After every long day at the office I go home to face my addiction: watching other people work. Whether I’m gritting my teeth as elderly miners crawl through a tunnel to chip out coal, or cracking up as drag queens scurry to complete missions assigned by RuPaul (catch-phrase: “You better work!”), there’s nothing I’d rather do after a two-hour commute than watch reality television. Much of my life is spent either at work, working from home, or looking for other jobs, so you’d think that the last thing I’d want to do is relive work in an estranged, if tautly edited, form. But reality TV is better than the morosely Freudian period dramas everyone else in my demographic keeps talking about. It’s far more honest about our condition, and therefore more educational.

The first thing you have to realize when you’re watching reality TV — hell, any TV — is that everyone is on the job. So before we consider weighty concepts such as representation, desire, and whose hair is fake, we must start from the fundamentals: TV is a bunch of people trying to survive under the conditions of capitalism, and in that way are pretty much like the rest of us. As Marx reminds us, capital isn’t just money, it’s a social relationship. Wage labor is compulsory. Work is experienced as social domination, which is a term that aptly describes the crap they put entertainment workers through. Even the cast of Jersey Shore, the labor aristocracy of reality show stars, is a bleached-tip hair away from roid-raging each other to the great Shore Store in the sky. With no time off between seasons, our bronzed broletarians are so ready to escape the Sartrean hell of endless GTL and Ron-Ron Juice that Vinny got the world’s worst chest tattoo in a desperate cry for help.

So I offer a corrective to the moralizers like Charlie Brooker, who in Dead Set literalizes the cliché that reality and its audiences are taking part in a mutually cannibalistic frenzy. Rather, the reality show workplace is a theater, run by the biggest corporations in existence, and they’re staging fantasies of work. And so to understand reality TV as ideology, we have to consider what it says about work. But if we want to see the seams of reality TV, the kind that Michael Kors would tsk-tsk on the runway, first we have to think about the part of the labor that isn’t staged for us: the conditions of labor behind the camera, and the larger global economic contexts of work.