BRANDON GREENAWAY—Whether you tune in for the scheming, the alliances, or the thrill of watching familiar faces placed in unfamiliar pressure cookers, reality television has always thrived on audience engagement. But when that engagement spills beyond the screen and evolves into coordinated online harassment, the line between entertainment and harm begins to blur. Recent public backlash surrounding Colton Underwood on “The Traitors” has brought that tension into focus, raising a question the industry has largely avoided: do reality TV producers owe contestants any legal duty to mitigate foreseeable audience harassment? Following episodes of “The Traitors” that sparked intense online criticism of Underwood, the show’s producers issued a public statement urging viewers to treat contestants with respect and refrain from personal attacks. Similar advisories have appeared across the genre. Producers of “Love Island USA” likewise asked fans to stop cyberbullying contestants amid mounting concerns over online abuse directed at participants. These public statements reflect a growing industry awareness that reality TV exposure routinely subjects contestants to intense and hostile audience reactions amplified by social media.
That acknowledgement matters because, in tort law, foreseeability sits at the heart of duty. Online harassment of reality TV contestants is no longer speculative or incidental. It is a predictable byproduct of modern unscripted television where producers exercise near-total control over editing, narrative framing, and the airtime contestants receive. Participants are packaged, branded, and broadcast to millions, often with storylines designed to provoke strong emotional reactions from viewers. When harassment predictably follows, it raises the question of whether producers have simply documented the risk or actively helped create it.
Despite this reality, participation agreements in unscripted television overwhelmingly allocate the risk of reputational harm, emotional distress, and public backlash to contestants themselves. These contracts typically include expansive releases, assumption-of-risk provisions, and waivers covering mental and emotional injury. Contestants agree, often as a condition of participation, that they bear responsibility for how audiences react once episodes air. Producers, by contrast, retain broad discretion over editing, promotional use of a contestant’s likeness, and the timing and manner of public exposure.
This contractual structure reflects the industry’s longstanding reliance on the assumption-of-risk doctrine. But assumption of risk has limits, particularly where the defendant controls the conditions that give rise to the harm. Courts have traditionally been reluctant to enforce waivers that absolve parties of liability for risks they materially increase or uniquely control. In the reality TV context, contestants may consent to public exposure in general, but they do not control how they are portrayed, which moments are emphasized, or how producers frame them to millions of viewers in an algorithm-driven media ecosystem primed for outrage.
The role of foreseeability becomes even more salient when networks themselves publicly acknowledge the risk. Viewer advisories urging civility implicitly concede that harassment is not only possible but expected. While these statements are framed as moral appeals rather than legal admissions, they nevertheless underscore that producers are aware of the harm and its prevalence. In other contexts, courts have treated such acknowledgements as relevant to duty analysis, specifically when a defendant recognizes a danger yet continues to operate without meaningful safeguards.
Social media has fundamentally altered the scale and intensity of that danger. Platforms amplify emotional reactions, reward controversy, and enable pile-on behavior that can quickly escalate beyond criticism into harassment and threats. For reality TV contestants, online abuse can affect employment prospects, mental health, and personal safety long after a season ends. These are becoming increasingly documented and common features of the genre.
None of this is to say that existing law clearly imposes a duty on reality TV producers to police audience behavior. Courts have been cautious about extending liability for third-party conduct where free speech concerns are implicated. But the landscape is shifting. When producers exert extraordinary control over exposure, profit directly from audience engagement, and publicly acknowledge the consequences of that engagement, traditional boundaries of duty analysis are tested.
The statements issued by “The Traitors” and “Love Island USA” reflect an industry grappling with this tension in real time. They signal a recognition that the modern realities of social media have outpaced the legal frameworks and contractual norms governing unscripted television. Whether courts will eventually treat foreseeable audience harassment as a risk that producers must meaningfully address remains an open question. What is clear is that the status quo places nearly all of the risk on contestants while reserving nearly all of the power to producers. Reality television has always blurred the line between performance and personal life. As audience participation becomes more immediate, more aggressive, and more consequential, the legal system may soon be forced to decide whether that line can remain as legally invisible as it has been. In an era where a storyline can trigger global backlash overnight, the question is no longer whether harassment will occur, but who should bear responsibility when it does.
