Pictures and Their 1,000 Words

It’s not surprising that many things in Hollywood are fake. Kim Kardashian’s bangs (and personality), for instance, Bradley Cooper’s third, fourth and fifth nipple, and yes, it appears, even “reality” TV. Although I could spend days and days cataloging all the unrealistic aspects of reality television, today’s blog will focus on MTV’s Catfish.

If you’re unfamiliar with the show, it’s formatted like the 2010 film of the same name, and profiles people as they meet their online loves for the first time. What makes this “great” TV is that these people are basing their entire relationships on photos, online chats, texts and (sometimes) phone calls. What they don’t seem to do—ever—is any kind of video chat. You see where this is going?  The online love rarely ends up being the person in the profile picture—in fact, several times they’ve ended up being, not only the wrong person, but the wrong sex as well.

I had heard rumblings that the whole thing was fake—dating back to the release of the movie—which I hoped wasn’t true, but the more episodes I see, the more I believe it is. The fact that the elusive online love—a person who up until that point has absolutely refused to meet in real life—could get one phone call from a stranger (the host, Nev) saying that he was doing a show for MTV and that he’d like to facilitate a meeting between the internet lovers, and suddenly the reclusive person thinks meeting sounds like a swell idea? It’s totally unrealistic and sounds pretty fishy to me. (See what I did there? Catfish is fishy?! Hi-larious!)

What finally convinced me that this is all a sham, though, was my experience with Google Image Search. Have you tried this? You upload a picture and it’s supposed to bring up websites that display that picture. On the show, they always use it to search pictures from the online profile in question, and almost always find that the photos are tied to other online profiles—real profiles—and that, therefore, the profile in question is fake.

Nev and his right-hand man, Max, doing a little “research” – probably with Google Image Search.

Sounds great, except for one thing: It doesn’t work. I tried Google Image Search with my Facebook profile picture, a picture that’s obviously on the internet because it’s on my Facebook profile, and what photo did it bring up? Gisele Bündchen’s. I mean, obviously if you’ve ever seen me, you know that Gisele and I are basically doppelgängers, and that I get mistaken for a Victoria’s Secret model every day of my life, but that’s not the point. The point is, it was the wrong picture. My profile pic didn’t come up. In fact, I tried it with several different pictures, with the same results. So how is it that the correct photo ALWAYS comes up on Catfish and always points to a fake profile?

Easy.

The show is as fake as the online profiles it aims to debunk.