The worst of reality TV

But the popularity of reality TV has subsided significantly of late, as producers reboot and re-reboot old formulas, as scandal plagues the likes of “Duck Dynasty” and the canceled “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” and as ratings continue to drop. Meanwhile, according to Morgan Stanley Research, the number of scripted shows is up 20 percent. Even reality loyalists Bravo and E! are dabbling in scripts, with “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce” and “The Royals,” respectively. The “reality TV era” is no longer a thing.

I’ve enjoyed some reality TV, particularly early in a show’s run, before the repetitions and the spinoffs. Every so often, one draws me in with something resembling real human nature — the first season of “Survivor,” for example, which was a relatively unmanipulated look at interpersonal politics. And they can be funny (the early years of “The Real Housewives”) and instructive (the early years of “Project Runway”). But I’ve winced over and over again through the years, as certain reality series have publicly exploited fame-hungry people who appear to have major issues.

To wit: “The Swan,” which is close to the top of my Most Disturbing list. The show, which premiered on Fox in 2004, found women considered to be ugly and, with the “help” of a group of “experts,” including cosmetic surgeons and dentists, put them through an extreme transformation. Then, to maximize their self-loathing, the show pitted them against one another in a final pageant, so that they could lose despite all their work and hope.

There was so much wrong with the show, it’s hard to know where to begin. It tapped into too many of our contemporary cultural problems, as it played on negative female body images. It tormented women — onstage and in the audience — with glossy-magazine notions of beauty, trying to make them look like creepy Barbie doll Stepford Wife mannequins, as if that’s a good way to look. Rest in misery, “The Swan.”

MTV’s 2004 masterpiece, “I Want a Famous Face,” also dug into self-loathing, and it added in pathological fame-aholism for good measure, as ordinary men and women went under the knife in order to make themselves look more like their favorite stars. In one case, twin brothers wanted facial reconstructions in order to look like Brad Pitt — one wanted to be Pitt circa “Meet Joe Black” while the other wanted to be Pitt circa “Legends of the Fall.” Unlike the gentler makeovers on shows such as “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” the makeovers on “I Want a Famous Face” weren’t helping people create better versions of who they already are; they were helping them annihilate themselves in order to try to become someone else. Fun times.

Almost as fun as “Bridalplasty,” which ran on E! in 2010 and featured brides competing for premarital surgical procedures.

OK, now let’s move from the body-image shows to the questionable treatment of children, shall we? “Toddlers & Tiaras” doesn’t trigger the same outrage as “The Swan” and its ilk (did I neglect to mention ABC’s “Are You Hot?,” featuring Lorenzo Lamas and other D-listers judging bodies and using a laser pointer to highlight flaws?). The TLC series, which premiered in 2009, is a look at the world of child beauty pageants, where the parents tend to be emotionally manipulative stage mothers. For money or for their own vicarious needs, they stuff their kids into frilly pink dresses and shove them in front of judges. At one point, the show revealed that Honey Boo Boo’s mother, June, was serving her Red Bull with Mountain Dew — they called it “Go-Go Juice” — for energy.

In 2007, CBS’s “Kid Nation” subjected its young cast, between 8 and 15, to the full-on reality treatment as they supposedly lived on their own. The show wasn’t as painful as “Toddlers & Tiaras,” but it did put viewers in the awkward position of watching children be deployed by the makers of the show for typical reality psychodramas involving conflict and humiliation. It doesn’t seem fair that some poor kid will grow up haunted by footage of him or her as “The Villain,” “The Bully,” or some other reality type, simply because his parents sold — I mean lent — him or her to TV.

I probably don’t need to remind you of “The Anna Nicole Show,” which featured Anna Nicole Smith slurring her unsteady way through Hollywood. Like “The Surreal Life,” the 2002 show that ran on E!, it invited us to laugh at how stupidly wasted she was. It’s not the worst of the worst; there’s not room here for all of those. But it’s one of the sadder stories that reality producers twisted into a comedy. A few years after the show, in 2007, Smith died of an overdose.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.