The Prince Harry Prison Experiment
Nonfiction by Colin Scanlon
After being cast in what they’d believed to be a The Bachelor-style reality dating show called “Dream Date”, twelve American women decamped to the English countryside to have their road to romance televised for mass consumption and excoriation. Following a 7-day stint cloistered inside a windowless London hotel, production sent a fleet of luxury Rolls-Royce coups to whisk contestants away to the palatial Englefield House, a sprawling Elizabethean estate nestled in England’s Berkshire County. Once the ladies arrived at Englefield, the reality show’s nauseatingly duplicitous premise began to crystallize as members of production meticulously planted and fed information to the cast leading them to believe their mystery beau was none other than Prince Harry (yes, that Prince Harry).
An aristocratic reimagining of Joe Millionaire, a 2003 reality television show wherein women competed for the love of an “average joe” they believed to be a millionaire, production on Fox’s I Wanna Marry Harry went to staggeringly unseemly lengths to convince the group of Americans that their hired Harry, a semi-professional Prince Harry impersonator named Matt Hicks, was a bonafide royal looking for love. Sparing no expense, production hired full teams of security personnel, servants, paparazzi, and date-crashing faux Harry fans to further their harebrained farce.
Unwilling to outright lie, Hicks never explicitly claims to be Prince Harry, instead allowing production’s seemingly endless supply of manufactured evidence (including fake photographs, scripted off-camera conversations, a fake therapist, and staged paparazzi ambushes) to lead the women to their own logical conclusions. Superficially a testament to Hicks’ character, as events of the show unfold it becomes increasingly apparent this conscious omission represents an extension of production’s own commitment to plausible deniability rather than a demonstration of Hicks’ own moral constitution.
Premiering on May 20, 2014, I Wanna Marry Harry was welcomed by a slew of online and critical criticism before being pulled from airing in the United States after just four episodes. Aptly described by The Telegraph as “fodder for the braindead”, the show’s contestants were, unsurprisingly, lampooned by audiences for their perceived foolishness and vapidity. Despite public humiliation, namely the public humiliation of young women, gradually becoming an integral facet of formulaic reality dating programs like The Bachelor and Love Is Blind, the gleeful gaslighting suffused throughout I Wanna Marry Harry was beyond the pale for most audiences.
Whereas other reality programs like The Bachelor thrive under the presumption of full contestant understanding and consent, I Wanna Marry Harry’s willful obfuscation of the contestant’s role forced audiences to reckon with the uncomfortable nature of their own participation in
perpetuating predatory, morally dubious programming. Regardless of the myriad of extraneous factors like mental illness, naive ambition, or financial precarity that can taint a cast member’s decision to participate in reality television, the implication of a contestant’s full consent and understanding allows audiences to circumvent extensive critical thought under a stalwart “they knew what they were signing up for” ethos.
Humiliation for the sake of televised entertainment is by no means a novel concept. Shows like the reality singing competition American Idol have ingrained degrading audition processes into their programming, forwarding musically untalented, often mentally unsound contestants to celebrity judges only for their singing to be harshly criticized before dismissing the wannabe singers after their performances are reduced to a punchline. Whereas shows like American Idolrely upon and even revel in the overeager and deluded attitudes of contestants willing to degrade themselves for the audiences viewing pleasure, the removal of a manufactured belief of willful contestant participation in Harry ultimately moved audiences from the cozy position of immaterial bystander to active participant in the open commodification of the deception of young, impressionable women.
Nearly all retrospective coverage of I Wanna Marry Harry contains the unfounded, self-congratulatory notion that a show of this ilk could never make it to production today despite a bevy of evidence pointing to the contrary. Far from it, I Wanna Marry Harry serves as a confoundingly honest illustration of reality television’s inherent “unreality.” What remains most notable about I Wanna Marry Harry is not its particularly immoral approach to reality television, but its brazen contestant manipulation that forces audiences to confront their own complicity in production’s exploitation.
Although I Wanna Marry Harry may stand out for its audacity, absurdity, and gumption, it is hardly anomalous within the broader reality television ecosystem. While I Wanna Marry Harry may have crossed an ethical line too brazen to ignore, it reflects a broader industry trend where viewers are invited to gorge themselves on the exaggerated or distorted realities—often at the expense of the very real women on screen. What makes I Wanna Marry Harry so exceptional is not its inherent immorality, but rather its careless transparency in illustrating the lengths to which reality television is willing to go to entertain, deceive, and commodify its contestant’s personhood.
Colin Scanlon is a writer born and based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has written about pop culture, film, and television for magazines like Esquire, Redbook, Harper’s Bazaar, and Elle. He is currently a student at Carlow University’s Master of Fine Arts Program with a focus in creative non-fiction.
