What is more embarrassing for a bird: flying into a window, or watching another bird hit the glass and bounce off it? This question kept tumbling around my mind after watching five episodes of Byron Baes, Netflix Australia’s attempt at a “so bad it’s good” reality TV series that is, in fact, just very bad.
It’s full of vapid people, doing things we have come to expect from such shows: gossiping, bitching and backstabbing; pursuing trivial arguments and forming petty allegiances – all the while blurting random thoughts to the camera, encouraged by the producers to remove any kind of filter between brain and mouth.
It’s surely embarrassing to be one of the subjects (the metaphorical bird hitting the window), but there’s also a different, more poignant kind of embarrassment to be the viewer (the other bird watching). The latter comes with the shame of accepting something terribly stupid has occured within the development of your own species. That’s what I felt while watching the privileged and fame-seeking subjects of this new series, who converge in the famous New South Wales coastal town of Byron Bay in order to… um…well…
Usually in reality TV programs (Byron Bae’s producers prefer the term “docu-soap,” but they’re not fooling anyone), a common goal provides a narrative spine. Participants strive to cook the best meal, for example, or survive the longest in the wilderness, or tolerate housemates from hell. But here there is no shared purpose: the subjects are in effect contestants without a competition, merely sharing a desire for celebrity and the furthering of their careers. This is true of other reality TV shows, of course, but here it’s nakedly on display.
Sarah from the Gold Coast is a musician hoping to make it big. Jade, who claims to be the most followed male influencer in Australia, says he is here to “make new friends,” but really of course just craves the spotlight. Jessica is the owner of a fashion label. Talent manager Alex, a former assistant of – shudder – Kyle Sandilands, is the director of two influencer agencies. A couple of the men have been recycled from other reality TV shows, suggesting this genre is a circuit to milk before your 15 minutes of fame are up: Nathan appeared on The Bachelorette, and Elias on Love Island.
The absence of a shared purpose is one reason Byron Baes feels so rudderless, which makes the producers even more determined to locate crumbs of drama and inflate them into scandals. Jessica for instance feels she is owed an apology from Hannah (the co-director of a shop that sells ethically sourced clothing) for some incident that happened prior to the show even beginning. Alex suspects Jade has a large number of dodgy followers and intends to confront him about it. Another key dramatic thread explores the question of whether Nathan is a “fuckboy”.
You don’t watch a show like Byron Baes for intellectual nourishment, but it fails even its own modest standards
Byron Baes generated controversy in the lead-up to its release for two main reasons: firstly due to the backlash from the Byron Bay community, including Indigenous leaders, furious their town was being used as its backdrop; and secondly for its cast members appearing to violate COVID health measures. The former could have provided an opportunity for actually interesting drama through an exploitable tension between the local community and these fame-hungry influencers. Imagine how fun the series would have been if it had incorporated the rancor of the locals – perhaps cutting to the owners of the local fish and chip shop, kvetching about the sideshow that’s rolled into town.
In an alternate universe, the producers might also have had something to say about influencers: an especially tedious form of modern celebrity born during the era of social media, appealing to algorithms and enslaved to engagement metrics. But again there is absolutely nothing upstairs, no conversation about what this form of celebrity says about contemporary times, or popular culture and society at large. (For more on this topic, check out the 2021 documentary Fake Famous, which discusses among other things the difference between “famous” and “online famous,” and the belief that followers are – in the words of its director, Nick Bilton – “the current currency of the most important thing on earth today.”)
You don’t watch a show like Byron Baes for intellectual nourishment, but it fails even its own modest standards, taking a long time to embellish its own confected, petty nastiness. Within just a few minutes of the first episode, Byron Baes samples upcoming conflict in an attempt to whip up some interest. “I think you’re an egotistical fuck,” says one subject. “I think you’re an absolute fucking disgrace,” declares another.
But without context these words are just baseless insults floating in the ether, seemingly for nobody and about nothing. By the end of the third episode, the show has more successfully stoked our rubbernecking instincts: not exactly “can’t watch, can’t look away” material, but approaching the realm of the morbidly intriguing. It sure takes its time to get there.
For a film and TV critic such as myself, getting the knives out for a critique of a production like Byron Baes is perhaps to be expected. For a long time the reality TV genre represented to many of us the death spiral of broadcast television. Hit programmes such as Big Brother and Dancing With The Stars grabbed a sugar hit of ratings while engaging in a “how low can you go?” race to the bottom that surely signified the eventual end of the medium itself.
These reality TV shows stood in stark contrast to the generally much more compelling longform narrative programmes, which once upon a time characterised the streaming experience. The vast majority of Netflix’s slate still consists of narrative productions, to be sure, but it’s clear it has more than just dipped its toes into the pool of reality TV. Tonnes of titles are on offer, from Queer Eye to Too Hot To Handle to Master Chef’s Amazing Race for Real Housewives to Marry a Bachelorette in the Big Brother House: Survivor Edition (OK, I made that last one up).
Locally, Byron Baes joins a line-up of trashy Netflix Australia commissions that includes Chris Lilley’s Lunatics, the soapy fantasy series Tidelands and the so-so disappearance thriller Clickbait (which was shot in Melbourne but set in California). The commissioning of a show like Byron Baes from the likes of Netflix is a stark reminder of the streaming platforms’ abandonment of any pretense of superior quality. To use TV industry parlance, Netflix (and other streamers) is embracing diverse “content offerings”, which in plain speak means they are integrating content viewers have historically expected of broadcast television, with the ultimate goal of taking it all in the end.
There are still some varieties of highly popular broadcast programming that platforms such as Netflix generally don’t touch: for instance local current affairs shows and daily news programmes. It’s perhaps just a matter of time until they march into that space. If or when they do, who knows what that content will look like – maybe, just maybe, we will see the emergence of new kinds of respectable investigative journalism. Anything is possible, though it’s hard to feel optimistic – particularly after watching Byron Baes.
Byron Baes is now streaming on Netflix