I’ve been down a TV rabbit hole. After 2 or 3 hours, I said to myself okay this is manageable. What’s the worst – 8 or 10 hours of obsessive viewing? I’d say that I know discipline. I can make myself go to bed early when I need to, can sometimes be in the gym before day starts. But this had me. Day after day, I was finishing my work and immediately reaching for the iPad to have more enthrallment. Radio 4’s PM at 17.00 – forget it; I had no time for that anymore. And when of an evening I tried to watch a credible drama that would normally appeal to me because of a clever plot and tight script, I didn’t want to know. I had to be back in that lair.

It wasn’t that I wanted to know ‘what happens next’ – after all the events were oh so predictable – but somehow the stars of the show became personal to me. It was like a surreal border had been crossed and, as with the feeling when you first fall in love, I couldn’t get them off my mind. A few times I found myself dressing in the morning and going over their actions – analysing, berating, suggesting, hoping. And of course I did that aloud to the screen too, as I watched their lives unfold. In Love After Lockup, half a dozen men and women have become pen pals with prisoners through a ‘meet an inmate’ programme. The show starts as these ordinary folk go to pick up their ‘soulmates’ on the day they’re being released from prison. And then we get to see if their relationships can survive in the outside world.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been drugged into Reality TV. Eons ago I watched some of The Kardashians but that addiction only lasted until my provider wanted me to pay extra for episodes. During covid, I did a couple of Married At First Sight runs but the show had too much repetition and I’ll never go back there. With Love After Lockup there’s not enough repetition to put me off and I’m wide-eyed at the characters’ gullibility and audacity. Take Clint who marries Tracie the day after her release from prison, only to be abandoned on his wedding night as she takes his rental car when he’s asleep to go get high. She ends up back in jail, leaving Clint to wail about his broken heart, the $21,000 he owes the rental company, and how he’s still standing by his ‘goddess.’ And 13 hours in, I can’t judge Clint’s commitment to Tracie as wholly mad or brave, unless I side with his patient parents.

I’d like to know if others, like me, have Reality TV protagonists who, unchecked, will take up too much headspace. Maybe I don’t have enough actual people in my life, or more-novice-than-pro at consuming Reality TV, I’m susceptible to being infatuated, especially when events are so out of the ordinary. Perhaps Love After Lockup is mostly scripted and the producers know compelling storylines. The other shows that I watch where members of the public share their true selves are Race Across The World and Traitors. But in these real-life TV programmes there’s exciting competitions and although I ‘connect’ with some of the competitors, they disappear from my thoughts when the viewing is done. There’s a potential 32 hours to the Love After Lockup season that’s had me cuffed to the screen, and an enormous four other seasons out there. Now that’s an unreal dilemma.

Cover Photo by Michal Ico