Life as It Should Be

Devon Halliday on the lure of reality TV in Stephen Fishbach’s novel ‘Escape!’

By Devon HallidayJanuary 27, 2026

• Fiction

• Television

WHATEVER YOUR RELATIONSHIP to reality TV—whether you watch it obsessively, reluctantly, ironically, or not at all—you have probably tried at some point to understand its appeal. And if you’ve watched enough of it, you might even have asked yourself: “Why would anybody put themselves through this?” Escape! (2026), the debut novel by two-time Survivor contestant Stephen Fishbach, offers a compelling answer. As it follows eight contestants and a production crew filming a survival show in the remote jungle, Fishbach’s novel explores the psychology of reality TV, from the conniving producers to the self-aggrandizing contestants to the devoted fans. The result is a novel of hard-hitting entertainment, packed with plot twists and sharp insights.

The story begins with two disgraced characters on a collision course. Kent Duvall is a former reality TV competitor, scrounging for scraps of glory at reunions, speaking gigs, and charity events. Beck Bermann is an underemployed producer, recently fired from a gig on a show about surfing dogs. The advent of a brand-new jungle survival show (also called Escape!) offers both characters a last-ditch chance at redemption.

With Beck on the production crew and Kent on the cast, we might expect their redemption arcs to converge. But Beck instead fixates on another of the eight contestants—Miriam, the typecast “nerd” and predestined loser of the show—as an underdog just waiting to be led into the limelight. Beck is determined to make Miriam the hero, whereas Kent is determined to be the hero. Meanwhile, there are six other contestants angling for hero status, plus a large cast of showrunners and producers and camerapeople, all trying to figure out, improve upon, or entirely rewrite the story.

Narratives bloom, die, and get resurrected; plotlines are unceremoniously chopped short; and character arcs soar, then shrink to background detail. Footage is truth, but there is so much of it—and so short a runtime—that most of the truth won’t get told. Just as the characters get their hearts set on certain narratives, so too does the reader. When one (genuine, developing, earnest) love story is thrown over for a showmance, we feel as devastated as Beck, who has spent hours and tons of social capital laying the groundwork for the real love story. To have the rug of traditional plotting pulled out from under us so many times is maddening—and also the novel’s point.

Fishbach is interested not in replicating the experience of watching reality TV but, rather, in flipping it over and exposing its machinery. As such, Escape! is both less satisfying and more interesting than a typically packaged season of reality TV. In his refusal to lift the most appealing plot strands out of the tangle of competing narratives, Fishbach rejects the neatness of storytelling—and makes the case that such simplifications are always suspect.

A classic feature of reality TV is the “confessional,” in which contestants reveal their true feelings to the camera in a one-sided interview. But Escape! reminds us of the invisible half of these interviews: the producers. “The micro-gestural markers of approval and disapproval—the smile, the frown, leaning in, and leaning away—guide the contestants so subtly they don’t even know it’s happening, like that feeling you get at the tip of your spine when someone’s bored at a dinner party,” Beck explains during a scene in which she shepherds Miriam from one interpretation toward its opposite. As Miriam nears the “correct” interpretation, Beck provides Pavlovian encouragement: “I leaned forward, my eyebrows hiked and my mouth open just a touch, like I couldn’t wait to hear her thoughts. Suddenly she was the wittiest guest at this cocktail party.”

These scenes are among the novel’s most unnerving, as the producers chip away at the contestants’ resistance. A producer poses a question to one of them: “Wouldn’t you say you wish you’d never left Kent behind?” At first, the contestant tries to prevaricate: “‘I would say I wish—’ She was wary, choosing her words carefully. ‘I wish I’d never left all of that back there.’ She gave a quick, hopeful look up at the camera, like she might have gotten away with it.” But soon she gives in, providing the desired sound bite: “I wish I’d never left Kent.”

The manipulation goes deeper than mere sound bites. We watch as the contestants begin to echo the producers’ insights as their own, following personal codes (how to be a hero, how to stand up for yourself) that were only recently implanted into their minds. After obeying a producer’s suggestion without wanting or meaning to, Miriam begins to speculate: “What if she was now discovering a deeper self that knew things that were opaque to her conscious intelligence? […] Wouldn’t that be wonderful? And isn’t that why she’s here?” It is a terrifying conflation of gut instinct with gaslighting.

If this is all beginning to sound a bit grim, that’s because it is. Underneath the splashy concept, the twists, the drama, and the pleasures of a highly plotted novel (so rare in literary fiction), Escape! presents a rather bleak view of personal transformation. Of the main characters, only one changes for the better, but they lose everything in the process. The others betray themselves, corrupt their judgment beyond the point of recovery, and, most damningly, remain stuck in the seductive world of the show. The reader might be inspired to clutch the real world a little tighter after finishing the novel, but the characters prefer to stay in the myth of reality TV, where everything they do has the chance of mattering.

Because that is the secret, the one irreproducible thing that reality TV offers to its contestants. We see it when Miriam is sitting on a tree stump, giving her first confessional:

Sitting here, surrounded by all this production equipment whose entire subtextual message was that she was worth miking and worth videotaping, that she was worth spending tens of thousands of dollars to record, Miriam started to untwist on the stump, not just that she was sitting up straighter, but as though her entire spine was expanding.

We see it when Kent decides to return to reality TV despite the wreck it has made of his life: “He’s here to slip into the old costume, which has started to sag and tear. He’s here to be Kent Duvall.” We see it when the contestants cast out of the show can’t stop obsessing about the show: “Was everybody talking about me after I left?” they ask.

Reality TV, as Fishbach depicts it, offers its participants a trade: agency for attention. The contestants get to feel that every choice they make is important, even though they are no longer entirely in control of their choices. As the contestants obediently follow the paths the producers have paved for them, they remain utterly convinced that the choice of one path over another is not only voluntary but also significant. They will compromise any of their values along the way so long as the decision to make that compromise matters to someone.

In real life, the intricate minutiae of our days do not matter to anyone outside the small circle of people who love us. However, “on the show, every morsel of food [a contestant] ate, how long he slept, every passing whim or frustration, mattered urgently to the producers. It was how life should be, all the purposefulness of a religion, that the trivial opinions and feuds of your tiny existence mattered in the eyes of God.” Reality TV gives to some what religion gives to others: protagonist status in a story of cosmic importance.

This is a convincing analogy, but Fishbach has a still-better insight in store. He compares the feeling of being on reality TV to Kent’s memories of his childhood, when the boy and his mother would collect caterpillars for a butterfly-growing kit:

Every day as they peered into the cup, his mom would ask him, “What do you notice?,” and they discussed like it was serious business. […] One of the things he misses most about being a kid was the sense that these experiences mattered. That it mattered how much attention he paid to the butterflies, that it mattered how much he loved his mother.

Reality TV cannot bring back the glow of existential importance, but it is the closest these contestants will ever come to feeling it again.

No such glow is conferred on the viewers of reality TV—our decision to binge-watch four episodes in a row will not be noted by anyone, save perhaps our partners and roommates—but as we imagine ourselves in the contestants’ shoes, we get a taste of that same importance. To watch reality TV thinking “I wouldn’t have voted for him. I wouldn’t have traded the machete for the rice” is to participate in the belief that the minor decisions of ordinary people matter vitally—that our minor decisions could matter vitally, under the right (televised) circumstances.

Escape! contains more layers, more wisdom, and more energy than I have articulated here. It is also flawed and at times frustrating. The plot frequently outstrips the characters, pulling the rug out so often that it’s hard to fully invest in each new scenario. Toward the end, the novel’s grim outlook nearly overwhelms its entertainment value, and the final sequence packs so much distress and injustice into such a tight space that I finished the book feeling troubled and exhausted, despite all my enjoyment along the way.

There is also the problem of the producer Beck, whose character never quite coheres, despite the many pages we spend with her. The plot requires her to function as an agent of chaos, which results in contradictory actions and inconsistent characterization. On one hand, she is an experienced manipulator; on the other hand, she gets drunk and sleeps with her boss, whiffs social cues, and fails to secure any lasting allies. Her early fixation on Miriam feels shoehorned in; she progresses from skimming Miriam’s bio (“Was I crazy to think she looked like me?”) to plotting out her vindication (“What if I could give Miriam a different story?”) within two pages. Such leaps are the signs of a character given too many jobs at once.

These missteps are noticeable, but Fishbach compensates for them with an abundance of authenticity and imagination. He writes with the urgency of someone who has glimpsed what everyone else is missing: the stymied longing that propels the devotees of reality TV. In one scene, midway through the filming of the show, the contestants speculate that a poisonous snake was purposely sent into camp by the producers. But this suspicion offers them a strange comfort. “Paranoia is a fantasy of control,” Fishbach writes. What a relief it would be if the contestants were not, after all, “at the mercy of an irrational universe” but safe within the preconceived world of the show, in which everything, even snakebites, happens for a reason.

Nowhere else have I seen the quasi-religious appeal of reality TV evoked so persuasively and with such compassion. Escape! is a mad romp deserving of close study, shrewd and harrowing and full of heart.