The rumors started in February. Summer House fans knew how to read between the Bravo lines. The show, in which svelte New Yorkers spend their weekends partying in a Hamptons mansion, has a zealous, millions-strong fandom that knew, just knew, something was up between leads Ciara Miller; her ex, West Wilson; and her close friend, Amanda Batula. They were right, as the now-iconic image of Ciara crying on the sidewalk outside an Hermès store in Manhattan soon proved. West and Amanda had gotten together behind her back.

For Ciara, the moment was both a heartbreak and a breakout. All the lies and betrayal—coupled with her deeply relatable reaction (disbelief, anger, indignation)—elevated the former ICU nurse from reality TV cast member to reality TV star. Her loyal followers (1 million on Instagram, at last count) cheered as the opportunities rolled in: red carpet hosting gigs; a spot on Dancing With the Stars; Sonic, DSW, and Old Navy campaigns; and then the pinnacle of modern reality star achievement, a hosting gig for the Love Island companion series Aftersun. (“Keep on epically winning, Ciara!” commented one fan. “Best news ever!” wrote another.)

“Don’t quit your day job; this is not a career,” offered Bravo’s Andy Cohen at a Vulture event in May, speaking to aspiring reality TV personalities. Perhaps the advice is sage (if a bit cheeky), but the assertion is wrong. In 2026, “reality star” is very much a career—pioneered by the Kardashians, forged over the course of decades, and solidified by a concurrence of shifting cultural appetites and social necessity. Once objects of ridicule, reduced to comic relief by callous producers and taunted by the public for reeking of desperation, reality stars have become some of the most famous people on earth. The former proverbial losers now capture and hold our attention in a way previously reserved for movie stars. They are breaking out bigger, staying in the limelight longer, and influencing our lives like never before. They are needy, messy, dramatic, imperfect, ambitious, and, most importantly, everywhere. And we are, collectively, obsessed.

“Back in the day, we used to watch reality shows for trainwrecks,” says John Arthur Hill, a former reality TV producer and current SiriusXM radio host. “Now we have heroes. Ciara is like this generation’s Julia Roberts.”

The proof is in the numbers. More than 3.5 million people are now watching every episode of season 8 of Peacock’s reality dating show Love Island USA. The series’ last season drew 8.8 billion minutes of total viewing time over its six-week run (it was the most-watched streamed title anywhere for adults under 35). Netflix’s dating experiment Love Is Blind once hit 2.1 billion minutes of viewing time in a single week, while Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and Peacock’s The Traitors each often rake in half a billion weekly viewing minutes. Credit goes, in part, to the series’ showrunners who make even the most banal moments sparkle, but mostly to the stars and their followers, who together have created a modern ouroboros of fame and fandom.

Love Island USA’s Leah Kateb had 20,000 Instagram followers when season 6 started airing in June 2024. By the time she finished in second place, she had 1 million. (With those numbers, who cares what place you come in?) Today, she has 5.5 million and dozens of adoring fan accounts. Love Island UK alum Maura Higgins currently has 4.3 million Instagram followers. The Bachelorette’s Gabby Windey has 1.5 million. Stats like these have networks and streaming platforms paying attention; they’re casting popular reality stars again and again in a thriving ecosystem of show-hopping as fans demand to see more of them.

A few years after she exited The Bachelorette, Gabby joined OG Survivor star Boston Rob on season 3 of The Traitors, where they each amassed new fans. A year later, Maura and fellow Love Islander Rob Rausch followed suit, charming their way through season 4 and watching their follower counts (and sponsorship deals) explode. The opportunities are now endless: Love Island itself has its own universe of spin-offs including All Stars, Games, Beyond the Villa, and Aftersun. Reality stars can earn loyal stans across Dancing With the Stars, The Masked Singer, and Big Brother and jump to more mainstream fare from RuPaul’s Drag Race, The Challenge, and Top Chef.

Ashley Iaconetti, former cast member of no fewer than seven reality shows including the current Real Housewives of Rhode Island, sometimes has to pause to take it all in. “I’m like, ‘Wait,’” she says. “You’re telling me that I married a guy from meeting him on Bachelor in Paradise. And then we moved to Rhode Island. And then Bravo decides to make a Real Housewives of Rhode Island?” Yes, exactly that. Nearly 3 million viewers tuned in to watch Ashley (1.3 million followers) and her newest batch of costars in the show’s first seven days. She’s still got it.

“I’ve gotten really supportive messages,” she adds. “A lot of the people who reach out to me are people who have been following me since The Bachelor and then throughout the years. Now they’re seeing me again on TV and they’re like, Oh man, her consistency is awesome.”

That kind of staying power is infinitely valuable as celebrity itself splinters and the influence of traditional Hollywood contracts. On the big screen, the classic movie star is being overshadowed by the franchise character—we used to buy tickets to see Leo, Denzel, or ScarJo; now we’re buying them to see Spider-Man, The Avengers, and Barbie. Back home, on our phones, we’re favoring whoever populates our feeds the most. “When we had more movie stars, we hated reality stars,” explains Brian Moylan, author of The Housewives: The Real Story Behind the Real Housewives. “Now that we have fewer movie stars, we have more reality stars we love.”

To truly understand the appeal, you have to first grasp one thing: We may follow reality stars like they are Hollywood A-listers, but they are not Hollywood A-listers. They are us. And when dropped into unfamiliar or challenging situations, they have no choice but to do what any of us would do: be themselves. “On a reality show, eventually the audience disappears,” says longtime Survivor host and now showrunner Jeff Probst. “Exhaustion, uncertainty, fear, and disappointment all start arriving faster than you can manage them. At that point, you’re no longer performing. You’re responding. And that’s when the most revealing moments happen.”

Viewers don’t have to be stranded on a deserted island to get it. Most of us grapple with similar feelings every day: fear that we might lose our jobs to AI, worry that we might get ghosted or dumped, exhaustion over our always-on culture. To see these emotions mirrored by a reality star—on and off television—feels visceral. “As today’s movie and TV stars are increasingly guarded and presenting meticulously curated personas, we see people gravitating toward reality stars who are more open and real,” says Jason Lynch, a curator at the Paley Center for Media.

“People relate to us because they experience what we experience,” adds Love Island USA season 6 contestant JaNa Craig. “We’re just doing it in front of a camera.”

JaNa’s own viral onscreen crash-out was one for the reality TV history books. Discovering that her castmate Connor Newsum, who she’d been coupled up with, was getting cozy with Leah had JaNa sobbing through a monologue about...plants: “They have a lot in common. Like, they both live in fucking L.A. and they both, like, like fucking plants. Like, I like fucking plants, but I can’t name all the fucking plants. Like, fuck. So I need to go study some fucking plants?” Sure, it was funny, but it was also JaNa’s raw insecurity splayed out for all to see, the amplification of thoughts we’ve all had—What if I’m not good enough for someone the way I am? Fans rewarded JaNa for her vulnerability, flooding her socials (she’s now at 2.5 million Instagram followers) and helping her score brand deals with Maybelline, Revolve, and Credit One, among many others.

The speed with which it all happens is also part of the allure. Writer Anna Peele, whose book Enter the Villa: The (Unauthorized) Reality Behind Love Island tracks the rise of the dating show, explains. “They’re not on their phones; they’re not on the internet,” she says of the contestants. “It’s very immediate for them in a way that I think most young people aren’t experiencing, so we easily fall in love alongside them.” And because many shows like Love Island air practically in real time, when a cast member does something amazing (or awful), all of pop culture can pile on right away, giving way to tweets, memes, mashups, and the rest.

That, in turn, gives reality stars the chance to listen to their fans and respond to their wishes, pushing these relationships beyond the parasocial into a symbiotic audience–famous person arrangement. Don’t like the way someone treated their costar or hate an interaction between two of your favorites? DM them. Chances are, producers—and later, the stars themselves—will take note, giving fans a chance to influence the narrative. To create a world where someone beleaguered can persevere. Where someone wronged can take the high ground. Where a misdeed can be rectified. On The Traitors, Maura was betrayed by Rob, but he later made it up to her with a Birkin bag. And two previously fierce Traitors rivals, Bob the Drag Queen and Boston Rob, have become comrades and opinionated podcast cohosts.

That the storylines no longer end when the cameras stop rolling helps us cling to the ideas of empowerment, transformation, and connection. The latter is especially important during our well-documented post-COVID loneliness epidemic rife with social isolation. As we gather at watch parties and band together online to track these stars, “they stop feeling like television characters and start feeling like people you know, because you do,” says Jeff Probst. “You understand their strengths, weaknesses, blind spots, and motivations. Sometimes better than they do, because you are observing them without any stakes. It goes so deep that you may not even agree with their choices, but you understand why they made them.”

Rooting for them is like rooting for ourselves. Even if these days, we’re a risky bet.

No examination of the power of reality TV stars could be complete without acknowledging how that power has the potential to transform not only the stars and their fans but the entire world order. President Donald Trump owes much of his popularity to the picture of leadership he projected while hosting 14 seasons of NBC’s The Apprentice. That he now wields his position of power to campaign against the rights of women, transgender people, immigrants, and other marginalized groups is a stark reminder that reality stars don’t just mirror our dreams but the crueler aspects of humanity as well.

Over the course of Trump’s two presidential administrations, movies and TV shows have gotten markedly less diverse. In 2024, a trans storyline was pulled from a Pixar series. Nearly half of the LGBTQIA+ characters on TV shows didn’t return in 2025. The number of BIPOC film leads has fallen, and disability representation remains grim. Against a backdrop of economic, political, and social instability, once-aspirational superstars now repel audiences with their lives of excess: Chrissy Teigen’s “accidental” ordering of a $13,000 bottle of wine, Logan Paul’s $5.275 million Pokémon card.

By contrast, even when their content is aspirational, reality stars are some of the only entertainers sitting in the mess with us, not serving up hyper-curated lives or even toxic positivity. What they’re sharing looks more like what we’re actually all living through. “Scripted television can comment on culture,” notes Probst. “But reality television documents it in real time.”

And when it comes to representation, that realness looks a lot like resistance. Reality TV has become one of the only forms of onscreen entertainment that widely and consistently offers many viewers better reflections of themselves, says Raina Deerwater, associate director of entertainment research and analysis at GLAAD. “It has a history of touching on real conversations and tense moments as people are able to authentically speak their minds. When those stars are from communities that are being actively attacked and silenced in this political moment, these series offer a platform for their voices to be heard.”

As examples, Deerwater cites the original Queer Eye “Fab Five”; Richard Hatch, Survivor’s first winner and an out gay man; and the many iterations of RuPaul’s Drag Race. “There are audiences for reality TV that may not know a trans person in real life,” she says. “But if they get to know and love someone like Survivor’s Zeke Smith, Drag Race’s Peppermint, or America’s Next Top Model’s Isis King on TV, it can be very impactful. Reaching people in their living rooms while they’re being entertained is a powerful force in pushing back on disinformation and harmful rhetoric.”

Former Vanderpump Rules cast member and Dancing With the Stars contestant Ariana Madix, now host of Love Island USA, wants to see more kinds of relationships on her show. “Queer representation is just representation,” Ariana, who is bisexual, told Cosmopolitan earlier this month. “Queer people are part of life.” Meanwhile, the top three contestants—JaNa, Leah, and Serena Page—of season 6 of Love Island USA were all women of color. This season, Love Islander Beatriz Hatz is a Paralympian and the first disabled person to appear on the show.

And then there are reality stars like Ron Funches, a stand-up comedian with no prior reality TV credits, who was banished from The Traitors’ castle in episode 6 of season 4. Onscreen, Ron regularly seemed confused as to why his direct communication style was perceived as deceptive. After the show aired, Ron says he got messages from fans telling him he might be autistic. “They started off pretty mean,” he told CBS Mornings in February, “but then they started turning into ‘Oh, it’s so nice to see a representation of myself.’” Ron has a son with autism but had never considered that he might also be neurodivergent. After following the fandom’s lead, he received his own diagnosis, posting on Instagram, “Well, the internet told me I was autistic and was right.”

When a show successfully connects two real people in a real relationship, searing their romance into the hearts and minds of viewers, their fandom also explodes. Love Island USA season 6 winners Serena and Kordell Beckham coupled up on day one and survived the show’s many obstacles (mainly, the temptations of Casa Amor). Now, nearly a year after they met on TV, they are still earnestly and obsessively tracked by their fans. (Sample comments from some of their combined 3.7 million followers: “I’m going to tell my kids this is Michelle and Barack Obama” and “Just marry this girl already!! Sheesh!!”)

“It was such a relatable journey,” Serena says about their appeal. “Everyone got to watch it blossom in real time and even have a part to play in it.”

Their success as a couple feels like our success—or at least, the kind of relationship we’d like to have in a time of app doomscrolling and chatbot romances. Watching someone else find love and choose commitment feels like wish fulfillment, the antidote to the misery of present-day dating.

“Everybody wants to find love,” says Ashley, who transformed her Bachelor sob story (quite literally: she spent her entire first season crying) into a real-life nearly seven-year marriage with fellow Bachelor Nation alum Jared Haibon. “I think we all are ingrained to want to experience something like a rom-com.”

Except, for these stars, their rom-coms aren’t the classic polished version. They’re dramatic by design but also familiar in their heady highs and gritty lows. “That’s always been what was great about reality television—you can’t help but keep the dark underbelly from coming out,” says Moylan.

“It’s bold,” adds Serena of the way reality stars like her and Kordell come together. “It’s easy to play into what people want to see, but it’s that much harder to be vulnerable.”

Reality dating show contestants’ willingness to appear cringe feels simultaneously repulsive and seductive. We can’t imagine ourselves publicly melting down while looking for love but also can’t look away from what might happen if we did. “In our society, everything is so curated,” says Hill. “But ultimately, people want to see something real and not perfectly pruned.”

With big movie stars a dying breed and scripted TV and film actors seemingly following scripts even offscreen, Hollywood should pay attention. Thanks to pressure from studios with too much to lose and actors’ tendency to seek out emotional separation from their roles, its elite stars may still elicit aspiration but are giving back zero relatability. How well do we really know them or their relationships? By their accounts, not in the slightest. This side of the industry could stand to give its emerging talent, coupled up or not, a few pages from the reality star playbook.

Perhaps it’s already started doing so. Take the leads of Heated Rivalry, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, who play lovers on the show and play up their close friendship outside of it without fear or hesitation. Their shenanigans feel like access, and they cater directly to their enormous fandoms, regularly dropping content like photos and videos. Whenever Hudson and Connor (who are, quite crucially, not a couple in real life) appear anywhere together, their raw chemistry and willingness (or ability) to appear un–media trained feels like watching behind-the-scenes footage.

Actually, it feels a lot like watching a reality TV show.

When Amanda and West betrayed Ciara. When Tom Sandoval cheated on Ariana on Vanderpump Rules. When The Traitors roundtable expelled Ron. We—the audience, the fandoms—rose up in their defense. We’re not always right, and our methods can still be questionable, but we’ve always been attracted to spaces and platforms where we can somehow get involved. If not literally, at least emotionally and parasocially. Egregious disrespect of a beloved or sympathetic star offers a rare opportunity for cultural unity, a chance to collectively delight in a well-deserved clapback or a moment of true empathy.

And when we’re all in on a star, we’ll do whatever it takes to help their brands soar. Supporting our favorites means helping them get more followers, more shows, and more lucrative deals, and tracking their stats closely. “I’m so happy her numbers are climbing,” a fan recently posted about JaNa. “We need to keep supporting her especially outside the Villa.” Echoed another: “You have so much love and support out of this Villa! Even if you don’t win (which you should), you are still gonna come out on top. Brand deals and opportunity galore for you, girl!”

It’s a vast shift from those early days of chastising reality TV personalities for cashing in on their 15 minutes, for being too thirsty, for trying to outstay their welcome. Now all types of celebrities are jumping through hoops to get sent to The Traitors’ Scottish Ardross Castle—and not because they’re dying to eat the show’s widely praised smoked salmon. They know the series’ popularity and potent dynamics create the perfect alchemy for reality stardom and a chance to win over an entirely new audience.

No one can deny we’ve always loved to watch pretty people stir up shit onscreen, but these days—when we’re dealing with seemingly insurmountable messes, day in and day out—we’re finally ready to reward them for their efforts. And thank them for their service.

“People want to be entertained,” says Ashley. Including reality stars themselves. They are both fandom inspiration and fans, following each other across the reality TV universe. “The Bachelor is like a rated-PG version of a lot of these shows, and I do prefer my romance to be a little bit cleaner, a little bit more innocent,” says Ashley of her own viewing preferences. “But give me something funny, sassy, shady, dramatic, whatever. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad.”

The collective promise that reality stars offer—that there is a world in which we can all find love, approval, acceptance, and success while being ourselves—is an enormous one, and it comes with no guarantees. But, for now, the promise itself has to be enough.

“At the end of the day,” says JaNa, “I’m a regular girl. I just took a risk and went on a show. People have high expectations for me, but my goal has never been to stay in the limelight as long as possible. It’s literally just to do what I love. I really get paid to be myself.”

Cover: (row 1) Ashley Iaconetti, Ciara Miller, Tiffany “New York” Pollard, Ariana Madix; (row 2) Leah Kateb, Serena Page, Bob the Drag Queen; (row 3) Jeff Probst, Lisa Rinna, Paige DeSorbo; (row 4) Robert Irwin, Olandria Carthen, Rob Rausch, Gabby Windey; (row 5) JaNa Craig.

Images in illustrations: Getty Images.