Climate Change Is Our Reality — So Why Wouldn't It Appear on Reality TV?

But Zezo said attitudes have started to shift toward featuring climate change on shows.

“When you talk to buyers now, maybe they don’t exactly know how to do it, but the door is more open to it,” he said. “And I’m excited to follow that where it goes.”

Scenes modeling sustainable behaviors or highlighting the impact of climate change have been cropping up lately in shows as diverse as the paranormal reality series Ghost Adventures, (in one episode, an anthropologist suggests climate change might be responsible for the unexpected sighting of a massive unidentified sea creature); talk shows, such as Jane Fonda’s appearance a few months ago on The Kelly Clarkson Show; and the business startup contest Shark Tank (for example, Gwyneth Paltrow buys into a sustainable diaper company).

According to a University of Southern California study shared with NPR ahead of its fall publish date, nearly 30,000 mentions of climate change-related keywords appeared across every category of unscripted TV between last August and this February.

“That included home shows, food shows, docuseries, even sports,” said Erica Rosenthal, director of research at the university’s Norman Lear Center, the group behind the study. “So that was really a surprising and exciting finding.”

An unlikely climate change reality star

One unlikely example of the new openness to climate change programing is the car racing show Extreme E.

In the series, electric SUVs try to outpace each other in remote parts of the world hit hard by climate change. Season one included a race in Greenland that passed by a retreating glacier.

The show also includes many direct mentions of the term “climate change,” such as, “In climate change, everyone needs to win, or we all lose.” Last year, according to the producer’s audience growth report, the show reached 135 million viewers across the globe.

But unscripted shows like this one that center climate change as a topic — or even mention the term directly — are still relatively rare.

“What we’re seeing is plenty of fleeting mentions of terms that are climate-adjacent,” USC’s Rosenthal said. “But not necessarily explicitly climate change.”

Rosenthal said the most commonly used terms in the study were “vegan,” “vegetarian,” “insulation” and “solar.”

“The term ‘climate change’ itself represented just 4% of all of the keyword mentions we came across,” Rosenthal said, though he added that the term did make it into the top 10 of the keywords the study covered.

This baseline analysis of unscripted TV was created as a follow-up to research published last year on scripted TV and movies. As with this previous study, the new findings are based on the analysis of show scripts. This means it excludes most non-verbal references to sustainable behaviors or climate change depicted on screen, such as, for instance, Recipe for Disaster‘s use of compost bins on set.

“When people are talking about climate change and global warming, they’re talking about it through other ways,” said University of Colorado Boulder environmental studies professor, Max Boykoff.

Boykoff, who studies the intersection of mass media and climate change, said he’s not surprised that unscripted TV producers tend to sneak climate change-adjacent material into their shows, rather than address the topic head on.

“Unscripted television is a way to get into the homes of people who otherwise may not take interest in climate change,” Boykoff said. “Those who otherwise may see it as yet another set of challenges that they just don’t want to have to deal with.”

But Boykoff said producers need to be bolder, since the medium has the power to reach so many people. Using that influence only to focus on small behavioral changes isn’t enough.

“Climate change is a collective action problem at a global scale,” Boykoff said. “We ought not get caught up in just using a mug instead of a paper cup and thinking that we’ve done our job.”

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