A Look Back At The Wackiest Reality Shows From The 2000s

The 2000s were the decade of reality television. Audiences tuned in to watch real people in allegedly real situations, making shows like "American Idol" and "Big Brother" some of the biggest shows on the air. Television producer Mike Darnell later explained to SBS that a lot of the rise of reality TV was due to simple economics. "If you have to fill 40 hours of TV with scripted shows it'll cost you an arm and a leg," he said. "You'll be out of business because those scripted shows will do no better and probably worse than reality shows did."

However, while a lot of reality shows became unstoppable cultural juggernauts, plenty more existed, as Darnell hinted, simply to fill time. For every influential and popular show like "The Simple Life" or "The Real World," there were a dozen more shows that aired very few seasons, got very few viewers, and inspired much handwringing on the state of popular culture and what reality TV meant for national attention spans. A lot of these reality shows have since been all but forgotten, no longer really talked about and not available to stream anywhere online. Fear not! We've done some digging, so read on for a look back at the wackiest reality shows from the 2000s.

A lot of 2000s-era reality shows have been lost to the big TV graveyard in the sky because audiences were simply overwhelmed by the sheer amount of arguably tasteless content choking the airwaves, and the shows flopped. One such failure was the provocatively titled "Who's Your Daddy?" which managed to air only one episode in 2005. The show was about a woman named TJ Myers who was adopted at birth; producers reunited her with her birth father but hid him among a group of imposters. If Myers could correctly guess which of the men was her dad, she'd win money; if she eliminated her birth father, the guy who managed to fool her would take home the cash.

Understandably, the show was controversial before it even aired. "By turning adoption reunions into a game show, 'Who's Your Daddy?' takes an intensely personal and complex situation ... and transforms it into a voyeuristic display," Deborah Capone told Today; this mother had adopted her daughter, and subsequently organized an email campaign to try to get the show canceled.

Producers defended it, though. Fox's head of reality programming told Variety (via The Guardian), "I guarantee you: if you have any heart, you'll be bawling at the end of the show." Myers, too, defended "Who's Your Daddy?" when she told a radio DJ, per the New York Daily News, "It was just absolutely amazing and full of love. I didn't understand why, when everybody wanted to meet each other, the adoption agencies are upset."

VH1 in the aughts was a seemingly lawless place where anything could and would happen, and in that respect, "Strip Search" fit right in. The cleverly titled show was a national competition searching for strippers — male strippers — who would, if they were to win, receive a lucrative contract to perform in an all-male revue on the Las Vegas Strip. Basically, it was "Magic Mike" before there was a "Magic Mike" ... or a "Finding Magic Mike." 

"Watching 15 shirtless guys bicker, work out, learn how to dance and then bicker shirtless some more ... is well ... wonderful tv!" wrote one blogger in a review of the show. The short-lived 2005 series came at a pivotal point in culture, premiering as debates over metrosexuals were raging and shortly after the republican party tried to pass a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage. "Strip Search" was pointed to as an example of the then-new trend of men waxing their body hair; Salon called them "smoothies" in a piece on the culture. Male stripping was also on the rise overall, as The Denver Post noted. 

While there were also iterations of the show in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, the winners of the U.S. version — who had to compete in the likes of thong-dance challenges — performed in "American Storm," a Vegas show that ran for several years, according to Nevada Magazine. "Gentlemen are welcome [to attend the strip show]," they pointed out.

There were a lot of dating shows on television in the 2000s, and many of them prioritized beauty and looks over brains and personality. In an attempt to correct this, Fox aired a show called "Mr. Personality" in 2003, hosted by Monica Lewinsky, that aimed to focus more on the likability of the suitors rather than the handsome faces and conventionally attractive bodies other reality shows elevated.

The only problem was ... viewers found the show to be downright creepy. In an attempt to get the series' central woman, Hayley Arp, to get to know the men instead of feeling physical attraction, producers put the suitors in terrifying masks that concealed their facial features. CNN reported that the men looked average anyway, though you wouldn't know it beneath their facial hoods, helmets, and sculpted visages that inspired more terror in viewers than affection.

"I thought it was stupid. ... [But] I was always up for something that I was actually building with my hands," mask designer Tina Haatainen-Jones later told The Outline. "They wanted a mask without any personality. So just a neutral mask. ... I wanted to make them more interesting, so I made it like a beaten metal kind of sculpture." Producer Scott Firestone admitted, "I think it probably did come off rather ridiculously in the end."

On "Kept," a VH1 reality show that aired one single season in 2005, Mick Jagger's ex-wife and socialite Jerry Hall searched the country for a so-called kept man. "Kept" wasn't exactly a dating show; rather than looking for someone to fall in love with her, Hall was instead simply searching for some eye candy she could bring as her plus-one to industry events, someone she could spoil in exchange for keeping her company. The men had to compete in challenges like etiquette and modeling lessons, and in exchange they would receive a year-long lease on a penthouse in London and what the New York Post called "a six-figure allowance."

A man named Seth Frye won, according to Entertainment Weekly, but he seemed pretty over it once the show ended. "I'm supposed to say I'm going to be at Jerry's beck and call, blah blah blah. I had a great time. But I really don't know," he told the magazine. "Gimme my hundred grand."

It seems that Hall was over him, too. Frye told TVSA that he did receive the $100,000 prize money, but he did not have to follow through on being, well, kept. "After the last shot I was whisked away for a bunch of exit interviews never to see her again," he confessed. After the finale aired, viewers were never to see "Kept" again, either.

Before the tanned and gelled days of "Jersey Shore," there was "Growing Up Gotti," an A&E reality show about the children of Victoria Gotti. She's the daughter of John Gotti, the infamous mobster whose life would later inspire a famously critically panned John Travolta film. Victoria lived with three teenage sons named Frank, John, and Carmine, and the show followed the family's exploits as they ... well, mostly just bickered a lot. The boys wore distractingly blue contact lenses, because why not? It was 2004!

Critics were not kind to the show, to put it mildly. According to the New York Daily News, one contemporaneous review on Film.com read, "Victoria Gotti has the warmth of an ice pick and her sons the charm of, well, thugs." An article about the series in Deseret News was titled, fittingly, "Go away 'Gotti'!" Victoria's reasoning for signing her family up for the show strained credulity with a lot of viewers. "I think I did it for my children, believe it or not," she reportedly said, adding that she didn't want her boys "to go out in the world and be known as the Mafia princes, blah, blah, blah."

Though the boys told the New York Post that the filming process was difficult, Carmine added, "It's better than 'The Osbournes,' because we're in it." The show managed to air 40 episodes across three seasons in the 16 months it was on air, so clearly, someone must have been watching.

Reality television arguably sank to some incredibly exploitative lows in the 2000s, and perhaps no show sank lower than Fox's short-lived series "The Swan." The 2005 competition show revolved around women receiving plastic surgery live on television, adjusting all of their physical insecurities in an attempt to make them more, well, conventionally beautiful.

In addition to the very nature of the show causing controversy, Entertainment Weekly reported that the show was often "Frankenbited," meaning editors chopped up dialogue to make people sound like they were saying things thy didn't mean. And, according to the New York Post, a lot of the transformations didn't stick. Former contestant Laurie Arias admitted later, "I had the most surgeries of any Swan in the history of the show and it has all gone to absolute s**t. I am a 300-pound mess of a person who is afraid to go outside."

However, another previous contestant named Rachel Love insisted to Metro that it wasn't the show's fault that not everyone's transformation lasted. "I would have thought [the producers] would have helped a little more with that. But what can you expect from them?" she said. "Reality shows aren't there to guide you for the rest of your life." Nevertheless — or perhaps because of how controversial it was and how painful it apparently became for some people involved — Time named it one of the most influential seasons of reality television ever.

On the Ashton Kutcher-produced series "Beauty and the Geek" — which bridged the gap when The WB became The CW — conventionally beautiful women were paired up with awkward, nerdy men to compete in challenges. "This is not a dating show," the series explained in its opening moments. "This is a social experiment, to see if beautiful women can turn geeks into social superstars. ... And can a group of geeks help these beauties become more than just a pretty face?" Challenges included the so-called geeks attending fashion shows while the dubbed beauties had to help fix cars, because it was the 2000s and gender essentialism was seemingly all the rage.

It seems that, all things considered, the show may not have been as exploitative as it could have been. "I was really happy with the way the show portrayed me," Season 4 contestant Jesse Yeary told Reality TV World in 2007. "I was kind of worried beforehand. There's tons of things they could use that make me look way more awkward and stuff than what they even showed on the show, so I was pretty pleased."

While the series only lasted a handful of years in the United States, the format was successful abroad; "Beauty and the Geek Australia" has been airing consistently since 2009, including a season that aired in 2022.