, their ticket out of families and surroundings that, in many cases, were unhealthy and toxic. Yaya DaCosta, undeterred by the judges, has gone on to have an extremely successful career after Top Model. Others haven’t been so lucky. After coming in third on Cycle 8, Renee Alway was arrested in 2013 and charged with counts of burglary, fraud, theft, and drug possession. Speaking to ABC News in 2015, Alway said, “I felt like a failure because I couldn't get past the reality TV stigma that had been put on me…it's almost like a setup for failure.” Each season of America’s Next Top Model spent its entirety molding young women to fit an industry-standard that Tyra Banks made up — one that would consistently shift in its criteria from season to season — until contestants were booted back to real reality with no support system after spending weeks being degraded under the all-powerful thumb of the show’s host and judges.
Reality television was a much different beast when Tyra Banks first created America’s Next Top Model, but the genre of Girlboss Choosing Their Protege reality show has only mutated, not died. The Big Shot with Bethenny stole the ball from MTV’s short-lived Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club, which aired in early 2019. Both shows are eerily similar, as consistently baffling as they are undeniably entertaining. They exist by keeping contestants under conditions of complete pandemonium. “There are no rules,” says Frankel in the trailer for her show. She means for her, but really it applies to the entire production.
Both Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club and The Big Shot with Bethenny ship in a cast of contestants who are all competing for the chance to become a valued member of an expanding team run by an enigmatic, terrifying boss armed with an overcomplicated brand whose vision for the show and the actual position at stake are constantly shifting. Lohan and Frankel both lure their cronies in under the promise of a life-changing opportunity and then become furious whenever contestants express the desire to get a leg up in the world by going after that said opportunity; they are both entirely confused about what the messaging for their brand is; they are both cruel bosses who set zero boundaries themselves and then expect their contestants to understand the limits of those nonexistent lines. And if not? Pack your bags.
Speaking to Live Science about cult leaders, professor emerita Janja Lalich, a cult researcher who teaches sociology at California State University, Chico, told reporter Megan Gannon, “Charismatic leaders tend to be intuitive. They're able to read people. They thrive on chaos. They’ll create crisis situations. When they walk in the room, you never know if they’re going to be good and kind-hearted or be mean and call someone out or create some kind of dangerous situation.”
To say that fits the bill of Lohan and Frankel is a certain understatement. In The Big Shot…, Bethenny will exit a car without sunglasses, walk five feet from the car to her destination, and put on sunglasses before reaching the contestants just to establish a layer of ocular dominance before throwing an unexpected wrench in a challenge. In the show’s second episode, that wrench comes in the form of inserting herself into the Skinnygirl shapewear photo shoot. Each contestant is tasked with coordinating a photo shoot with two models featuring pieces from Frankel’s line of shapewear. When Bethenny herself shows up, she immediately demands they figure out a way to incorporate her into each of the timed photo sessions after they had already spent hours planning and staging a concept for two models. Rules are vague, if existent at all. “I don’t have time and I would use me wisely, that’s the bottom line,” she says before strolling off to a couch she later calls the “passive-aggressive couch” when each person up for the illustrious position at an outdated brand can’t possibly read her mind in an already high-stress situation. The entire shoot goes off the rails when one entrepreneur, DJ Nicole Rosé (her Christian name), is denied Bethenny’s presence in her shoot by the mogul herself, citing reasoning that’s murky at best. It’s a challenge that Frankel says is designed to test time management, but it’s really designed to keep each person vying for the position running around a studio frantically trying to finish a photo shoot while Frankel sits on the couch, legs tucked beneath her, gossiping with her bitchy gay makeup artist about which candidate is performing the worst.
If you think you can pull some sort of sense from that, I implore you to try Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club. On the sun-drenched beaches of Mykonos, Lindsay Lohan and her business partner Panos are running an open-air club that bears the actress’ name. To help her run it, she needs a host of VIP ambassadors to make sure that the experience for high-paying patrons runs smoothly at all times. There can be no drunken antics, no flirting with the attendants, and no funny business — this is, after all, the brand of a woman who made a career on staying out of trouble. Each episode, a “VIP” that you’ve never heard of before is coming to the beach club, and the ambassadors must make sure that they don’t besmirch the Lohan name. Of course, chaos ensues. But not just because Lohan and producers ply the ambassadors with alcohol while the unrelenting Grecian sun beats down on them in the dead of summer, but because Lohan and Panos genuinely do not know what business they’re running. Everyone is expendable, and if someone so much as looks at Lohan the wrong way, they could be fired. And then rehired. And then fired again when tasked with procuring gelato and sushi from a beach club that serves neither gelato nor sushi. As one contestant succinctly puts it, “Welcome to Mykonos, where nothing makes sense and we’re all confused all the time.”
Both Lohan and Frankel loom over their contestants like a threatening, entrepreneurial pall. And frankly, it’s great television. It’s nothing short of enthralling to watch Bethenny Frankel scramble when the audio for a live appearance on HSN goes out, looking at her job applicants as if they’re somehow supposed to be in charge of fixing it when they’re already preparing to go live with her after the challenge being sprung on them five minutes before. Seeing Lindsay Lohan stalk around her own beach club with a loaded champagne gun, threatening to blast her VIP ambassadors with bubbly while shouting, “I feel like Putin!” is both dark and deliriously watchable. The rules are always changing, it’s a different show every episode. But it’s still at the expense of its participants.
Cult recovery therapist Rachel Bernstein treats former cult members and has a wide breadth of experience dealing with the trauma inflicted on members by their cult leaders. Speaking to Insider, she says that, “Most cult leaders are malignant narcissists. They don't care about the damage they're causing. They don't care about the lies they're telling, and they don't care about the families they're destroying. They just need to need it, and they need to be loved, they need to be adored, they need to be feared.”
I want to be clear: I don’t think Bethenny Frankel, Lindsay Lohan, and Tyra Banks are real cult leaders, intentionally inflicting psychological damage on the participants of their reality shows — although, Banks’ intentions are certainly questionable. Each person who signs up for these programs has an idea of what they’re getting themselves into, and I don’t want to downplay how much a good portion of them probably know that they’re essentially paid pawns in the game of making good television. I do, however, think these women share many of the same manipulative characteristics that experts ascribe to cult leaders. And even though it’s just television, their behavior can often traverse into true cruelty and calculated confusion — like when Frankel said that four people at the introductory party got wasted when no one was visibly drunk or out of control. At what point is a line crossed? One would think that some light gaslighting might be getting close, especially when it involves calling someone’s professionalism into question when they’re not present to set the record straight about what happened.
In the third episode of The Big Shot…, Nicole Rose tries to tell Bethenny how committed she is to the job and the brand. “I dropped everything to be here.” Bethenny chastises her for saying it, despite constantly demanding loyalty at all moments. By the next episode, it becomes clear that she simply didn’t like the verbiage. When another contestant, Milokssy Resto, tells her that she left her children at home to come fight for this new opportunity, Bethenny explains in a confessional: “I’m starting to realize that these people are really making huge sacrifices to be here.” Four episodes and several verbal dressing downs later, Bethenny is only beginning to realize that she holds an influence over the people who upended their lives to compete for a role at her company.
Good, fun reality television shouldn’t come at the expense of its participant’s emotions, careers, and sanity. Look at another HBO Max offering, Stylish with Jenna Lyons. As she sets out to take on a new stage of her career after leaving her position at the top of J.Crew, Jenna Lyons brings in designers and personalities to work on specialized projects with her and her team. Compared to The Big Shot with Bethenny, it’s a deep breath of the freshest air imaginable, an immediate release of what feels like years of built-up tension. Lyons and her team are kind, sweet, and inquisitive towards the show’s participants, offering constructive feedback and criticism when necessary without overstepping and offending. In the second episode, Lyons gifts a set of clothing from her own closet to a designer whose luggage was lost on the flight in for the interview. Bethenny, however, won’t even hold a cocktail party at her own Hamptons home, making sure to tell her lackies that she has gathered them at one of her many rental properties and she’s selling it soon. Stylish with Jenna Lyons is light and fun, and frankly, just as watchable as the constant chaos of any of the other reality competition shows mentioned — if not more! And its participants are better for it; not only are they coming away without traumatic verbal lashings to unpack with therapists, they’re more prepared to continue the pursuit of their dreams after learning under Lyons’ tutelage. Kindness is an immeasurable tool in both business and television alike. It may not be as instantly effective as unbridled cruelty, but it’ll take you farther in the long run.
The world will always be more willing to binge a reality show filled to the brim with drama, it’s how the genre made itself famous. Competition shows are just that: competitions. Some may argue that contestants are getting exactly what they sign on the dotted line for, but I think it’s worthy — and more compelling — to look at the full picture. Who are the people participating, and what are they risking for the slim chance at a better life? We shouldn’t have to claw tooth and nail for an opportunity, subjecting ourselves to the powertrips of egos so big they threaten to burst through the television, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe these shows are all just the result of capitalism engraining itself so seamlessly into the American identity that we forget that the people on the screen whose names aren’t in the show’s title have lives, families, and feelings. They won’t come out of this as unscathed as the executive producer who signed a multimillion-dollar network contract for an 8-part reality series. After all, we can’t all bounce back when Skinnygirl lunch meat flops.