5 Best Anime With Reality TV Themes

Highlights

• Blue Lock, Grand Blue Dreaming, Danganronpa
  – anime mirroring reality TV themes, from sports competition to deadly scenarios.
• Tomodachi Game
  offers a cruel debt game scenario, mixing entertaining mind games and manipulative challenges.
• Starship Operators
  brings reality TV to space, showcasing military sci-fi adventures in a unique and intriguing setting.

Reality TVand anime both have one thing in common: They are mediums of television that many across the world watch to relax and unwind. Other than that, it’s hard to really say they are similar, but, oftentimes, the two mediums can share aspects.

The very same competitions, slice-of-life viewing, and dramatic relationships that make reality TV so entertaining are the same factors that can often be found in a number of different anime in one way or another. Some anime borrow concepts directly from reality TV, while others have subtle parallels that match the same energy of live-action content. Here are five anime that have reality TV-like themes in them.

5 Blue Lock

Become The Best

Blue Lock is a sports anime where some aspects mirror the common type of physical-challenge-based reality TV competitions, such as Physical 100, a show where ‘One hundred contestants in top physical shape compete in a series of grueling challenges to claim the honor, and cash reward, as the last one standing’. In Blue Lock, the main characters compete in a football competition where high school athletes battle it out to get a chance to be featured in a future Japanese World Cup squad.

It’s a grueling program these athletes enter, which has the end goal of creating the best striker in the world. The competition is watched by onlookers, including those who work for football federations and entities in and outside of Japan. The contestants are viewed from their training exercises to their hyper-competitive matches.

Blue Lock also has an entertaining cast of characters befitting a reality TV show where competition is key. From those with giant egos to those with unending ambition to those with intense willpower to the crazy, violent competitors and the ones who seem like the physical embodiment of determination itself. Blue Lock has all the intrigue of an athletic televised contest.

4 Grand Blue Dreaming

Japanese Frat Fun

A highly humorous anime which, unfortunately, has only had twelve episodes adapted from the manga so far. Grand Blue is another athletics-based anime, though of a very different flavor. The athletes here are not in a competition, nor do they even compete in their sport in general, instead spending most of their time partying and going on silly misadventures.

Grand Blue follows the lives of college students on the Izu Peninsula, where our main characters are part of the university’s diving club, but as mentioned before, they hardly do any actual diving. From the goofball, the pranksters, and the comedic straight men, Grand Blue has all the archetypes of a slice of life ‘keeping up with’ type of reality TV show.

Each episode is a Big Brother-type day in the life story, looking into the world of these students, most of whom live together under the same roof, and all of whom are constantly getting into amusing conflicts with each other. With lectures, dates, and the rare beautiful diving session, there’s a lot to see when it comes to reality TV-style people-watching throughout Grand Blue Dreaming.

3 Danganronpa

The Deadliest Student Competition

Definitely the deadliest entry on this list, Danganronpa is a televised game of despair, and definitely the last reality-TV style anime that any sane person would want to be a part of. Originally a video game in the murder mystery visual novel genre, Danganronpa tells a story that starts with a group of students entering a prestigious high school.

Hope’s Peak Academy, which, aside from its reserve students and lucky lottery winners, typically enrolls those who are the most talented people in their field of expertise. These are known as ‘Ultimates’ or ‘Super High School Level’ athletes, writers, detectives and more. Unfortunately for these Ultimates, and one ‘lucky’ student, the school is not what it seems. They are trapped in the building by the mechanical and maniacal bear Monokuma, and not allowed to leave. The only way to escape is to kill another one of the students and then, when the class trial comes around, get away with the crime without getting caught. That is how they win, either get away with murder, or catch every single murderer in a series of class trials.

It is revealed later in the series that these killings and class trials are televised to the rest of the world, allowing them to wallow in the on-screen despair that matches their dystopian world.

2 Tomodachi Game

Mind Games On Debt Games

An anime that had all the markings of the typical death game, much like Squid Game, except, unlike Squid Game, the contestants are not likely to lose their life during most of the Tomodachi Game. Instead, they will most likely lose their livelihood, as the game being played by those with life-threatening debt who want to free themselves from it and pass it on to other unfortunate competitors.

A safer but arguably just as cruel game where friends are pitted against each other in a series of physically-taxing and manipulative challenge rounds, similar to that shown in the Liar Game manga. Like any entertaining yet cruel fictional competition, the Tomodachi Game is televised in-universe, with fans sending messages and emojis that the host can showcase, as if it was a live stream.

Tomodachi Game, and its eccentric main character with a troubled past, will give new viewers a spectacle of clever tricks and manipulative mind games as the competition goes on. These mind games, and the promise of erased debt and great wealth, make for highly intriguing viewing, both for fans of Tomodachi Game in-universe and for viewers in the real world.

1 Starship Operators

Reality TV To The Stars

• Creator: Ryou Mizuno
• Seasons: 1
• Genre: Space Opera
• Release Date: January 5, 2005

A less popular example than most of the entries on this list, but perhaps the most fitting of all. In Starship Operators, the story follows the 73rd class of the Defense University of a planet called Kibi which, unfortunately, has been conquered by an entity known as the Henrietta Alliance of Planetary Nations. The cadet protagonists need to save their home planet, and require some way to pay for their endeavors. This leads to what is known as the Galaxy Network, to fund their efforts in exchange for live reality TV broadcasts.

The military science-fiction adventures of these cadets and their starships are being broadcast and watched as if it were reality TV. It is one of the most interesting applications of a space-faring plot ever put on the small screen in anime. Why watch a group of celebrities getting into petty conflicts with each other in a house when, instead, a group of space cadets tackling real planetary-level conflicts from inside a spaceship is also available for viewing?

With characters like Executive Officer Sinon Kouzuki and Commanding Officer Cisca Kanzaki, Starship Operators offers the type of reality viewing most reality TV-esque shows do not tackle. The reality of life, death, and the cosmos.