Among Its Many Faults, "The Activist" Was a Big, Shining Billboard for the Sector’s Image Problem

We’re not usually in the business of TV reviews here at Inside Philanthropy, but I can be reasonably certain that if we were, CBS’ “The Activist” would not be getting five stars—at least the way it was originally conceptualized. Last week, the network announced it would be airing a five-week “competition series” starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Usher and Julianne Hough as hosts, in what seemed like a thoroughly joyless prospect for evening entertainment.

The backlash to the announcement was so strong, in fact, that CBS and Global Citizen, the advocacy organization co-producing the show, got cold feet and just announced that they’ll go back to the drawing board. Instead of a competition format, “The Activist” will now apparently look more like a documentary.

Time will tell what the final product looks like, but the competition concept was a fiasco from the start. Described as “unprecedented” in the original press release, “The Activist” planned to pit six competitors against one another in a series of “missions, media stunts, digital campaigns and community events” designed to draw attention to their social change work. Attention was the relevant metric. In addition to the hosts’ thoughts, the show wanted to weigh the activists’ merits via digital engagement on social media and elsewhere. And once a winner was determined, the prize was a trip to the G20 summit in Rome for “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet with world leaders in the hopes of securing funding and invaluable awareness for their causes.”

Needless to say, the whole thing was in startlingly poor taste, and commentators from the nonprofit world and across the Twitter-verse weren’t afraid to say so. The reality show’s premise struck a nerve, prompting such creative descriptors as “cursed” and “the second circle of hell” and even inspiring a hashtag, #CancelTheActivist. Vu Le over at Nonprofit AF went so far as to pen a list of satirical alternatives that are at once amusing and not really much more absurd than the premise itself. (I cracked up at No. 4, “Holy Hummus!”)

Le and a bunch of other writers have chronicled pretty much everything that was wrong with “The Activist”—including its “Hunger Games” format, its elevation of three questionable celebrity hosts, its lack of an actual prize, and its apparent reliance on social media metrics rather than any measure of ground-level impact. The show was so thoroughly trounced that one was left to wonder whether this was some big-brained scheme by CBS to release something so tone-deaf that its sheer badness would bring in more viewers than something blander, but actually, you know, empowering.

Faced with this deluge of criticism that resulted in an embarrassing backtrack for those involved, I wondered if there’s any silver lining. Also, what might “The Activist” and the backlash against it tell us about philanthropy and how it’s perceived?

Arwa Mahdawi took a stab at a happy takeaway in The Guardian, closing a litany of the show’s ills with the observation that “icky as it may be, the show is also a sign of progress… the fact that social justice has gone mainstream, and activism is aspirational, is ultimately something to celebrate.”

There are plenty more wholesome examples of mainstream engagement with social justice out there—pretty much any other example. But there is some comfort to be taken in the fact that we’re living in a time when entertainment execs—usually receptive only to reality programs centered on dating, cooking, starting businesses and surviving on islands—believe there’s enough interest in social change to warrant something like this.

Of course, what they came up with felt like a perverse caricature of actual social change activism, never mind its apparent intention to “inspire viewers.” And that brings me to the second point—what does this perverse caricature say about philanthropy?

Taken for what it is, there really wasn’t much in the way of philanthropy in “The Activist.” It’s a reality TV program aiming at high ratings. And what the winners were slated to receive wasn’t a prize or a grant, just publicity and the opportunity to get in front of powerful people. It’s more like crowdfunding without the actual funding, with a television executive’s criterion for what matters most—eyeballs—in the place of impact.

Still, as others have pointed out, aspects of “The Activist” speak to crucial concerns for the sector.

For one thing, there’s the whole power dynamic of nonprofit workers running in circles for moneyed power brokers, which bears a dispiriting similarity to philanthropy as it’s commonly practiced. The reality TV competition format also called to mind the artificial scarcity so many nonprofits face, obliged to compete for grants while funders nurture massive endowments and potential donors sit on expanding fortunes (and DAFs), casually contemplating which charities to support at some point in the future.

Then there’s the focus on metrics—not always a bad thing, but very much reminiscent of the philanthrocapitalist framework so many funders have adopted to no great effect. And in place of the well-meaning but inexperienced big donor, we were presented with three celebrity judges who’ve said some iffy things in the past, yes, but more importantly, lack any particular expertise or qualification for the role.

Widening the lens a bit, what is really striking about “The Activist” as it was first conceived is what it says about how unfamiliar many people outside the nonprofit world remain with social change work in all its variety, and how it’s funded. I’m talking about the people who greenlit this show, but also the general populace, who are more than likely to associate “philanthropy” with billionaires and movie stars burnishing their brands, or with self-congratulatory galas festooned with images of kids from Africa. By coincidence, I just saw a TV show where the hypocritical villain presided over just such an event. He wasn’t exactly philanthropic at heart.

The fact that “The Activist” was poised to play into many of these tropes is a sign that philanthropy still has a long way to go to fix its image problem. Our unified distaste for this reality show is all well and good, but I’m sure a lot of people get a similar bad taste from the performative aspects of philanthropy in general. It’s something that came up this summer at Jeff Bezos’ post-spaceflight press conference (where he gave out $200 million on what seemed like a whim, half of it to a TV personality) and that won’t be the last time.

Making some progress on addressing philanthropy’s structural inequities could help stave off another potential backlash, not against a tone-deaf TV show, but against tone-deaf grantmaking.

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