The Biggest Opportunity of My Life

What I Gave Up for Reality TV

This spring, I applied to compete on a British TV show. Having read accounts of reality TV casting, I was prepared for multiple grueling rounds of taped interviews. The first interview was a phone call, which lasted five minutes, and centered on my visa status. At the end of the call, I was told that I’d been cast. I had envisioned the casting process as an opportunity to determine, once and for all, whether or not I was objectively interesting. Now I might never know.

The show, now in its twelfth season, is essentially a speed-painting challenge. Participants are given four hours to paint a celebrity. I had a month between the casting and the shoot, and I spent that month devising an increasingly brutal, aggressively anti-social training regimen. I woke up at four a.m. each day and biked to my art studio, where I timed myself painting portraits. Sometimes I painted with my non-dominant hand, in case of injury.

Meanwhile, the production team was fleshing out my backstory, emailing me questionnaires about my childhood. The first question was about my parents. “I’m happy to talk about my family on air,” I wrote in response, “but it’s probably a pretty bleak topic for this sort of show.” This bleakness seemed to inform the rest of my answers. A list of childhood hobbies read: “Crying, journaling in my closet.” My attitude toward competition: “I’m not competitive.” I am surprised they allowed me to proceed.

Weeks passed, and the anxiety dreams got worse. Every night, I dreamt I was on TV, and in the dreams I was charmless, unable to hold anyone’s attention. I slept poorly, and the exhaustion combined with all the studio hours made my whole body a repetitive strain injury. I kept telling myself that I should be grateful for this opportunity. I was living out someone’s dream life, maybe even my own. And then I got an email from my father’s girlfriend telling me that he was in the intensive care unit.

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I didn’t see my father much as a child. He divorced my mother shortly after I was born, moved an hour away, and he and his new wife became involved in a pyramid scheme until she was arrested, and my father somehow evaded prosecution.

Despite the FBI raids and the trials and retrials and my stepmother’s years of imprisonment, my father seemed to be enjoying his new bachelorhood. He played in a jazz band. He dated younger women. He traveled to see the World Cup. He organized a college reunion. He was beloved, revered in my hometown. “I adore your father,” strangers would tell me. “He officiated my wedding.” “He used to come to my restaurant all the time.” “He’s my son’s godfather.” I would relay the connections to my father with pride, but my father never had any memory of these people. His charisma was a one way street. He had always meant more to the world than the world had ever meant to him. He was magnetic and unreachable, like someone on TV.

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I called my father’s girlfriend a dozen times but she didn’t pick up. I called the hospital but they wouldn’t tell me anything because I wasn’t listed as a family member. A clerical oversight that was difficult to not interpret symbolically. “Please just tell me if he’s alive,” I begged, and the nurse told me quietly that he was alive but unconscious. “I’m not in the business of making predictions,” she said. “But you should probably get on a plane.”

I looked up flights. I sat. I thought. I sent an email to my father’s girlfriend telling her that I would appear on TV the following week and asking whether he would survive that long.

I painted more and refreshed my email. Around lunchtime, I wondered if my father might already be dead. I decided that if he was, I would go ahead with the filming. Why rush home just to visit a corpse? And wouldn’t my father want me to appear on TV? Wouldn’t he understand? “This is the biggest opportunity of my life,” I kept telling people, as if I had more than one father.

It wasn’t even that big of an opportunity. 72 artists would appear on this season alone. If you were a portrait painter in the UK, odds are you would appear on the show at some point. Besides, I was only guaranteed one episode, which I would have to win in order to advance. The odds of winning that first round were one in ten. None of the artists would get paid.

I got the news that my father was awake. I called. His words were difficult to make out. There were long, wheezy pauses. “Sorry I’m not very interesting,” he said. Then he fell asleep while I sat in my studio, listening to him breathe.

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My dad was the most interesting person I’d ever met. Distance rendered him godlike. “You worship him,” my mother said once, disdainfully. He worshiped me back. “My favorite daughter,” he said. His other two daughters, from an earlier marriage, hadn’t spoken to him in decades. I was the winner by default.

The night before the shoot, I didn’t sleep. I worried I would never sleep again. I worried my father would never wake up.

In the morning, I took a taxi to a formerly grand arts center, where I was led past gilded murals and mosaics to a windowless green room, handed a vegan breakfast box and kept under close scrutiny by a team of headset-wearing production assistants. “This is the biggest opportunity of your life,” I reminded myself.

The main set was cold and lit by panels of white fluorescence, like a blindingly overcast winter day. I began to set up my palette but was interrupted by a cameraman who wanted to film me squeezing paint. This would be the rhythm of the day—natural gestures interrupted, modified, reenacted for the cameras.

When the celebrity guest entered the room, we clapped and cheered even though we did not know who this person was—they were later introduced to the studio audience as a non-binary indigenous fashion designer. I tried to smile but couldn’t, because I had developed a facial tremor that made it difficult to control my expressions.

The studio audience filed in and the timer was set. As I raced through a preliminary sketch, I was observed not only by artists, judges, minor celebrities, cameramen, and production assistants, but also by a hundred strangers whose running commentary was fully audible to me. It goes without saying that no great work of art has ever been produced in such an environment.

I erased and redrew the head, moved the hands up and down the canvas until it was blurred with erasure. Every few minutes, a roving camera crew came by for an update. “How do you think it’s going so far?” the woman asked. “Fine,” I said, trying to somehow continue working while also smiling at the camera lens. “Can you answer the question as a complete sentence?” she said. “I think it’s going fine so far,” I said.

The interview concluded and, although my sketch remained underdeveloped, I charged ahead with color. Just as I was gaining confidence, a man came to escort me outside for headshots. I stood in the winter wind, holding one of my earlier paintings. My hair kept flying across my face, and I didn’t have an extra arm to adjust it. The timer was still going. I ran back inside. Then it was time for lunch. A previous contestant had advised me that you didn’t need to take the full lunch break. You just needed to swallow food. I walked to the green room with the other artists, swallowed food, and returned to the set.

Back at my easel, I discovered the same bad painting I’d left a few minutes earlier. There was a static camera above my workstation recording my entire process. I could already picture the expert who would watch my episode and think, “This woman is an absolute idiot, blending her paints with Gamsol instead of linseed oil.” The temperature seemed to be dropping. My skin hardened and a male production assistant came by to suggest I arrange my hair so that it covered my nipples. I put a sweater on, only to be told to remove it for visual continuity.

The rest of the artists returned, and time passed, and periodic breaks were announced. I only paused once, to check my email in case my dad was dead. Otherwise, I stayed in the zone.

By the final hour, when the judges were making their rounds, my painting was looking better, and I felt a tentative relief at having done all that was asked of me: trained hard, showed up on time, ate my lunch, and completed a painting. I was rewarded with cryptic feedback.

“What’s left for the rest of the afternoon?” one of the judges asked.

I wasn’t sure. I gestured at the background, which was still white. Maybe I should fill it in?

“It’s up to you,” the judge replied before walking away, trailed by a camera.

In the final minutes, I decided to fill in the background, which I’d left blank until then. I filled it with pink paint. Then I set down my brush. I was satisfied. It was all over. I could sleep now. I could die. My dad could die. I surveyed the other paintings. One of them was excellent. Had I known I would compete against this particular artist, I would’ve bailed on the show a week earlier, flown home to see my dad, and spared myself the public humiliation.

We waited in a hallway while the judges deliberated. An acquaintance of mine in the studio audience texted me to say that the judges didn’t like my background. Then we were ushered back in for the announcement. There would be three artists on the shortlist. Two names were called. My facial muscles twitched. I looked for my acquaintance in the crowd, as if a guy from my monthly writer’s meetup could save me. There was a long pause before the third and final name, the host’s mouth hanging open, and I waited to hear the other girl’s name, but instead I heard my own. The cameras all swiveled toward me and, for the first time that day, my reaction was genuine.

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We went back into the hallway and waited for the winner to be chosen. I decided that if I didn’t win, I would fly home in the morning, and then at the hospital, maybe I wouldn’t outright lie, but I might allow everyone to think that I had chosen to quit the TV show instead of getting eliminated. “It’s just TV,” I might say. “Being here is what matters.”

The judges called us in to hear the results. I stood on stage beside the other two shortlisted artists while cameras and lights were adjusted around us. The studio audience went quiet, and I wondered if they already knew who was going to win. To distract myself, I imagined my arrival at the hospital, my father alive and awake to greet me. “My favorite daughter,” he would say, and this time I would take it at face value, and I would tell him something profound, something that would change everything between us. “We don’t have to be interesting,” I would say. “We just have to be here for each other.” We’d always failed on that count, but maybe we would get another chance, except we wouldn’t, because I’d won.

When they announced my name, my acquaintance rushed to the stage and hugged me. “They’re going to think you’re my boyfriend,” I said into his ear, forgetting that my mic was still on. Everyone cheered, as they’d been instructed to. “Big smiles,” one of the cameramen shouted, “Keep the applause going.” They would edit out his audio in post. The clapping tapered off. I left the stage. “Woah, sorry, I’m just,” I stuttered to the waiting camera crew, my eyes wide with shock. I pressed one hand tightly over my skull, as if to keep my brain from falling out. “Oh my God,” I gasped. I sounded like a person on TV.

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There were no cameras at the airline counter where I cried and begged for a last-minute ticket; there were no cameras on the plane or in the taxi; there were no cameras at the hospital where I sat by my father’s bedside, holding his unconscious hand and whispering, “I’m here now, Dad. You can go if you’re ready.” There were no cameras when I left for a leisurely lunch, nor when I returned that afternoon to find him dead. There were no cameras in Connecticut. There had been cameras everywhere in London, on tripods, ceiling mounts, cranes, shoulders. Cameras in the hands of the audience. Hours and hours of footage, shot from every angle, preserved for posterity, broadcast to millions, footage of me missing the biggest opportunity of my life.