Loving neoliberalism? Digital labour and aspirational work on streaming food TV

ABSTRACT This paper considers the changing textual meanings, industrial practices and platform infrastructures of food TV as it moves from network television to on-demand streaming platforms. Using Netflix cooking competitions Sugar Rush and Crazy Delicious as case studies, it shows how streaming TV normalises the tenets of the aspirational, branded self to such an extent that the work of self-production is presented as both self-evident and a pleasurable form of leisure. The paper argues that streaming reality’s persistent reframing of labour as leisure allows services to profit from contestants’ pre-existing identities and content (including from other platforms, most notably Instagram), just as its algorithmic logics extract value from the labour of audiences. Netflix food programmes highlight a significant expansion in the forms and types of unpaid labour taken for granted on contemporary reality TV, whereby the invisibilisation of work on-screen increasingly mirrors the invisibilisation of work in Netflix’s own platform logic.