Rachel Abrams

Anna Peel, welcome to The Daily.

You are a culture writer, but you are also a reality TV expert, which I like to think of myself as a reality TV expert just based on how much I watch.

But you have actually spent a lot of time reporting and writing extensively about reality TV.

So just to start the conversation, I wonder if you could, for people who have not seen the show, tell us a brief overview of the premise of Love on the Spectrum.

This show is noteworthy for approximately one million reasons, but not the least of which is that reality TV is a genre of television that is arguably the most exploitative.

The premise of so many shows is that people debase themselves for your amusement, and this show has the potential to be...

an absolute train wreck of a show, right?

Like this is walking such an ethical tightrope.

And what you're saying is that not only does it succeed in walking that tightrope, but it is a commercial success because it is heartwarming, because it makes people feel good.

Okay, so let's talk about how the show came to exist.

Not just a cat wrangler, an assistant cat wrangler.

No, you got to work your way up in the cat wrangling business.

Like actually, she was speaking and like not being nonsensical.

Yes.

OK, I mean, I think it's probably pretty obvious, but just to state the obvious, working on reality television does not, to me, seem like something that prepares you to just start filming in a psychiatric ward.

The issue of consent, though, I can imagine that that was probably one of the biggest, thorniest issues in everything he had to navigate on that show.

How did he approach that?

It was handled very sensitively.

And what was the argument for why they should allow themselves to be exposed in this way?

That sounds like something that would have made quite an impression on a person in his position.