Netflix’s Unknown Number: The High School Catfish shot to the top of the charts because the story is almost too surreal to believe. A teenage girl was harassed by anonymous texts for nearly two years, only to learn the stalker was her own mother. The documentary is horrifying, but what’s equally unsettling is how the internet responded. Twitter and TikTok lit up with reaction clips, jokes and memes. Strangers dissected every twist and revelation, seemingly forgetting that the teenager at the center of it all still has to live with the fallout. The drama was so consuming that the audience became another layer of the spectacle.
It’s not just true crime that turns real pain into public sport. Reality dating shows like The Bachelor have spent more than two decades packaging heartbreak as entertainment. Contestants walk into the process hoping to find love, but their most vulnerable moments are stripped of context and replayed endlessly. A breakdown during a rose ceremony is clipped into GIFs, a personal confession is remixed into a TikTok trend, and a moment that might have taken enormous courage becomes fodder for ridicule. What was personal becomes public property, frozen forever in meme form.
The question isn’t why this keeps happening — chaos draws attention, and attention fuels the media economy. The deeper question is why we can’t look away, and what that says about us.
Dr. Isabelle Morley, a clinical psychologist who has studied the psychology of reality dating, says these shows tap into a universal desire.
“We all want to win, to be chosen as special by one person in front of the whole world,” she said. “If it doesn’t work out, we just don’t care, because they got chosen and that feels gratifying enough.”
That longing for validation drives what researchers call parasocial relationships: one-sided bonds viewers form with strangers they’ve only seen on screens. It feels like intimacy, but it isn’t real. The emotions are powerful, but the connection exists only in our imagination.
True crime runs on a similar engine. When audiences follow a case, they don’t just want to know what happened. They want to feel close to the story, examining motives, tracking evidence and speculating about outcomes. The narrative becomes a puzzle to solve, a drama to inhabit. But the victims, the people living through tragedy, often fade into the background. Their lives are reduced to content designed for shock and suspense.
The result is that chaos becomes consumable. Watching someone else’s pain offers a sense of control. A Bachelor viewer can imagine navigating rejection without being humiliated. A true crime listener can imagine spotting red flags without facing danger. The risk belongs to someone else, and the audience gets the illusion of safety in exchange.
That’s where the trouble lies for Christians. Stories of brokenness and justice matter. They can spark reflection, expose injustice and even inspire reform. But when we join in the cycle of memes and mockery, we lose sight of the people involved. Lauryn becomes a shocking twist, not a teenager processing betrayal. A reality contestant becomes a punchline, not a person navigating very public rejection. Empathy evaporates the moment someone’s most painful chapter becomes entertainment.
Faith calls us to resist that detachment. Scripture urges believers to bear one another’s burdens and to treat every person as an image bearer of God. That doesn’t mean Christians should swear off documentaries or reality shows entirely. It does mean we should consume differently — asking not only what happened but what our response should be. Are we joining the mob, or are we pausing to see the humanity in the story?
Imagine if the first wave of responses to Unknown Number wasn’t snark but compassion. What if the conversation wasn’t built on jokes about the mother’s bizarre scheme, but on prayer for Lauryn’s healing and concern for the systems that failed her? Imagine if Bachelor fans saw contestants not as cartoonish characters but as people making themselves vulnerable on national television. Those responses wouldn’t trend, but they would look more like Christ.
Choosing empathy doesn’t make chaos less dramatic. The stories remain messy and painful. But it reshapes our role as consumers. Instead of fueling the cycle, we can interrupt it. Instead of adding noise, we can offer understanding. Instead of turning suffering into entertainment, we can honor the people at the center of it.
Culture isn’t going to lose its appetite for spectacle. Chaos sells, and it will always sell. But Christians have the chance to be countercultural. To remember that Lauryn isn’t a character, she’s a young woman still recovering from trauma. That contestants on The Bachelor aren’t memes, they’re people who exposed their hearts on camera. To look past the edits and see the human reality underneath.
Because when the episodes end and the memes fade, the people remain. And the call of Christ is clear: to treat them with compassion, not consumption.
