On March 3, 2023, reality-television fans stood still. Midway through Vanderpump Rules tenth season, news broke that series leading man Tom Sandoval cheated on his longtime partner and co-star Ariana Madix with another co-star, Raquel Leviss. The scandal wouldn’t be addressed on the show for at least two months, when an episode named after the hashtag that dominated offscreen conversation (#Scandoval) finally aired. The cameras didn’t document the affair, but they managed to capture the slow motion collision of unscripted TV and real life — of what happens when the Bravo edit slams into a narrative already built, struck down, and refashioned by TikTok scholars a hundred times over. 2023 felt like crash after crash, from Love Is Blind to The Real Housewives of New York City to Below Deck: Down Under to Squid Game: The Challenge, all of which reckoned, in various ways, with what constitutes reality and how much intervention goes into documenting it. In celebration, Vulture has rounded up 25 moments — one for every day until Christmas — that shaped reality TV in the year of the lighting-bolt necklace.
