EMMYS WATCH 2026 — From the Disruptors to the Establishment: How Five Aging Reality TV Franchises Take Different Approaches to Brand Management

‘Emmys Watch 2026’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated in the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards.

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Seemingly just a brief moment ago, MTV’s The Real World: New York opened with the words, “This is a true story of seven strangers picked to live in a loft and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.”

More recently, Survivor: Borneo opened, “From this tiny Malaysian fishing village, these 16 Americans are beginning the adventure of a lifetime. They have volunteered to be marooned for 39 days on mysterious Borneo. This is their story. This is Survivor.”

Reality television was a disruptive child. The scripted television world worried that ‘reality’ would put a whole industry of actors, writers, and directors out of work. The promise of reality TV was that it would be made for average people, starring average people. Anyone could become a massive television personality, even you.

We’ve come a long way since then. In 2025, Executive Producer Jeff Probst formally announced that Survivor would be producing its 50th season. Hollywood’s disruptive little brat had become an old queen worthy of a golden jubilee. People wanted details about how, specifically, the franchise was going to take a bow. But there was never a lot of suspense about one thing: Survivor’s 50th wasn’t going to be about a group of average Americans who were meeting for the first time. It was going to be about Survivor’s greatest stars, many of whom knew each other from fan conventions, podcast networks, and watching the show themselves.

Survivor 50 would go on to be nominated for Outstanding Reality Competition Program at the 78th annual Primetime Emmy Awards. So did The Traitors, Dancing With the Stars, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and Top Chef. The Traitors is the newcomer of the bunch, but the format has already produced approximately 89 seasons across 40 global territories. (It depends what you count.) Ironically, it has become rare for a scripted show to make it beyond three seasons.

All five mature reality productions faced the same basic question: How were they going to continue building out a long-term franchise that they hoped would survive for decades? Specifically, how were they going to manage their stars? Each took a distinctly different approach. But the most dramatic and contentious production process was that of Survivor 50.

SURVIVOR 50

On February 25, 2025, CBS invited New York City journalists and superfans to a VIP screening of the premiere of Survivor 48. Following the screening, the show’s host and executive producer, Jeff Probst, announced the first details about Survivor 50:  “For the first time ever, the producers will not be in charge of the game design. You will.”

On the recording, fans can be heard roaring with shock and awe. A woman in the back of the room cries, “WHAT?!” As Jeff continues, fans begin screaming with awe and amazement. One can almost imagine them passing out from the vapors and having to be treated with smelling salts because this sounds so epic. The fans weren’t going to have an opportunity to become stars. They were going to become the producers. They were going to make the show into exactly their vision for how it should be, and the season was going to rock.

As of that time, 771 people had played the game before, and I could tell you about every single one of them the way other people could tell you about ballplayers. All but a few of those people started out as ordinary and largely anonymous members of society. They were dairy farmers, biochemists, cement truck drivers, and river rafting guides,  sheriffs, dentists, pastors, and telephone repairmen. But once they got on the show, they became characters who went on adventures – heroes and villains, objects of desire and admiration and, yes, sometimes mockery. Early aughts reality shows like Survivor, American Idol and The Apprentice represented a new version of the Horatio Alger rags to riches fantasy where the lowest among us could have their true value recognized overnight.

As the show developed its conception of All-Star seasons, bringing losing players back to take a second bite at the apple and winners back to defend their crowns, those stories were extended. Jenna Lewis played at age 22, when she was a young mom getting her undergraduate, and at 26, as a guest actress on TV series, and at age 47, as a real estate agent, so we experienced her growing up. When social media, fan conventions, and podcasts became staples, their stories left the frames of the episode and the editors’ control and continued indefinitely. So it mattered which of those human stories got a new chapter in the world of Survivor and which of them intersected in a potentially lore-filled way. Designing the journey that they were going to go on ensured, at the very least, that they would get a fair chance to show how much they had grown and what they were now capable of.

In various press interviews over the next twelve months, Jeff would explain, “What I normally hear from fans is ‘If I was in charge, this is what I would do.’ And so well, now you are, and really that's it… When it's done, the fans will have designed the kind of game they want to see played in 50… I'm just going to wait and see what the result is and then say, ‘Okay, now we know what the game is’... This season is in the hands of the fans. They're calling the shots. It's out of our hands… Let's let the fans be in charge.” That’s a frankenbite, but it’s very reflective of how he spoke about the concept.

That’s not the show Jeff made, however. At least, not in my view. Not in the view of my friends and family. Not in the view of many Survivor legends, media columnists, and fans who have spoken on record.

By making such a broad and yet vague pitch for the season a year in advance, Jeff set expectations that he was not prepared to fulfill. Once before fans had selected the cast of a season, and many initially believed that could happen again. In fact, Rob Has A Podcast spent months discussing all 751 former players and attempting to gauge their interest level in participating before turning the conversation over to a massive fan vote. The results were shared directly with the production team. 4 of the 20 players fans selected ultimately overlapped with the cast that Jeff chose. Could have been better.

Perhaps that’s fair, though. Maybe fans couldn’t be counted on to choose a coherent group that worked well together. “We’re taking it on as our responsibility to figure out that tapestry that represents the entire run of the show,” Jeff said. “That’s why we put this group together. It has every flavor, every era, every type of personality.” Except, a full half of the cast he chose came from just the most recent 5 years of the series. The other 20 years collectively split the other half. And many of the legacy players that fans would have marched into Hell for were so important precisely because their return had been requested for 20 to 25 years.

Rob Cesternino had last played Survivor 21 years ago. Afterward, he and his then-girlfriend (now wife) had begun a Survivor podcast in their small New York City apartment. Over time he had interviewed all but a handful of the 751 former players. He had virtually become required listening for anyone thinking about going on the show. He had built Rob Has a Podcast into a network supporting dozens of young podcasters, most of whom started as average listeners of the show. RHAP served as a warm companion not only for following many other reality series but many scripted series and movies as well. He held awesome events where hundreds of superfans gathered in movie theaters to watch live broadcasts of Survivor, cheering and screaming like it was the Super Bowl, while cast members from the episode sat in the audience right beside him. This was the guy many of us wanted to see play again. He got cut.

Three-time Survivor player Kelly Wentworth wrote, “Snubbing [seasons 20-29] completely but adding five people from the last two seasons when this is meant to be a celebration of the entire series is wild work… Should have let the fans vote on the cast.” Famed villain Abi-Maria Gomes complained that the production kept her on the hook for nine months without clear communication and then failed to notify her when she had been cut from the process, letting her find out with the rest of the fans. “I was ghosted,” she told the U.S. Sun. After being cut right at the finish line, season two icon Jerri Manthey told EW, “I’m pissed, I’m disappointed, I’m sad.” In reply to such criticisms, Jeff said, “I understand any player who isn’t on 50 and is frustrated with us. I really do. It feels personal. It’s not personal. We have to please ourselves. We’re the producers of the show.”

The show did make extensive time for involvement by mainstream celebrities who had no direct connection to the show’s history. One episode featured a 20-minute advertisement for country singer Zac Brown, including contestants raving about his music, competing in a challenge to attend his concert, listening to several of his songs, and eating fish that he caught. IMDb voters rated it the worst episode in the history of the series. 

Fans also speculated about all kinds of creative ways they could design the game (“what if we submitted ideas for challenges?”) only to learn that they would receive a brief menu with a curated set of possibilities and be allowed to choose between them. Some of the choices were superficial. ‘What colors will the tribes wear?’ Others were more impactful. ‘Should the competitors be given rice to survive on or should they be forced to hunt and gather everything they eat?’

Meanwhile, most of the game elements that fans had spent endless social media bandwidth complaining about weren’t on the ballot. Several of those issues were rooted in compromises the production had seemingly made for cost-cutting measures. The production would not explore a new country and culture the show had never visited before. It would not restore the game to its original 39-day length. Some of them would have cost nothing extra but were simply in conflict with Jeff’s philosophies. The game would not come down to a one-on-one showdown. It would come down to a battle between three people, which many fans argue is inherently less dramatic.

Even more problematically, nearly every time new choices were made available Jeff would mention how he thought the fans should vote. “I would never give the players rice. Never… I'd say absolutely do not vote for anything that makes it easier… . I've met people who said, “You should go back to season 1. No idols, no advantages, no twists, nothing.’ And I say, ‘Okay, we'll probably never do that because that was 25 years ago and that game would be boring… You're going to not be entertained.’” Guess what? Every time he put his thumb on the scale fans voted how he told them to. So it was almost as though he had designed the game after all.

Let me be clear: It may seem from the outside like fans simply complain no matter what. Jeff Probst in particular may experience that subjective reality. I’ve definitely experienced it at moments while reading Reddit. And it would be accurate to say ‘someone is going to complain no matter what.’ That’s God’s honest truth. But I think a lot of it comes from fans envisioning something so perfect, and so creatively satisfying, that they fantasize about it on the train, in a meeting, at the gym. They feel like kids on Christmas morning at the thought of opening it up and seeing it with their own eyes.

So I believe the biggest mistake Survivor made was overselling the level of fan involvement and creating an environment where fans would spend an entire year imagining what they would do if they were in charge of the 50th season. Jeff could not please everyone. If you have one ideal and I have another, putting Survivor 50 in both our hands will probably cause us to fight over it and drop it. That inherent problem was compounded by an unforced error: Jeff did a poor job of demonstrating in practice that listening to the fans was his north star.

 I, as a fan, experienced Survivor 50 less as a year-long celebration of the franchise and more-so as a year-long argument about it. However, another of the Emmy nominees would make a single choice that cost them more political capital than any one thing Survivor did.

THE TRAITORS

In June of 2025, the cast for Season 4 of The Traitors was on the verge of dropping, and I was keeping an eye on Reddit for one specific piece of joyous news. Reddit had gone crazy when Rob Cesternino, who so many of us had wanted to see on Survivor 50, announced that his protégé, Mike Bloom, would be hosting the RHAP podcast network’s summer coverage leading up to the most anticipated Survivor season of all time. Rob’s ardent fans knew he was not going to miss the buildup to Survivor 50 if he was laid up in the hospital. Since there was no explanation given, the human mind formed a supposition: He was going to be on The Traitors.

Then on June 12th, 2025, realitytv_fan, an anonymous source who had a proven track record of leaking real information, posted the cast list for The Traitors (with one omission I’ll discuss). Rob was on it. In the year of our lord 2025 it was hard to find things to celebrate, and you had to take victories when you got them. His whole staff of podcasters would organize a tribute show in which they literally wept with joy while they told stories about how positively he had impacted their careers and how proud they were of him.

The Traitors’ most powerful contribution to reality television is that it’s the crossover story to end all crossover stories. Survivor is concerned with building its own lore. The Traitors takes figures from other creative universes, many of whom carry decades of lore with them, and recombines them into the television equivalent of Trix Cereal with every over-saturated color and fruity flavor mixed together. It asks who would win in a real fight, the best player from Survivor or the best player from Big Brother? What would happen if the Real Housewives were placed into conflict with a real British Lord? And then you threw in Olympic figure skating champions Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir? And Taylor Swift’s future mother-in-law? And what if the UK added Sir Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, and Bella Ramsey?

The Traitors was pop. It was eclectic. It was a fabulously expensive dinner party in an old Scottish castle where theatrical people from across the entertainment sphere dressed up in high fashion for a murder mystery dinner party.

Jeff Probst objected because his casting team had spent years sifting through mountains of audition tapes discovering stars, and once CBS had made those ordinary people household names, Peacock had come along and simply cherry-picked the best finds. I get why he feels frustrated, but I would respond that all Hollywood actors get discovered by one casting director or another. That doesn’t mean it’s unfair for other movies to then cast the actors in other roles. That’s showbiz, kid. It’ll break your heart.

The exception to my laissez-faire attitude about poaching from other texts came from the other announcement realitytv_fan made the same day. “There is a name going around for Traitors 4 that is… let’s just say very polarizing and controversial to put it extremely mildly (not a reality star.) I am not going to be posting the name to prevent me being potentially responsible for any unnecessary and premature backlash against Peacock in case I am wrong… If they do end up being on, let Peacock face all the backlash they get because… oof. There will be a lot of people who refuse to watch.”

Within minutes the Reddit hive mind had identified Casey Anthony as the leading theory. Anthony was a Florida woman charged and acquitted of murdering her two-year-old daughter, Caylee, in one of the most notorious criminal trials of the era.

There was never any reason to actually believe it was Casey Anthony except that realitytv_fan’s warning had been so ominous that it genuinely seemed possible to people. “What if they had an actual killer at the party?” I have to say, that felt incredibly 2025 to me.

When Peacock announced the official cast list and Anthony’s name wasn’t on it, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was only Michael Rapaport.

Rapaport, an actor known for Atypical, Boston Public, Friends, and Higher Learning, was a very vocal fan of Bravo reality shows like The Real Housewives. He was also an extremely outspoken pro-Israeli activist who had made sick jokes and sensationalistic claims about Muslims. After pagers used by the Hezbollah network in Lebanon blew up, killing 12 and injuring 2,800, including civilians and children, Rapaport filmed a reaction video in which he kept repeating “beep beep!” and laughing hysterically. He was also fond of repeating the claim that Muslims had celebrated in the streets of New Jersey on 9/11.  He had also been arrested and pleaded guilty to the aggravated harassment of ex-girlfriend Lili Taylor. New York had issued a protection order against him after he called Taylor 21 times in four days and banged on her bedroom window at one in the morning. There was immediately a boycott campaign with online fans saying they refused to support the season and they would hold anyone who did in moral contempt for financially rewarding Peacock’s decision.

Instead of bringing years of lore from another franchise with him, Rapaport brought years of lore about hate speech and harassment. That wasn’t fun lore. It didn’t add a tasty new ingredient to the stew pot. It threw dirt in the stew pot.

I just wanted to relax and enjoy The Traitors, man. I just wanted to enjoy my dumb show. I wanted to talk about Alan Cumming’s silly costumes and see what crazy new twists the show came up with and watch Rob. I feared the presence of this one irrelevant loudmouth was going to hijack all of the publicity and make it hard to discuss anything else about the show, which is more or less what happened. I agreed with everyone that Rapaport sucked, but the emotional discourse was exhausting. Was it really possible that the producers had failed to foresee this when they cast him? And if they had foreseen it, why had they decided the cost-benefit analysis worked out in their favor?

When the series released the first three episodes, Rapaport overpowered each one, shouting belligerently and insulting various Housewives while everyone else shared the scraps of screentime left over. Let it be known that Rob Cesternino targeted Rapaport in the first episode, later explaining that he knew it was what his audience would have wanted. He was overruled and subsequently murdered at the beginning of the third episode because of a game mechanic that prioritized randomness and chaos over strategic gameplay. 

Don’t get me wrong. The Traitors is not a show for purists. It ain’t meant to be human chess. It’s meant to be human bumper cars. But after waiting 21 years to see Rob step into the arena again, I wanted to enjoy it for more than just one night. Sometimes your ice cream falls on the floor. Sometimes your balloon flies away. But I wasn’t begging to watch Michael Rapaport act like a bozo fifty more times, either. So my mom and I decided we wouldn’t watch the show again until Rapaport was voted out.

When he finally was banished from the game in Episode 5, we did come back, but my heart was never really in Season 4 after that. I wish the producers had recognized a distinction between stars who added to the fun dinner party mixer and stars who ruined the event.

That’s where one of The Traitors’ Emmy competitors stole the show. They chose their guest list very strategically, and in doing so they more than doubled their ratings among younger adults, 34 seasons into their run.

DANCING WITH THE STARS

If I am attempting to call the fight down the middle, I believe Dancing With the Stars deserves to win the Emmy for Outstanding Competition Reality Program. They are not necessarily the best of the five franchises, but they had the best year.

Season 33 of Dancing with the Stars was a landmark success. Despite debuting shortly after George W. Bush’s reelection as President, the franchise ranked first among entertainment series among viewers 18-49 for the first time in its history. But we’re talking about season 34. The ratings among viewers under 35 more than doubled (+118%) from the previous year. So they were already the most watched show among the youths and then they became cool. The number of fan votes cast for who danced best in the premiere was more than two and a half times (+163%) what it was the previous year. Then the ratings grew every week for the next six weeks. Nearly half a billion votes were cast over the entire season. The show had its most-watched finale in nine years. 

What makes all of that more impressive is, this wasn’t the show’s 50th season. They didn’t have some sort of special gimmick like bringing back all the past champions for a big showdown. They didn’t suddenly cast Barack Obama. Nothing shockingly controversial happened.  It was just Season 34. The franchise ran essentially the same plays it always does, and it got a different result. But obviously something was different, and I think I can explain what.

Essentially, the casting department learned how to work smarter, not harder.

I am a casual sampler of Dancing With the Stars. Sometimes I see a clip of it on YouTube, and I’m really interested for about a minute and twenty. I’m more of a social strategy reality fan. But I believe the appeal is generally that you get to watch famous and powerful people be vulnerable. At the point they commit to the show, they may have absolutely no idea whether they’re capable of learning how to dance. They may have a sinking suspicion inside that they can’t, despite the promises of the show. But they do a mega big brave and take their first dance lesson in front of cameras, and you get to watch them learn how to dance right in front of your eyes. Often the secret is that they are carried by their dance partner to a significant degree - at least at first - but when you surround them with nice set pieces and theatrical lighting, most of them are able to look remarkably good out there. And along the way you see them enter this really intimate relationship with a stranger. JoJo Siwa famously chose a woman, a first in the series. And your pro dancer is primarily your teacher, your mentor, but two marriages and two children have come out of pro/celebrity relationships on this series so far. I’m told that if you’re in Hollywood, marrying your Dancing With the Stars teacher is kind of the move now. And all the relationships can be very emotional, for better or worse. Some couples have a hard time working together.

But the problem was sort of there all along: Dancing With The Stars was a mid-career rehab. Most of the people chosen weren’t at the tips of America’s tongues in terms of the country’s most adored celebrities. They might be able to get a couple of stars each season who felt significant today. A lot of these stars were people like Bad News Bears actress Tatum O’Neil, ex-NFL wide receiver Jerry Rice, and Saved By the Bell star Mario Lopez, who were nostalgia plays by that point. Consequently, the show’s greatest appeal was to older viewers who had been around long enough to care about these guys.

Over the past couple of seasons, DWTS has rethought their search to consider the possibility that the best stars might lie in the future rather than the past. On Season 34, the one nominated, one of the breakout stars was Alix Earle, a TikTokker who had (merely) 7.5 million followers when she was cast. Alix makes Get Ready With Me videos as she travels around the world wearing fabulous clothes. Robert Irwin, 21-year-old son of “The Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, is following in his father’s footsteps as a conservationist in the media. Gold- and silver-medal winning Olympic gymnast Jordan Chiles had the potential to be a superstar on the dance floor. Two of the women were from the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, a show which grew out of #MomTok but appealed heavily to Gen Z because the characters were fish out of water. They were confronting their own messiness, sexuality, generational perspective, faith, family commitments, and personal vanity in the conservative social world of suburban Utah. A lot of the kiddos were intrigued by that. DWTS even had my former high school theater costar Hilaria Baldwin, wife of Alec.

All of these people had a lot more current popularity than Cheers star Kirstie Alley, and they had better current platforms to ask their fans to rally. But they might have previously been overlooked because their popularity didn’t come from traditional sources. “I admit there were some seasons past where maybe it felt like people that have gone away, and it’s like a rehab for a career,” Dancing With the Stars Casting Director Deena Katz told People. “And really, I think what we’re [not] missing is the relevance.”

If DWTS had abandoned their entire existing audience, I wouldn’t applaud it even if I understood the business calculation. Part of the genius of the move was that they didn’t cast every slot with influencers just to ensure one made it to the end. They still had Danielle Fishel of Boy Meets World, who half the guys my age say was their first crush. They had Andy Richter, formerly of the Conan O’Brien Show. They had Corey Feldman, known for movies like Gremlins and The Goonies. Baron Davis, an NBA star across three decades, brought sports fans. So instead of conceding the hunt for either Xennials or Zoomers, they brought everybody to the table and then hoped they would stay for the people they didn’t already know. That’s what worked.

The Traitors and DWTS both build their brand off of interesting guest lists of experienced media personalities. But the category’s final two Emmy nominees each found a different model for using the stars they had built while keeping the pipeline of new talents flowing.

RuPAUL’S DRAG RACE AND TOP CHEF: CAROLINAS

In 1913, the Frederic La Delle Company of Jackson – Michigan released an essential text called How To Enter Vaudeville: A Complete Illustrated Course of Instruction. Among the promises on the book’s cover was that you would learn how to do Eccentric Wardrobe and Makeup, Characterization and Impersonation, Distinctiveness and Originality, and Overcome Stage Fright. “I help anyone, anywhere, to get an act and engagement,” La Delle said. “Experience unnecessary.”

In 2009, drag queen RuPaul took up La Delle’s mantle and opened a vaudeville boot camp for a new age, promising, “If you have a dream where people have said, ‘You can't do that,’ our show is an instruction book for anyone out there watching.” He did not happen to name his show Chill’n Like A Vaudevillian, but the historical continuity is real.

RuPaul’s Drag Race asks the queens to go through a gauntlet of variety show performances, doing celebrity impressions, song and dance numbers, stand-up, or sketch comedy. The Snatch Game prompts the contestants to dress up as famous people and fully commit to a giant improv sketch parodying The Match Game, often going deep into dark comedy. Jinkx Monsoon plays Judy Garland as a drug-addled older woman who rambles about her sexual escapades in classic Hollywood and belts out jazz songs.  As Mike Tyson, Monét X Change offers all of the beautiful women in the audience a f*ck in the *ss. In the Reading Challenges, the queens have to walk down a row of their competitors and deliver their wittiest one-liner insults. Darienne Lake sasses, “BenDeLaCreme, you remind me of a Russian doll: Full of yourself.” The queens may even be challenged with doing showbiz tasks that are conventionally hidden backstage like makeup and costume design.

Then they walk the catwalk, showing off a costume and presentation they have designed around that week’s theme. The survivors of that day’s challenge move on while the bottom two are forced to “lip sync for their lives.” Loser goes home.

Over time you see the contestants construct a larger persona around themselves, attempting to become stars. If you think about Paul Reubens’ construction of Pee-Wee Herman or Terry Bollea’s reinvention as Hulk Hogan, that’s essentially what they’re trying to do (just with a queerer aesthetic.) Some of them do break out. Jinkx Monsoon played Maestro, a member of the celestial Pantheon of Discord, on Doctor Who. She has performed across Broadway and London theater. Some stay within the reality landscape. Bob The Drag Queen and Monét X Change played The Traitors.

Survivor showed how a regular person could become a star by acting naturally in front of a Super Bowl sized audience. RuPaul’s Drag Race showed how a somewhat irregular person could become a star through a kind of creative workshop. But as Drag Race produced more and more favorites, it was faced with the same challenge: Would it retain its original commitment to discovering fresh talent or begin building icons associated with their franchise by focusing more and more on returning legends? And it found a solution I’ve wished for years that Survivor would try. ¿Por qué no ambos? RuPaul kept his flagship show focused on discovering new gems, but starting early on he created a spinoff called RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars where alumni could continue to delight their fans. By creating an entire second road for All-Stars to drive down, RuPaul has solved the congestion issues faced by other series, where insanely popular talents might have to sit on the shelf for decades before receiving a second chance.

There is definitely an argument to be made for Survivor’s model. By only holding a special All-Star season a couple of times a decade, Jeff Probst makes it an event. Jeopardy! Masters has become an annual event now. When Survivor held Winners at War, where only people who won their season were invited, it felt like a once in a lifetime event. It might sound outrageous to suggest RuPaul risks creating the mundane, but there are tradeoffs.

Top Chef took one last look at the problem on the board: How do we use existing popular names to increase our ratings without sacrificing the Horatio Alger fantasy? And they found a fifth solution. What if we brought our graduates back as the faculty? What if they taught the lessons we watched them learn to a new generation? What if we respected their right to be tough on the n00bs or show empathy because they had survived the war themselves?  

The show’s current host, Kristen Kish, almost flunked out of the system. She started out as a contestant on Season 10, chef de cuisine at Stir, Barbara Lynch's Boston demonstration kitchen and cookbook store, already skilled but little known. As a young gay South Korean-born woman with short hair and tattoos, she was not someone television executives would have historically chosen to star in a TV series. But she tested her merits against her comrades in the kitchen, and she thrived. She had won four challenges when she was placed in charge of a battalion in the great Restaurant Wars of 2012. Her concept was overly ambitious. She failed to manage a subordinate who screwed up the bouillabaisse. Kristen was told to pack her knives and go. By all rights she should have returned to relative anonymity.  But even though she dropped off the main show she persevered, winning five consecutive showdowns on a web series called Top Chef: Last Chance Kitchen and earning a chance to return to cable. She cooked a four-course meal head-to-head against her opponent, Brooke Williamson. Her red snapper with leeks, Little Gem lettuce, tarragon, uni, and shellfish nage carried the day, and she became the Top Chef. Within weeks she had been hired as the head chef at Menton, a fine dining restaurant. Now she’s the face of the series, the one who decides if your bouillabaisse was good enough.

Ten other former contestants played roles as mentors and judges on the Emmy nominated season, Top Chef: Carolinas. Season 19’s Ashleigh Shanti, who was from North Carolina (with training in Kenya), became the chef’s local guide, teaching them about Appalachian cuisine and the region's recovery after Hurricane Helene before they cooked for 200 first responders, farmers, and chefs in the affected Asheville community.

The five Emmy nominees for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program each took a different approach to the same industry challenge, practically staging their own reality competition in which they had to prepare the most creative presentation. Is it better to cap many seasons of newcomers with a climactic battle of legacy players? Or invite the zeitgeist’s most interesting dinner guests to a big party at a castle? Or have new media stars of the moment compete against showbusiness legends of yesteryear? Or create one show to make stars and another to showcase them? Or have the experienced veterans come back to teach the next class of newbies?

According to the insiders, The Traitors is predicted to win for the third year in a row. My vote is still for DWTS. Alas, we can’t pull out our cell phones and text our vote. Do the Emmy voters like DWTS’ showbiz samba or The Traitors’ Rapaport court? Did they even watch all the shows? We’ll find out on September 14th.

Biography

Charlie Jenkins is the author of American Wrestling: 1989, a transmedia architect, and the son of Professor Henry Jenkins. He has been a close observer of reality television for over 25 years and he’s currently developing a speculative fiction project set in that world.