This, in all its Botoxed glow and kitschy maximalism, is BravoCon. They flash big smiles and wear big hair, sporting T-shirts with taglines that snap, “Who gon' check me boo?” The halls are frothing, at times uncontrollably, with people from all corners of the country, and I am not so much here as lost in the crowd-which will peak at around 30,000 attendees by weekend's end. “I just spilled my wine!” All around me, women and gay men of all ages are drinking wine, waiting in line for wine, searching for wine. It's just shy of noon on a Saturday in October, inside the Javits Center, when I hear a woman make a confession. It’s OK to admit it: You are good and truly hooked. We enjoy letting other people into our curated worlds and being let into theirs in return. ![]() Across Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, we optimize our lives for the screen. Or because we demand our pop culture in every color, shape, and size. Perhaps it’s because we’re addicted to spectacle. Name a setup, pastime, premise, gimmick, and it probably exists as a reality TV show. The shows are operatic, polarizing, and unrepentant about what they are-all id and impulse. Reality TV has been called a “volume business” many of us swallow whole seasons in a single sitting. ![]() ![]() It’s also the most dominant form of entertainment today. What they do tell you about reality TV is everything else: how it’s reductive and superficial, how it’s cultural rot. One Thing I was never told about reality TV-and I’m willing to bet you weren’t either-is that it can heal.
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