There’s Something About Miriam: the nadir of reality TV’s most ‘shameful’ era

There are few pieces of entertainment history to have aged quite as badly as Sky One’s 2004 reality series There’s Something About Miriam, now the subject of a six-part podcast called Harsh Reality. For the six men recruited as participants, it was ostensibly a dating contest: holed up in an Ibiza villa, they would compete in challenges to impress the titular Miriam, who was billed by presenter Tim Vincent as “a J-Lo lookalike who’s got it all”. The twist? Miriam Rivera, a 21-year-old from Mexico, was a trans woman, and “got it all” was a snide innuendo. 

When she picked the winner, Miriam would also inform him that she was (in her words) “not a real woman” and that she had a penis. The result was, predictably, a trainwreck. The men brought legal actions against production company Brighter Pictures and Sky One, alleging conspiracy to commit a sexual assault, breach of contract, personal injury and defamation: the show could only be broadcast after they received an undisclosed sum in damages. 

But to many looking back now, it seems perverse that the men were treated as victims when Miriam was the one humiliated and held up for ridicule. Her genitals were subject to discussion on national TV: in the first episode, bizarrely, a doctor was brought in to verify that she was in fact anatomically male. The show became a touchstone for the mistreatment of trans people. The trans writer Shon Faye has said: “It just confirmed what I already sensed about the world – that I was a joke.”

To understand how There’s Something About Miriam happened, it helps to look at the context. 2004 was the year that reality television either grew up or, depending on your perspective, gave up the pretence that it was anything other than a theatre of cruelty. It was the year Pop Idol was retired in favour of X Factor, giving Simon Cowell even more control – and even more opportunities to deliver his trademark savage put-downs. 

Big Brother reinvented itself as “evil” for series 4, using a deliberately oppressive set to engineer conflict between the housemates. The live feed had to be suspended at one point when the friction erupted into brawling. The show, wrote Jenny McCartney in this paper, had gone “from a relatively harmless social experiment to a squalid little study in barbarism”. 

And while the genre’s kingpins embraced inhumanity, new titles emerged to scrape the bottom of the barrel. On Channel Five’s The Farm, viewers were treated to Rebecca Loos (a woman famous for claiming to have had an affair with David Beckham) masturbating a pig to collect its semen. This was an advance on the previous year’s Celebrity Health Farm from the same channel, which had shown a cast of the semi-famous undergoing enemas on camera.

Whatever Britain was willing to do, America could outdo. 2004 was a banner year for exploitation in US TV: it brought The Swan (plain women underwent extreme plastic surgery then competed in a pageant), Joe Millionaire (man pretended to be a millionaire, women competed to date him) and Playing It Straight (woman sequestered on a ranch with a mix of straight men and gay men pretending to be straight; if she could eliminate the gay men, she won). 

All these shows pushed the boundaries of ethics and good taste, manipulating or even deceiving their participants. None, though, has quite the same sense of shame and horror attending it as Miriam. That’s partly because it’s overshadowed by tragedy: in 2019, Rivera apparently killed herself (her husband Daniel Cuervo has cast doubt on the idea of suicide and claimed she was threatened before her death). It’s also partly because it ended in the nightmarish situation of a programme being sued by its participants.  

But it’s also because attitudes towards trans people have changed drastically since the 2000s. As the podcast (narrated by Trace Lysette of the drama Transparent) makes devastatingly clear, trans people on TV in the 1990s and early 21st century were largely treated as freaks and fraud, the stuff of The Jerry Springer Show or (in the UK) Eurotrash, brought out either to be mocked, sexualised or treated to a doctor’s pathologising commentary.

Even the liberal press was unsympathetic. In coverage of the series’ legal troubles, a Guardian journalist wrote: “Our new laws against discriminating on grounds of sexual orientation do not (yet) seem to require us to accept a man as a woman, however amusing it may be to the audience.” It’s now unthinkable that almost any outlet – especially the Guardian – would refer to a trans woman in this way, given it’s taboo in some quarters even to say that trans women are not female. 

In a world that’s been thoroughly exposed to the Stonewall slogan “trans women are women”, Miriam looks offensive in every regard, right down to the show’s branding: the “O” in “something” has a small arrow attached pointing up and to the right, turning it into the symbol for “male”. Even the way Rivera talks about herself would be unacceptably objectifying in contemporary terms. At one point she points seductively to her cleavage and purrs: “I don’t have any operations, only this.”

Which makes it all the more astonishing to learn that Miriam started from a place of, if not quite good intentions, certainly curiosity about human sexuality and openness to challenge. In 2013, Jonathan Stadlen, who developed the initial idea for Miriam (although he wasn’t involved in its production), described his original concept to an audience at the Edinburgh Television Festival as part of a panel on “The Worst TV I’ve Ever Made”. What he had wanted to create, he said, was very different to the eventual product. 

As Stadlen tells it, he was introduced to Rivera by his then-MD: “I walked into the office and there was this woman who looked not dissimilar to Jennifer Lopez. And then he said to me, ‘That woman has a penis. She’s a transsexual.’ I would consider myself really straight, and I really did find her attractive. I didn’t actually stop finding her attractive after I realised that she had a penis. So I was like: ‘We could do a really interesting show about this, and look at sexuality in a really interesting way.’”

At the time Stadlen met Rivera, she’d been pursuing fame for some time. Having made a splash on the New York ballroom scene (a form of competitive team drag where gay men and trans women represented different “houses” and were marked on their style and presentation), she wanted to take her celebrity further. Her beauty and charisma were obvious, but the entertainment industry couldn’t work out what to do with her: at one point she was a member of a girl band, but (the podcast points out plaintively) she was never able to overcome the fact that she couldn’t sing.  

For all its faults, There’s Something About Miriam made a good vehicle for Rivera because it simply required her to be herself, up to a point. All she had to do was flirt with the men without revealing the secret of her sex. In fact, one of the surprising things to come out in the podcast is the extent to which Rivera – despite the show’s reputation – was far from being a vulnerable person taken advantage of by callous TV executives. 

For Miriam to work, its star had to be committed to the concept, and she was. Although one contestant did guess early on, she played the part of the archetypal Latin seductress so well that those doubts never flourished into outright questioning, and none of the men asked to leave the island before the end of filming. In fact, the whole set-up placed Rivera at the centre: she was shown selecting the men who would compete for her, and then dismissing them one by one.

Watching the series on YouTube now, what’s striking is the extent to which it’s the men, rather than Rivera, who are the butt of the joke. You can still see in this a little of the show that Stadlen had hoped it could be, distorted though it is by the demands of the reality genre. As the contestants are put through punishing challenges of macho strength by a wiry ex-army instructor, the programme seems to be asking what exactly a man is supposed to be. 

Even when the contestants were left to their own devices, they ended up giving themselves away with rugby-club antics, as on the first night, when they all got drunk, got naked and bonded by sharing embarrassing stories (one described being given oral sex by another man on a dancefloor). There’s Something About Miriam was exploiting Rivera for shock value, but it was also exposing the men as boorish lads. And at least she had the advantage of knowing exactly what game they were playing. 

That disparity is the origin of Miriam’s legal issues. The show’s twist required that the producers play fast and lose with the contestants’ consent. In one of the most jawdropping moments of the podcast, one participant describes how all the men were at the airport together on the way to the villa. The atmosphere was like a stag do and they were several drinks in when producers delivered fat bundles of contracts for signing: “I remember thinking: ‘You’re one of the biggest production companies in the world, you’re not going to screw me.’”

It’s a moment of astonishing naïveté from the perspective of 2021, when the sharp practice of TV producers is a matter of public record. Such boundary pushing is by no means an unusual feature of the industry’s treatment of subjects. As Evan Marriott, who played the Joe Millionaire role in the first series of that show, told New York Magazine: “Going into reality television thinking you’re going to do anything on your terms – you’re fooling yourself. When you sign on that dotted line, they own your a--, and they don’t care about you one iota.”

But the programme makers were similarly unprepared for the drama their show would cause. Cynics may assume that they must have weighed up the risk of litigation against the benefits of publicity, but insiders say the producers were genuinely astonished when the legal action started. 

They must have realised, though, that things had gone badly before they wrapped up filming. Although the man Rivera picked initially accepted the prize – £10,000 and a luxury holiday with Rivera – he quickly changed his mind. Even within the show, he sounds genuinely hurt as he explains his decision: “I don’t want to spend a week on a boat with someone who deceived me.” It is, in fact, a very reasonable reaction. And though his fellow contestants react to the revelation of the “something” with shocked laughter, they don’t express hatred or aggression towards Rivera, at least on camera. 

In fact, when revisiting Miriam, the biggest surprise isn’t Rivera’s sex. It’s how accepting the men seem to be, even in a situation that has clearly been designed to embarrass them. She, meanwhile, takes the rejection sanguinely, and if her experience of the show was not wholly positive, it was certainly not enough to put her off reality TV: she went on to appear in Big Brother Australia later the same year. 

Although she didn’t win, it was a different story for trans contestant Nadia Almada in the UK version of Big Brother that year, who became a fan favourite and won the public vote. Perhaps Miriam’s mistake – or, at least, one of its many mistakes – had been to overestimate the public’s prurience about trans people. Its shock fell flat with reality viewers, who showed elsewhere that they were willing to embrace trans people as personalities on their own terms.

There’s Something About Miriam is irredeemable as a piece of TV. As one participant tells the podcast, “Now thinking about it, it’s not only embarrassing but quite shameful.” But Harsh Reality doesn’t only expose the horrors of 2000s television. It also gives a new view of Rivera herself: yes, she was sensationalised by the programme, but she was also a canny operator who understood the media better than most. While the men were shamed and the programme makers poleaxed, she was the one who came out with her dignity mostly intact. 

Harsh Reality from Wondery is available on all major podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and the Wondery app