Death, disease and cash prizes: the most disastrous reality TV shows ever

For a long time Katie Tunn couldn’t talk about Eden without feeling sick. “It was almost a PTSD thing,” the 38-year-old says of the results of appearing on what’s come to be regarded as one of the most disastrous British reality shows ever made.

Filmed in 2016, the social experiment followed 23 strangers as they tried to spend a year cut off from society, living self-sufficiently on the rugged west coast of Scotland. Originally programmed to air in real time, and shot by the cast members themselves, low ratings and public set invasions had forced producers to take it off air. (“We were getting viewers kayaking to the shore, bringing beer and chocolate,” says Tunn.) When it finally returned to screens as five-part series Eden: Paradise Lost in 2017, it was clear that what might have started as a cosy programme about building a community from scratch had taken a sinister turn. “It was just a completely different experience in the second six months compared to the first six months,” says Tunn. “It got very dark.”

The history of reality TV is littered with shows like Eden, ones that millions of pounds were invested in but descended into chaos or were publicly derided – or even cancelled before they aired. Perhaps that’s not surprising; unscripted shows have to walk a very narrow tightrope in order to remain gripping enough but not so dramatic that their contestants end up in mental or physical danger. It means that for every mega hit such as Love Island or The Traitors there are also shows that end up calamitous. Take NBC’s 2021 competition The Ultimate Slip N’ Slide, which got culled before it even finished filming, when 65% of crew got a giardia infection – and “awful explosive diarrhoea” – from the $6m waterslide-based set. Or The Chop: Britain’s Top Woodworker, the Sky-produced, British Bake Off-inspired crafting competition, which went off air after one episode when viewers noticed that one of the contestants allegedly had neo-Nazi tattoos on his face.

Who’s Your Daddy? , a family-reunited show formatted like reality dating stalwart The Bachelor, received mass criticism when it aired on Fox in 2005. The show followed a glamorous young woman, who had grown up with adoptive parents, as she tried to work out which of eight middle-aged men was her estranged father by living with them in a mansion. If she guessed right – basing her decision on things such as dance challenges – she won $100,000. If she picked wrongly, the fake father got the money. One clip, still on YouTube, shows a man telling her: “I want you to know that you were conceived in absolute love,” as she breaks down in joyful tears. He’s later revealed to be an actor. The idea was slammed by adoption charities as “destructive, insensitive and offensive”. The rest of the series was never made.

Another 00s show that caused public outrage was Kid Nation. The 2007 CBS series was like a junior Survivor. It saw 40 children, aged 8 to 15, attempt to run their own town in New Mexico for 40 days – cooking, cleaning and making the rules for themselves – with no adult involvement and no modern luxuries such as indoor bathrooms or electricity.

Laurel McGoff , 29, appeared on the show as a 12-year-old and says that while she enjoyed being part of it – “it was a little hippy commune” – she questions the ethics of the series, looking back. The cast were taken out of school for six weeks for filming, with no tutoring. “There were no kids on the show from New York or LA, because they had pretty strict child labour laws, as so much filming takes place there. But in all the other 48 states there were really no laws written into place about missing school for entertainment purposes.”

The producers would, like on adult reality shows, attempt to manipulate the children into having arguments. “Sometimes they would tell us what people said in confessionals to get our reaction, which is pretty shady to do with children!” says McGoff. And conditions were tough: the children slept on the floor, were only allowed a shower every three days and were only provided with one guaranteed meal – a sandwich – most days. “It’s fine when adults sign up for Survivor and are agreeing to eat poorly and not brush their teeth or shower,” she says, “but when it’s an eight-year-old who is not getting all their nutritious needs met, even for a short period of time, I don’t know if that’s exactly legal.”

Four children went to hospital after accidentally drinking bleach left in cups that had been cleaned with it. “I saw kids being like: ‘My stomach is killing me, my stomach is on fire,’” says McGoff . One child’s mother filed a complaint against the production company after her daughter’s face was burned with scalding fat while trying to fry some potatoes. There was no season two.

When it comes to truly horrifying reality show disasters, one French production company, Adventure Line Productions, has had to deal with more than most. Two of its series were cancelled between 2013 and 2015 after deaths while shooting. First, in 2013, when filming in Cambodia on Koh-Lanta, the French version of Survivor, was halted because 25-year-old contestant Gérald Babin had a cardiac arrest after a tug of war competition and died. Following media speculation that the production company could have prevented Babin’s death if they had provided better medical attention (which they denied), a week later Thierry Costa, the staff doctor who treated Babin, killed himself, writing in a letter: “I am sure that I treated Gerald with respect, as a patient and not as a contestant.”

Related: Eden plays on our dreams of escaping to a simpler world | Flic Everett

Then in 2015, another tragedy occurred during filming for French survival show Dropped. The series, a remake of a Swedish project, was supposed to follow a group of eight famous sportspeople as they were blindfolded and dropped from a helicopter into some of the world’s toughest environments – with just water and a GPS for survival. After shoots in Ushuaia in Argentina’s Patagonia region, the company planned to take three stars – sailor Florence Arthaud, boxer Alexis Vastine and Olympic gold medallist swimmer Camille Muffat – to the mountains of La Rioja province. Unfortunately, the camera crew’s helicopter collided with the contestants’ helicopter on their way to the shoot , killing the celebrities, two pilots and five crew members. French courts had found the production company guilty of 300 counts of “breaches of labour law and safety obligations,” in the lead up to the helicopter crash . The then French president called the crash an “immense sadness” for the entire nation.

And what about Eden? Why is it seen as one of the most disastrous reality shows in British history? Well, partly because of low ratings and because contestant rule-breaking continued even after the show stopped airing in real time. “I didn’t realise until afterwards that some of the contestants had been taking our boat out and going and having dinner and showers,” says Tunn. But mainly because it descended into a Lord of the Flies nightmare.

“It was probably about winter time when things started changing,” Tunn says. “By then all our mental health was struggling a bit.” A group of male contestants were shown dominating the camp. Adopting a meat-focused diet, they forced vet Rob to butcher excessive amounts of the community’s livestock. “He hated it,” says Tunn. “He was like: these people are being horrible to me, and I’m killing things that I care about, these animals that I love and look after, for them.”

She began to get bullied by those five self-declared Valley Boys – who bonded over “sexist jokes” and “locker room” behaviour. “It just got tribal,” she says. She doesn’t like to talk about the nastiest comments she experienced – still nervous about retaliation from the men – but explains one of them would tell her all the time: “Oh, you’re the worst person I ever met. You’re really horrible.” Other times “you’d look up and there’d be like a group standing on the sand dunes, just watching you”. It took months of CBT and antidepressants for her to recover from her time on the show. “I was a mess.”

Both Tunn and McGoff don’t regret their decision to appear on reality television. Both are actually surprisingly positive about their experiences on the shows. “It’s one of the things I’m most proud of for getting through,” says Tunn. “I still say Kid Nation was the happiest time of my life,” says McGoff.

McGoff does have one complaint, though. She remembers that towards the end of production on Kid Nation, the children woke up to find the producers encouraging them to riot. “This is so dangerous now that I look back,” she says, explaining that she sprained her ankle in the rush and was taken to hospital.

“It wasn’t until I was going to college,” she says, “that I got a call from an insurance company being like: ‘Hey, you owe money from this sprained ankle you had back in 2007,’ and I was like: ‘Oh, I just assumed CBS, a multimillion-dollar corporation, took care of that simple, probably small, medical bill.’ Those fuckers didn’t pay!”

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie . In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org , or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org