On March 16, 2026, at 5:45 pm in a leafy suburb of Atlanta called Sandy Springs, police pound on the door of a neglected French Country–style mansion, rifles at the ready, bodycams rolling. Minutes earlier, a distress call came from someone claiming to be hiding from a gunman in the mansion’s downstairs bathroom. The dispatcher heard a gunshot ring out in the distance, then the line disconnected. “Open the door!” an officer yells. A calm young man with a mullet and woolly eyebrows steps out, hands raised. The police ask him who else is in the house. “Just my friends,” he replies, as seven other young people, men and women, silently file out behind him, less evidently relaxed. They remain outside while two officers search the house.
Inside the mansion there are no immediate signs of a massacre, but the decor alone arouses suspicion. All of the windows are frosted over, so only a chilly light leaks in. The place is a mess, and the walls are adorned with lurid, seemingly AI-generated art: a frowning baby holding an assault rifle, a rubber ducky bobbing in a mug of what looks like black coffee, a lidless and levitating eyeball crying into a martini glass. The rooms are painted primary colors, grass green and cherry red, like a kindergarten class. A vape dangles from a doorframe by a chain, suspended at mouth level. The pantry is practically empty. The bedroom is a dormitory featuring seven identical twin beds.
No one is hiding in the bathroom. The call, it seems, was a prank. The police return to the driveway and ask, “What is it that you guys are doing here?”
“We’re just livestreaming,” says a man in a camo hat named Matt.
“OK,” one officer says. “You guys don’t have any firearms or anything inside the house?”
There are guns in the house, Matt says, for self-defense. Fans of their livestream can be obsessive, he explains, and tend to have perverse ideas about jokes. The distress call, for example, complete with gunshot sound effects. The officer asks to see their weapons, and they go downstairs. The room is cluttered with ergonomic swivel chairs, desks strewn with takeout containers and energy drinks, two flatscreen TVs, and a dozen computer monitors. It’s a control room of some kind.
Inside the Fishtank
On one desk, beside the keyboard, lies a handgun. On another, a rifle rests under a tangle of cables. The officer picks up each and turns them over in his hands. He recommends that they “have them locked up,” as leaving weapons out can sometimes go poorly. Then he takes a last look around and notices that the monitors display live feeds of every upstairs room. The kitchen, the dining room, the bedroom. “You all got everything on camera,” he says, stating the obvious, probably considering whether there’s anything inherently dubious about that. Surveilled sleeping, frosted windows, guns, mullets. The producers had cut the video feed when the police showed up, but the officers themselves were recording through their bodycams. So this is livestreaming?
“OK,” the officer says, finally. “No issues with that.”
Outside, the inhabitants thank the Sandy Springs PD for their service. “Of course,” the officers reply, “good luck with y’all’s stream!” They begin to drive away, and one by one the streamers file back inside, into the Fishtank.
Perhaps the easiest way to describe Fishtank Live is as a reality show. It features real people living together in a real house, bickering and mingling, with the promise to viewers that they will see unrehearsed, authentic human behavior. In many respects, it’s identical to Big Brother or its precursors, MTV’s The Real World and the Dutch show Nummer 28. In other key ways, which become obvious within moments of watching the show, it’s much stranger.
Fishtank takes place in what its producers call a “fully monitored smart house”: a suburban home rigged up with dozens of CCTV cameras, microphones, and speakers. Each season, between six and 10 contestants—or “fish”—move into the home and battle for supremacy. They face off in elimination challenges and attempt to irritate each other into quitting. Last one remaining wins. The rules are simple: no phones, no weed, extremely little privacy. Only the bathrooms, and a closet or two, are off camera.
So far, still in the realm of Bravo. But Fishtank is live and unedited, and it runs 24/7 for weeks straight; it’s for audiences who grew up on Twitch and expect to participate in—rather than just consume—the material. About half of that time the contestants are sleeping or eating. Fans watch for hours each day and pay to interact with the cast in various ways. An ad for the show reads: “You live in the walls. You control the action.” Viewers can vote on popularity-based challenges, send gifts or advantages to the cast, or type messages that blare through the speakers in real time, like a comments section sprung to life. These messages are uncensored and composed, largely, of obscenities, slurs, and insults, anything to get under the cast’s skin. They often succeed, and the contestants’ antics—if you can call them that—dwarf the most startling behavior MTV, TLC, and Netflix have collectively cooked up over decades. Contestants have been known to strip naked, pour cups of piss on one another, scream slurs, and fistfight. They have smoked crack or meth (viewers couldn’t quite tell which), masturbated, attempted to smear feces on each other, worn blackface, and run directly into plate glass doors. Producers—who run the show from the basement, where they also sleep amid scattered guns—often come upstairs and join the chaos. Like the masterminds behind many reality shows, they seem to revel in psychologically tormenting their subjects. They also, occasionally, strap on boxing gloves and beat the shit out of them for real.
The violence and degeneracy of Fishtank is hard to exaggerate, which seems to be by design. It may well be the most extreme reality show in history. It’s been drummed out of four neighborhoods in three states after neighbors complained about possible zoning law violations. It’s viewable on its own website and on the freewheeling streaming platform Kick.
You’ve likely never heard of Fishtank and may be tempted to brush it off as fringe—an unwell collective of sadists, masochists, and exhibitionists throwing simultaneous tantrums on a remote frontier of the internet. That may be true, but the show is drawing nearer to the mainstream with each passing day. With more than 500,000 people regularly watching the most recent seasons, producers claim the show is worth more than $30 million; their budget is less than a million. The show has been landing increasing numbers of corporate sponsors, including Sticker Mule and Backyard Butchers. Bam Margera, from Jackass, hosted the latest season, and Joe Rogan noted on his podcast that the show, while shocking, differs from conventional reality TV only in degree, not in kind. “Isn’t it funny,” he mused, “The Real World is OK because they’re only mildly mentally ill?”
Each season, about half of the cast taps out before they’re eliminated, and so the daily challenges serve more to break down the fish mentally than to raise or lower their standing in the house.
Fishtank is the OnlyFans of reality TV, a kind of uncensored, subscription-based, interactive voyeurism. It’s part of an emerging content ecosystem that tech writer Ryan Broderick calls “Chudtech,” interactive sites that monetize humiliation. Maybe that’s the future—a proliferation of bespoke, 24/7 reality shows on which we all simultaneously and separately star, trading our privacy and dignity for cash to pay rent.
For some people, and so I ventured into their world of alternate-reality TV to find out what might be in store for the rest of us. I spent weeks watching Fishtank. I spoke to fans, former contestants, and its producers. And then I stepped into the Fishtank myself.
From the point of view of contestants, a season of Fishtank begins the same way many reality shows do. Staggered for dramatic effect, they enter the house one by one, suitcases in tow. They greet each other, choose a bed, and unpack. They poke around the rooms, taking in their new home.
For viewers, the experience is less standard. Rather than meet the cast over a minute or two in the form of a bouncy montage (“Ten strangers, picked to live in a house …”), they watch it unfold in real time, over many hours, during which little occurs. There is no music to color the action or punctuate a moment, or editing to foreshadow conflict. With those flourishes stripped away, all that remains is the eerie allure of watching someone who knows they are being watched but doesn’t know by whom.
Surveillance is the point. The Fishtank website is designed to mimic an array of CCTV feeds. Navigating it, you feel like a loss-prevention officer at a department store or a prison guard. The house is divided up room by room into a grid that covers most of the homepage. You can enlarge the view of any room by selecting it, then toggle between rooms by clicking on doorways or hallways. This makes it easy to pursue contestants as they navigate the house. Often, action is occurring in different rooms simultaneously, and so the viewers, in a sense, edit the show themselves by choosing which feed to watch. For this reason, and because viewers tune in at different times of day as their schedules permit, no two viewers ever have the same experience watching the show.
In traditional reality TV, at least a few cast members always come in swinging—talking shit, making fast friends or enemies, singing, dancing, having an immediate breakdown. Which is to be expected, since they’re selected for strong personalities: the bubbly one, the brainy one, the cocky one, the schemer. They are meant to have storylines, to be conventionally attractive and offer some sense of aspirational viewing. Fishtank’s cast, meanwhile, is almost always composed of very young, shy loners who don’t have much going on in their lives. They live with their parents and work minimum-wage jobs, if they’re employed at all. Many are self-described NEETs—“not in education, employment, or training.” They spend a lot of time online, which is how they discovered Fishtank to begin with, and they have usually never applied to be on a reality show before. Most have never been on camera.
When NEETs gather in a room, sparks don’t exactly fly. On the first day of a Fishtank season, there’s a lot of hand-wringing and timid banter. Not the most riveting stuff, but that’s where the producers come in. After the fish mingle sheepishly for a few hours, the host arrives. For the first four seasons of the show, this figure was the show’s cocreator, the comedian Sam Hyde. Standing around 6’5″, Hyde looks something like a GMO Trotsky—patchy mustache-goatee combo and circular glasses beneath a bulging forehead—and has an intimidating presence and a dark, confrontational sense of humor. He’s best known for his Adult Swim sketch show World Peace, which was canceled in 2016 after, among other things, Hyde appeared in blackface. Since then he has operated mostly outside of the mainstream, posting sketches and podcasts on his website and YouTube.
On Fishtank season one, day one, Hyde’s arrival was signaled by a blood-red light that suddenly cloaked the living room, where the fish were gathered. He entered wearing a blue suit, shouted, “Hey, new friends! How’s everybody doing?” and was met by a smattering of mousy hellos. He sighed, evidently disappointed, and asked the cast to gather round for a pep talk. “This opportunity?” he said, “It’s whatever you make of it. I don’t care … You can sit here and pick your fucking nose. I would recommend, though, that when I say, ‘How you doing, Fishtankers?’ we get a modicum of enthusiasm, OK?” He left and entered again. This time, he was met with claps and whoops.
Producing mainstream reality TV is the art of playing big egos off one another—focusing an energy that’s already in the room—and of platforming eager entertainers. Fishtank is the reverse, an exercise in turning shut-ins into performers willing to do just about anything.
That takes some coaching, but the alien, oppressive environment of the Tank also seems to naturally loosen the cast up over time, breaking down their sense of decency. The speakers, which pipe in messages typed by fans day and night, play a key role. Viewers criticize contestants’ clothes, voices, weight, social skills, and speech patterns. They bombard them with accusations and slurs. They taunt them as they try to fall asleep. They dig into their pasts, dredging up anything perceived to be embarrassing, tragic, or allegedly criminal.
“If you’re an avid Fishtank fan, you have a lot of free time. Probably there’s something in your life which isn’t optimal.”—Jet Neptune, Fishtank showrunner
At any given time the audience will select, organically and via some mysterious calculus, one cast member to pile onto. In the early days of season five, the unlucky fish was a young woman named Victoria: “Icky Vicky.” “You dress like a junkie.” “Fat. You’re fat. You’re a huge pigster. Kill yourself.” “Nasty beat bitch.” Victoria laughed it off for a few hours, but by the evening she broke down. The next morning, after a sleepless night, she hid from the cameras by sitting motionless with a sweater thrown over her head. By day seven, she quit the show.
Each season, about half of the cast taps out before they’re eliminated, and so the daily challenges serve more to break down the fish mentally than to raise or lower their standing in the house. In the early days of a season, the challenges are typically tedious—the Rice Challenge: Count the number of jasmine rice grains strewn on the floor and mixed with brown basmati rice. Then they turn bizarre—the Mommy-Baby Challenge: Half of the cast pretends to be mothers, the other half infants. Then confessional—the Most Traumatic Life Story Challenge: Tell your saddest story. Then gross—The Shit Your Pants Challenge: self-explanatory. Then mean—the Dress-Down Challenge: Contestants stand eye to eye and rip into one another. And, finally, sadistic—the Hurt Burt Challenge: Take turns punching and slapping a guy named Burt.
Often a contest will be framed as an elimination challenge, then ruled inconsequential afterward if a fan favorite loses. In this way, the producers run the show as a kind of rigged popularity contest, a fact viewers acknowledge but don’t seem to mind. The last fish to quit the show or to be eliminated wins. The prize is $50K—not a fortune, but enough to motivate someone desperate.
Often the house is badly damaged in the heat of competition. As the furniture falls apart and the drywall disintegrates and the garbage piles up, the cast steadily grows disinhibited. They do anything they can to entertain the viewers, who applaud or rebuke their efforts in real time. They let slurs fly, strip, scream, attack each other, and generally regress to some pre-socialized state of nature. Every season it’s the same. A spell settles over them, from which they rarely stir. An exception: On the 21st day of the most recent season, during a skirmish involving mops, brooms, and thrown piss, one fish named Bashir paused amid the fray and yelled, “What is the point of this?”
“It’s entertaining!” a producer called back.
“The Wire,” Bashir replied, “is more intellectual. You don’t watch The Wire for people throwing shit.”
The producer glared at him. “OK, well, you’re not on the fucking Wire.”
To make sense of Fishtank’s tasteless, deliberately appalling ethic, it helps to know a bit more about its creator. Sam Hyde grew up in Connecticut and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007 with a degree in filmmaking. After college, he began producing sketches and prank videos under the moniker “Million Dollar Extreme,” positioning himself as a kind of right-wing Andy Kaufman. A beloved bit among fans: He once performed standup in Brooklyn and pivoted mid-set to “speak from the heart,” which meant reading aloud from prepared notes which framed homosexuality as deviant, antisocial behavior. Most of the audience walked out, which was, of course, the goal.
In a more elaborate prank, Hyde secured a speaker slot at a TEDx conference at Drexel University in 2013 by posing as a globe-trotting documentarian and delivered a talk titled “2070 Paradigm Shift.” He asked the audience to pat themselves on the back for saving the world. They obliged. Then he offered a list of predictions for the next 50 years: “Sea floor farming … Sea beets. Sea yams.” Facebook will be in charge of birth certificates. Race riots. “Trash economy. You use cubes of trash as money. Everybody becomes rich.” In closing, he led the audience in another pat on the back.
After landing his show on Adult Swim in 2016, Hyde found a wider audience but also drew backlash. Hyde believed that rival forces inside Adult Swim, including Tim Heidecker of Tim and Eric, were responsible for the show’s cancellation. He called in to Heidecker’s podcast and accused him of conspiracy. Heidecker denied any involvement and suggested Hyde shake off the setback. This wasn’t just a bump in the road, Hyde fired back, “I’m blacklisted.” Exasperated, and seemingly eager to end the call, Heidecker encouraged Hyde to strike out on his own with the rabid fanbase he’d amassed.
“Why do you need Adult Swim?” he asked. “Why do you need anybody? You have an army, dude!”
Hyde took Heidecker’s advice. He retreated into independence, producing more sketches and posting them to YouTube, where his subscribers grew. Then, in 2018, his show was banned from YouTube, too, and he began posting content to his own website. His fans found him, and his relationship with them grew deeper and stranger the farther he drifted into exile. They were disaffected, aggrieved, angry, young, and mostly white. Unemployed, or underemployed, and very online. Perhaps analogizing Hyde’s professional cancellation to their own social alienation, they began to see him as a role model.
In 2023, Hyde devised Fishtank as a parody of reality TV. Originally, he wanted to call the show Hell House. He hosted the first four seasons but then told his producers he wanted to focus on other projects. He didn’t respond to my interview requests except to say, “Feel free to fabricate quotes.” Was he sick of his creation, or hoping to distance himself from it, legally? Streaming humiliation can go very wrong; last summer, a French streamer died during an “extreme challenge” during which he streamed for nearly 300 hours straight and was woken up at least once with a bucket of water. But while accusations of misconduct against Fishtank have been lodged online, and noise complaints have followed the production from house to house, nothing has been filed with police or taken to court, and no one, as far as we know, has been grievously injured. But still, Hyde moved on. He’s been producing videos on YouTube, where, no longer banned, he has accrued nearly a million subscribers between two channels.
The current showrunner of Fishtank is a onetime rapper who goes by Jet Neptune. Twenty-eight years old, Neptune grew up in Georgia and joined Hyde’s team a few years ago, pre Fishtank, as a video editor. He speaks with an easygoing, baritone drawl; has a round face, bushy eyebrows, a mullet; and typically wears a thick chain over a polo or oversize T-shirt. While Hyde’s cult popularity launched the show, it’s Neptune’s efforts behind the scenes, in the basement, that have kept it afloat for five seasons.
Neptune tells me that he was inspired to help Hyde produce Fishtank when he noticed that obsessive fandom seemed to be trending. Swifties, for example, were using Taylor Swift’s private jet registration number to track her every move. He calls this behavior “invasive, nosy, and gross … normalized stalking enabled by tech” but was curious whether he could capitalize on it and redirect it toward everyday people. He imagined a house in which “every inch is on camera, where every interaction is recorded and hyperanalyzed.” He wanted to know whether people would tune in for the sheer surreal novelty and what would happen to the minds of those inside.
Most people panic, it turns out, but some will roll with the weirdness and go wild. By day three, Neptune says, he can usually tell whether a contestant will adjust or crumble. As for the audience, he believes he has tapped a sector of the population that traditional reality TV never appealed to. “If you’re an avid Fishtank fan,” he says, “you have a lot of free time. Probably there’s something in your life which isn’t optimal. You’re unemployed, or disabled and can’t work, or you don’t have friends.” Neptune thinks the fans see themselves in those he casts, whom he calls “autistic, poorly socialized weirdos.”
“The average American,” Neptune adds, “is not some 5’11”, normal, well-spoken guy. The average American is a fucked-up carny who works at Hot Topic or at a gas station. And I think that’s more entertaining than the bronze beauties on normal TV.” He continues, “They’re imperfect weirdos. Maybe they’re not cool, but they’re interesting if you look closely enough.”
Neptune identifies with the carnies. Before joining Hyde, he worked as a desk clerk in a Super 8 motel and made music with a group called Autistic Boys Money Clan. He’s been a fan of Hyde since the Adult Swim days and spends very little time watching conventional TV. “I’m a bloodthirsty guy,” he says, “who wants to see crazy shit go down.”
Chaos is much of Fishtank’s appeal, he believes, along with the timeless catharsis entailed in watching people who want attention get humiliated. “You wanted to be on TV? This is what you get,” he says. “You wanted to be a superstar? Now you’re covered in chili.” Traditional reality shows have always fed this hunger for cosmic irony, he says, but they punish their stars with tricks like deceptive editing. Being live, Fishtank can’t utilize the same subtle tactics. “Their chili is metaphorical. Ours is literal.”
But the audience isn’t purely out for blood. As the weeks wear on, they start to care about the contestants. “They want to see them improve and grow,” Neptune says. That might mean standing up to another cast member or winning a particularly grueling challenge. He admits that, to the untrained eye, Fishtank can seem “evil,” but he believes that self-actualization is at its core. “Negativity is the most powerful force,” he tells me. “People’s attention won’t be grasped unless there’s something dramatic, controversial, fucked-up happening.” But once they’re hooked, then they naturally want a happy ending.
“If you want to send a message you believe in,” he says, “you have to hide it in a cake of horror.”
Neptune’s candor surprised me. As did his characterization of Fishtank as some kind of freak show makeover program—a 4Chan Queer Eye. Would former contestants describe it this way?
Jimmy Downey competed on season 2, where he finished fifth after being deemed a legal liability and was kicked off the show—he shoved a female contestant to the ground and threw a croquet mallet at her. He’s 30, grew up in Pennsylvania, and currently lives outside of Philadelphia, where he works as an overnight boiler operator at a lumber treatment facility. He speaks in a sleepy, courteous yawn, like Winnie-the-Pooh, and tells me that he applied to the show after stumbling onto season 1 and becoming transfixed. He found himself imagining how he would act in the house, in the thick of the craziness. “I daydreamed about silly things I would do,” he says. “Normally you have to keep those things pent up. In society, you can’t be silly all the time.”
After gaining a following on the show, Letty launched a streaming career of her own. Her fans, she says, are “white men who play video games and go on the computer a lot.”
Before arriving at the Tank, Downey had never made much content. But performing, he says, came naturally to him. “I’ve had to pretend to be happy a lot.” Similarly, being surveilled 24/7 wasn’t a major adjustment, as he spent much of his youth in and out of troubled-teen centers in Utah. The real challenge, he says, was enduring the viewers. After tossing out every insult in the book, they realized that Downey grew incensed when they suggested that he had sex with animals. He loves animals and was afraid that this false accusation would follow him after the season and be believed by people who weren’t familiar with Fishtank. Ordinarily he listens to music so that he’s not alone with his own thoughts, but that option wasn’t available. And so he lashed out at other contestants. “I just had to fill the silence,” he says, “to ensure that my brain wouldn’t bring up bad memories.”
Downey doesn’t believe the show made him a better person, and he regrets how he behaved. He was desperate for the prize money, which he hoped would eventually help him buy back his childhood home, a farm his parents sold after they divorced when he was 18. “I just want to have a nice family,” he says, “and die there happily.”
Letty competed in Fishtank season 1. She grew up outside Toronto and was living with her parents, unemployed, when she applied. “I was literally, like, so depressed,” she tells me. “I’d just stay in my room all day.” She thought competing on Fishtank might mix things up. Her application read, in full: “I’m a 23 year old woman.” She landed an interview, which she apparently aced. Her parents didn’t try to stop her from competing on the show, but friends who were familiar with Hyde and his fan base did. “They hate women!” they warned. “They’ll torture you!”
“They did torture me a little bit,” Letty admits. Each day producers screamed in her face or poured condiments on her. A cast member threw her clothes in the toilet, and she had to hold another one’s hand as he took a shit. By the end of the season, she was dishing it out, too—shouting slurs, throwing food and garbage at other fish. She describes the experience as unpredictable and exciting, the polar opposite of her life back home, where each day spent in her room was interminable and identical to the last. Unlike Downey, she says she experienced a positive transformation.
“I came in with really low self-esteem,” Letty tells me. But as the season progressed, she impressed herself with her ability to withstand abuse. “I felt better about myself. It definitely helps you mature.”
After gaining a following on the show, Letty launched a streaming career of her own. Her fans, she says, are “white men who play video games and go on the computer a lot.” Under their gaze, she’s been traveling for the first time and documenting her experience. In the past two years she’s been to Thailand, Korea, Japan, India, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, South Africa, Poland, Germany, and Spain. Still, she often wishes she was back in the Fishtank, that she had gone on living there forever. Though she only spent 42 days in the house, it was difficult assimilating back into the world. Three years later, she still occasionally wakes up, alone in a hotel room in some distant corner of the world, and has the feeling that she’s being watched.
On a cloudy day in April, I visit the Fishtank, which is shooting its fifth season in Sandy Springs, an affluent suburb of Atlanta. I arrive in the afternoon, and an electronic metal gate swings open, revealing a long, cracked driveway lined with weeds and dead trees sloping uphill to a weathered stone mansion. Trucks, vans, and motorcycles are parked outside. I’m greeted by Bill Ottman, the show’s lanky chief information officer. He’s wearing a hoody and jeans and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. He shakes my hand warmly. Ottman is a minor celebrity in the tech world for founding Minds, a social media network dedicated to minimal moderation. Before Meta scaled back most of its own screening efforts, Minds was known as the “anti-Facebook” and attracted right-wing users. We proceed to the patio, where I’m greeted by other producers: Neptune, his right-hand man Ben Taylor, a woman who introduces herself as Binx, and Bam Margera.
It’s the 27th day of the season, and they look exhausted. Only Bam, the veteran entertainer used to grueling movie shoots, is chipper. Dressed in black, his fingers covered in rings, he launches into praising what he considers Fishtank’s crowning innovation. It’s the first show to monetize trolling, he says. “All day, the trolls are sounding off.” They even heckle him, the host, but it’s music to his ears. It costs between $30 to $60 to send a message over the speakers. “So keep it coming! Tell me I’m a fat-homo-loser all day long!”
Some trolls experience buyer’s remorse, Margera says, chuckling. He says a man from Texas recently emailed the morning after spending $5,000 sending variations of the message, “Wake up, pussy!” He pleaded his case: He was drinking and blacked out. Margera wasn’t sympathetic. “Eat a dick!” he said. “That’s what you get.”
The team welcomes me into the control room, where several other producers are diligently clicking away behind custom multi-monitor displays. The fish mill about on their screens, flitting from feed to feed. I can hear their footsteps overhead.
The control room evokes an insurgency’s bunker, or the lair of a trashy supervillain—it’s all screens and crumbs, guitars and whiteboards, cables and empty cans and canisters of pepper spray. At least eight producers scurry around the largely windowless space or spin in their chairs. Neptune gives me the tour: One configuration of monitors displays the inside of the house, another the outside (to provide advance notice of the cops, when the fans call them as a joke); one desk controls sound effects and ads, another the paid fan messages. Much of this, I’m told, was coded using AI. I ask where the team sleeps. Neptune points to couches and the floor underneath his own desk.
“Luckily the carpet is nice and soft this season,” Ottman says.
“I like sleeping on the floor,” says Taylor, who wears a knit cap, an untucked dress shirt and Japanese-seeming slippers. He has a full beard and dark, tired eyes.
“It’s nice and debasing,” Neptune agrees.
“It’s punishing,” says Taylor. “I don’t want to sleep on a bed anymore.”
“I don’t deserve it,” says Neptune
“I don’t fucking deserve it,” Taylor echoes. “When we’re filming, I feel so masochistic. It’s like, fuck it.
“Fuck my stupid life,” Neptune says. “I’m just an idiot who sleeps on the ground.”
They both laugh, then fall silent. Just then, a printer beeps in the corner, and fresh pages jolt out. With an assist from ChatGPT, they’ve written a love song for one of the fish named Landon to sing. Landon, in his early twenties, is a janitor from Wisconsin who, I know from watching the show, is the team’s favorite cast member to torment. A few days earlier, Taylor had challenged a drunken Landon to a boxing match and viciously beaten him to the ground.
The previous night, Landon had gotten drunk again and spent many hours begging another cast member, Vimp, to kiss him. Today he’s experiencing a lot of regret, and the producers want to make sure he doesn’t give up on the storyline.
“Do we want this to end with Landon getting his kiss?” Taylor asks the room.
“I want it to end with it getting worse and worse and him never getting his kiss,” Neptune says. Everyone agrees. They decide to tell Landon, who is naturally trusting, that Vimp is simply playing hard to get. Lyrics in hand, Neptune and Taylor ascend the staircase and appear moments later, in miniature, on the monitors. Vimp is off camera, in the bathroom. They pound on the door, shout, “CHOP CHOP!” and then find Landon, who is curled up on a couch, hungover and sad. All day the viewers have been taunting him, but now a few are trying to comfort him.
“Landon, this is just part of life,” one calls through the speakers. “Good on you for having the balls to take a swing.”
Neptune settles down next to him and says, “Facts. Everyone goes through this. Every man. You just happen to be going through it on a livestream with a lot of people watching.”
Another fan chimes in: “Keep your head up, playa! Lots of people rooting for you. You’ve done well and grown a lot. No homo.”
“We’re rooting for you in the basement, as well,” Neptune says. “And the power of music is gonna make this situation better.” Landon gratefully takes the lyric sheet, and Vimp sits down next to him.
In the basement, Binx, who has a papery voice and bright blue hair, is explaining to me that many of the contestants choose to remain in the house even after they’ve been eliminated because the cast and crew—and the fans—become their only friends. Landon, for instance, was eliminated days ago and has no chance of winning the prize money. Binx appeared on season 3 and returned this season to help out with production. She’s 34, streams for a living, and lives alone in Miami. “Communal living is important,” she tells me. “You get that here.”
Upstairs, Landon croons while Vimp smiles awkwardly:
Cameras roll but I just see you,
Every moment feeling too good to be true …
They’ll be watching but they won’t understand,
We’re building something that was never planned,
We’re the season five power couple can’t you see?
It’s you and me against reality.
Taylor and Neptune, who have returned downstairs to watch the performance, snicker and feverishly edit the moment into a clip they post on TikTok. Much of the afternoon is spent this way: The producers brainstorm a situation in the basement, run upstairs to execute it, then return to the basement to admire their handiwork and cut a clip. Technically, as the host, half of this is Margera’s job, but he crashes just as the others perk up and spends most of the day napping on a couch. Beside him, a bug zapper hums and glows electric blue, frying mosquitos at irregular intervals.
This must happen often, because the producers have contracted a call center worker in India named Antara to pilot a robo-host, which resembles a wheeled iPad. Antara is 29 and lives in Kolkata. Each day, she asks the cast how well they slept and how much they’ve eaten, and updates them on the war in Iran.
Sometimes the producers remain downstairs and communicate with the cast over an intercom. While a contestant eats her lunch, a plate of beef, Taylor calls up to her. “Shout out the sponsor!” he says. “Backyardbutchers.com/fishtank!” she yells while chewing, without looking up. Ottman watches with his arms crossed, grinning.
“Good girl,” he says. “Well trained.”
Sponsorships are a new revenue stream for Fishtank. For the first few seasons, they didn’t bother finding corporate partners. But recently, Ottman tells me, more companies have been reaching out, which he sees as a sign of the culture shifting away from censorship as Meta and X relax their moderation efforts. The Fishtank producers try to incorporate the products they advertise in clever ways. With the beef they received from Backyard Butchers, for example, they devised the Smoke-Milk-Meat Challenge. They divided the cast into teams and had them race to smoke three packs of cigarettes, chug a gallon of milk, and eat several pounds of steak while doing sit-ups. There were dry heaves, a bloody back. It was gross, Ottman says, but only a shortsighted sponsor thinks image curation is more important than eyeballs. “They’re smart to give us freedom. We put a lot of thought and creativity into every day.”
The rest of the revenue comes from Season Passes ($10) and Fishtoys—gifts or “disadvantages” fans can send to the cast. To send a red rose costs $50; a letter, $100; a plushie, $360. Requests come in all day long from fans eager to connect with the fish, or punish them. For as much as $800, you can purchase the Bedsnatcher disadvantage, which forces an unlucky contestant to sleep on the ground for a night. “That’s the biggest punishment,” Neptune says, “which is funny because that’s what we do down here …” He blinks for a moment. “That just clicked in my head.”
After each season, the producers keep the money coming in however they can. The audience enjoys their shamelessness. After season 2, they assembled “mystery boxes” of debris from the house—chunks of drywall, slivers of splintered doors, an empty bag of chips—and sold them for $200. “We actually sold garbage,” Ottman boasts. As Hyde predicted in his TEDx talk: trash economy.
Eventually, it’s time for me to enter the Tank myself. I’m not eager to, but Neptune assures me that he has instructed the cast to play nice. Opening the door at the top of the stairs, I feel like I’m stepping onto an alien planet. It’s dim, the floor is sticky, and the air smells like piss. I’m immediately and acutely self-conscious. I know from checking the ticker downstairs that something like 10,000 people are watching me, and I don’t like it.
Two cast members, twin sisters named Haley and Ashley, are sitting on a leather couch preparing to get spray tanned. They’re both tiny and greet me with friendly, faraway stares. They introduce themselves as Bingo and Bongo, nicknames the producers gave them on the first day.
Haley tells me that she and Ashley are identical, but she’s smaller, the result of a prenatal complication called twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. “When we were in utero we shared a vein, and all of my nutrients flowed into her,” she explains. “Usually that has severe consequences, but we had a good doctor.” Ashley nods her head.
They tell me they’re not sure what day of the week it is. While we chat, another contestant named James enters. Tall and handsome, with sunglasses dangling from his collar, he more closely resembles a reality TV archetype. But he, too, has a crazed look in his eyes, wide and bloodshot. Taylor orders James to give me a tour of the house, and I follow him through a broken door into the bedroom, which is empty. Most of the beds, James says with a hint of disappointment, were launched out the windows days ago. As we walk, he tells me he’s an actor from Austin. The producers reached out to him through a casting agency, and he didn’t know anything about Fishtank before coming on the show. He was told it would be like Big Brother. “It’s been a lot of learning,” he says.
The viewers hate our conversation. “Boring!” one screams through the speaker. “Boring boring boring boring!” James introduces me to Antara, shows me their “communal vape,” which is attached to a chain, and a TV that only cycles through custom memes the fans pay to broadcast. He tells me he sits and watches it each morning as he drinks his coffee.
On the second floor, more cast members introduce themselves. “Welcome to our own personal hell,” Landon says. He’s sitting in a pile of trash, holding a broomstick. Bashir, the one who wishes the show was more like The Wire, apologizes for the mess. “Everything degenerates,” he says. “The house just gets worse and worse over time, no matter how much we clean or try to make things better.”
“Why?” I ask.
“It’s just the nature of things,” he says.
“Hey, journalist,” a viewer asks, “why do you keep your wallet in your front pocket? And why do you keep putting your hands in your pockets?”
The viewers have turned their attention to me. Reflexively, I take my hands out of my pockets, then put them back in to avoid looking like a pushover—there seems to be no winning. Meanwhile, Taylor gathers the entire cast onto one couch and sits me down in a nearby armchair so that I can interview them all simultaneously. I don’t ask him to do this, but I don’t protest, either. He moves through the room with such certainty that it feels inevitable. Then he disappears into the basement, leaving me alone with the fish, who tell me what it’s like to be in the tank.
“Adrenaline rushes through you at all times,” Bashir says. They all agree that the strain is more mental than physical. You lose track of the days and start to act in ways you wouldn’t expect. They share some low moments: One peed himself, another had poop thrown at her. Landon says the producers claim he threatened them with a knife one night while drunk, but he wonders if they’re just messing with him.
I ask them why they stay. “I’m not a quitter,” James says. Bashir explains that he’s on a spiritual quest. He’s a devout Muslim who wants to prove that he can keep his faith in God in even the most godless environment. Vimp, who’s been quiet, tells me she has also turned to religion to sustain herself in the Tank. She says she’s a survivor of the Parkland school shooting and the viewers have mocked her relentlessly for it.
“All night they were saying, ‘You should have been the one that’s killed.’ It was really hard,” she whispers. “But you just gotta keep going.”
As night falls, the producers announce that it’s challenge time. They shake out bags of dead, dried crickets across the living room, kitchen, and hallway, and cover the cast with double-sided adhesive paper. The goal is to pick up as many crickets as possible by rolling across the ground. No one will be eliminated, but the winner will get $500. The contestants drop to the floor, and Taylor follows them around the house shouting, “Roll! Roll!” After a few minutes they line up and he decides, seemingly at random, that Bashir has won. He raises his hands triumphantly, like Rocky.
I float between the upstairs and the basement, where I chat with Neptune and the rest of the staff as they work. I talk with a producer named Mints, who operates the sound board, among other things. He’s 26 and has dark red hair, a mustache, and wire-framed glasses, and is wearing an argyle sweater above astonishingly ill-fitting pants. For most of the day he’s been clicking diligently at his desk, not saying a word. He tells me he really enjoys his job. Before he worked for Fishtank he worked at a pizzeria. He was an obsessive Fishtank fan and a dutiful moderator of the show’s website, where the producers found him and offered him a job. So now he’s getting paid to do what he loves. He grew up in California. “How are you liking Georgia?” I ask. He shrugs his shoulders. “All of America is kind of the same, visually,” he says.
Mints agrees with Neptune that underneath the darkness, Fishtank is a positive show. “People who apply want to change something about themselves,” he says. The audience can be sadistic, Mints concedes, but he believes that “ultimately, what everyone wants to see is a positive story. They want to push people to their breaking point so that they can transform and grow … If they see a flaw in somebody, they feel like the hammer which is going to get out all of the dents.”
I must frown, or squint, because he continues. During season 2, he was a fan of a contestant named TJ who was very self-conscious, always stuttering and shaking. Mints sent hundreds of messages to TJ. “TJ, calm down!” he’d say. “Have more confidence!”
“It’s like bullying, kind of, but not really,” Mints says. “You’re just trying to get it through someone’s head: This is the thing that’s wrong with you … It’s exposure therapy for your whole personality.”
“Is working on the show similarly therapeutic?” I ask.
He thinks for a moment. “Um, well, it definitely makes me want to lose weight.”
At another moment, producers share the strange dreams they sometimes have while working on the show. Most entail being naked and immobilized in front of a camera, or some similar situation. Taylor reveals that he has Fishtank dreams every night and gives a recent example: In the dream, he and Neptune decided to cancel the show. They shut off the cameras and resolved, instead, to throw a party. He invited all of the fans, who filled the house and began to let loose. The party turned into an orgy. “All the fans were fucking each other in the basement,” he says. “I was walking around like, dude, I gotta get the fuck outta here. And then this big fan grabbed me by the shoulder and was like, ‘You’re Ben, right?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ And then he just socked me right in the fucking face. And I was like, I gotta wake up now.”
“What do you think it means?” I ask.
“Fuck if I know, bro.”
To finish the day, Taylor leads the cast upstairs to the arena, a small room where the walls and floor are lined with gymnastics mats. James is scheduled to box Burt, a streamer in his mid-thirties from New Jersey who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The fight, Taylor says, will be one two-minute round. They raise their gloves and start swinging.
James, who struck me as kind and gentle—if a bit frantic—when he was giving me a tour of the house, suddenly has hate in his eyes. His punches fly fast and straight, one after another, while Burt throws his gloves out desperately, weakly, in unison. James pummels Burt into the corner and knocks him down into a limp, twisted heap.
Taylor shouts excitedly, and the rest of the cast cheers. I stand with them on the sideline. We’re the audience, but we’re also being watched. I feel dirty, I notice, just being in the room. Taylor is counting to 10, and Burt is struggling to his feet with a resigned look in his eyes. Somehow I’m sure he’ll decide to continue fighting, and I wonder why, and why any of these people wake up each morning, in this house, and decide to stay rather than step outside into the spring air and just walk away.
It could be simple. Maybe the producers enjoy inflicting punishment, and the contestants enjoy receiving it, and they’re a harmless match made in heaven, or hell. But after my afternoon in the Fishtank, I’m left with the impression that both the cast and the crew are chasing some strange absolution. By entering into this house and sleeping on the floor in a pile of trash, by pissing yourself, screaming the N-word, shaving your head, and inflicting humiliation, you must die a kind of death while still breathing. You destroy your reputation, your personality. Your sense of right and wrong, clean and unclean, normal and insane. And then you emerge into a new, flat world where only one thing matters, attention. You must feel empty, but light. Maybe reborn.
Burt stands up and Taylor asks if he wants to keep fighting. “Yes,” Burt wheezes. Taylor lifts his gloves for him, then steps out of the way. James leans in and lands a hard shot to the stomach, and Burt resumes flailing his fists. “Let’s go, guys!” Taylor shouts. “Put that work in!” The other contestants scream gleefully from the sidelines.
What about the viewers, I wonder. Where’s the salvation in anonymously bullying strangers into oblivion? Our eyes adjust to darkness, and so it’s tempting, I guess, to believe that the room is getting lighter. To hope that by witnessing and inflicting enough pain, pain will become powerless, meaningless. Burt collapses again, then rises as Taylor’s count reaches nine. James moves in, and I think back to something Neptune told me earlier, that his ultimate hope for Fishtank is to hold the show in a warehouse, inside a fully fabricated set designed to look like a spaceship. Rather than compete with each other, the cast will work as a team and remain on board for a full year. He hopes it will simulate, for audiences, the collective joy of witnessing the Apollo missions. “Those daily broadcasts,” he told me, “it was something everyone was following. The world hasn’t had that feeling of rooting for, like, an expedition for 60 years. Everyone who’s on the internet today doesn’t know what that’s like. But it must have been incredible.” It was an odd thing to say, since that very day the astronauts of the Artemis II mission splashed back down on Earth after flying by the moon, but I understood his sentiment. He’s hoping that somehow, on the other side of all this, there’s something beautiful. A farm where he can raise a family, and die happily.
After the fight, Taylor returns to the basement, where Neptune is already cutting the footage into clips. They scroll through it frame by frame, watching Burt crumple in slow motion. “Daaaamn,” Taylor says. “He was out cold right there.” I say my goodbyes and feel a surge of relief stepping into the night air, which is warm and alive with hidden life, chirping and croaking. Ottman is sitting on the patio beside a firepit. As I wait for my ride, I sit with him, enjoying the heat on my shins. Through the walls, the viewers’ messages are audible but unintelligible. They mingle with the muffled, soothing shocks of the bug zapper, as it dazzles and vaporizes its prey.
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