When I was in elementary school, there was a horror reality competition show called Murder in Small Town X (FOX, 2001), which, being ten, I didn’t realize was fictional until I was older. It didn’t occur to me that they couldn’t simply sign people up to get murdered, but my lack of surprise at this illustrates something about reality TV: it is structured around cruelty. Similar to my experience, comments on the videos for Sex House indicate that some, especially younger, viewers were initially unaware that Sex House was not an actual reality show (though some of these could be comments from trolls). While it does become clear throughout the later episodes, the pilot is so seamlessly in keeping with reality TV conventions that the existence of such a show might not strike an audience as a parody except that it’s produced by The Onion. The viewership numbers are an exercise in irony: as of 17 July 2022, over 30 million viewers have watched the first two episodes, whereas all later episodes, which are much more clearly horror, have less than 10 million views, most much lower than that. The audience’s demand for the type of content represented by the first episode and unfulfilled in the second is part of the problem.