‘Catfish,’ the TV Show That Predicted America’s Disorienting Digital Future

Kamie Crawford and Schulman conducting a digital investigation. She joined the show full-time as co-host in 2020.

Since its first episode aired in 2012, “Catfish: The TV Show” has held up a mirror to our online lives, reflecting how we present ourselves and make sense of love, lust, trust, companionship and loneliness in an increasingly digital world. Each episode unfolds like a detective show, with the host Nev Schulman summoned to untangle truth from lies, to take relationships that exist only on computers and phones and drag them into our three-dimensional reality.

The saga of Danny and Jose, which aired in 2017, is emblematic of the deception, dashed hopes and complicated situations regularly featured on the show.

Danny contacted “Catfish” for help, believing Rosa had moved from Connecticut to Orlando, where he lived, but still would not meet him. Rosa had warned Danny that she had anger issues, in part because she had been molested as a child. When meeting with Schulman and his co-host Max Joseph, Danny said he wanted to help her by bringing more faith into her life. “I think I could make her a better person,” he said. “We plan to have a family.”

In their research, Schulman and Joseph quickly discovered the so-called mask, meaning the unwitting person whose photos had been sent to Danny: a woman named Natalie. But Rosa’s real identity was harder to pin down. “This is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Danny said when shown the evidence. “I never had anybody send me fake pictures.”

Schulman called Rosa to inform her that Danny was now aware she’d lied about the photos. Though combative, she agreed to meet in Connecticut. It became clear that she had never moved.

When Schulman, Joseph, Danny and the crew arrived, they were met by a sobbing Jose. “Just be yourself, be honest, say whatever it is you feel comfortable saying,” Schulman told him. Jose said he’d created the fake account more than a decade earlier. Danny was shaken but maintained his composure.

“What were you actually planning on getting out of this?” he asked. “You need some help. You need to go to church, you need to get involved, you need to speak to someone.”

“I feel bad about myself every single day that I wake up,” Jose said. The terrible things that he’d said Rosa endured had actually happened to him, he said. “I was in pain. To this day, I’m still in pain. I just try to find an escape.”

Though no two episodes are alike, “Catfish,” which premiered just as social media and dating apps became dominant cultural forces, has remained consistent: “Hopefuls,” in “Catfish” lingo, ask the show for help meeting a person with whom they have developed an online relationship, but have not met in real life.

The hopefuls usually suspect they are being deceived but can’t quite surrender their rose-colored glasses. They have almost never had a video call with their person, and often they have never spoken on the phone. Professions of love and longing, within perpetual scrolls of direct messages or texts, are frequent. Meeting, moving and marriage often come up. The exchange of private details and photographs, including explicit selfies, is common.

Schulman and Kamie Crawford, who joined as a full-time co-host in 2020 (Joseph left in 2018), conduct an investigation to unite the two people. The show facilitates the invariably fraught confrontations. The process is not intended to be easy or fun, and by and large, the elusive partner is a catfish: someone who fabricates an online persona for any number of motivations.

Today, those who have never watched a minute of “Catfish” most likely recognize the term, as the phenomenon has become more familiar than the documentary and TV show that minted it. The activities and behaviors that “Catfish” captures — wrestling with loneliness, seeking virtual relationships, sifting through digital misinformation and wondering what, if any of it, is real — are part and parcel of everyday life for many in 2024. Longtime “Catfish” viewers may not be as surprised as others by our current extremely online existence.

Nev Schulman and Kamie Crawford, the hosts of “Catfish: The TV Show,” which returns to MTV on April 30. People think of it as this “wild mystery adventure,” Schulman said, but “90 percent of the show is just people talking about their feelings.”

As the series returns for its ninth season on April 30, it will continue to present snapshots of the country rarely seen on TV. Previous investigations have taken viewers to Kodiak, Alaska; St. Ignace, Mich.; Charlotte, Texas; and Greensburg, Pa. — places where career or social opportunities may be scarce.

Each scenario is something of a slow-motion unveiling, dread and anticipation building with every revelation.

When confronted, Chelsea spoke about being bullied throughout high school, especially for her sexual orientation, and seemed relieved to end the charade. On “Catfish,” L.G.B.T.Q. struggles are frequently part of the equation.

During Season 8, the show was successful in pivoting its format for the pandemic, holding investigations and anxiety-addled reveals over video conference, allowing for more international stories.

After filming, Frank showed Longwell a photo of the hub from which the catfish ring worked. (The show did not disclose the country in which Frank lived.) There were “a thousand cellphones on the table, all plugged into different power outlets,” each phone logged into a different account, Longwell, who is now 41, told me in a video interview.

Reflecting on the ordeal, Longwell said he wished he hadn’t overlooked the glaring warnings for so long, but he understood why he and many others do. “I feel like everybody’s searching for the same thing in life. It’s not money or power or anything like that. It’s love. It’s unconditional love.” His advice to those in a similar mess: “Put the love interests aside and think logically, because your heart will overcloud your mind’s judgment every time.”

IF IT WASN’T FOR NEV SCHULMAN, we’d still think of catfish as whiskered inhabitants of fresh water and not as online impostors.

As the story goes, Schulman, then a 24-year-old New York-based photographer, had been befriended on Facebook by Abby, an 8-year-old Michigan girl. Seemingly an artistic prodigy, Abby wanted permission to use one of his photographs as the basis of a painting, and they formed a warm, sibling-like friendship, which led to a pleasant rapport with her mother, Angela, and then to a romantic online relationship with Megan, Abby’s 19-year-old half sister. When Megan’s story started to crumble, Schulman traveled to Michigan to find the truth, with a documentary team in tow.

In reality, there was no Abby or Megan as Nev had come to know them, only Angela Wesselman-Pierce, a married woman who used photos of another woman for her “Megan” profile. (She did have two daughters, Abby and Megan, but neither was involved in the lie.) Wesselman-Pierce was the painter all along. She’d also created an entire network of fake Facebook accounts that interacted with one another to form a fleshed-out illusion. This all played out in the documentary “Catfish” (directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, Nev’s older brother), which “caused some hyperventilation” when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010.

Wesselman-Pierce lived with her husband, Vince Pierce, and his two sons. “I didn’t want to lose the friendship no matter what,” a teary Wesselman-Pierce told Schulman in the film. “A lot of the personalities that came out were just fragments of myself.”

At the end of the documentary, a ruminative Pierce recalled a tale he’d heard, and in turn, gave the movie — and the expression — its name. Cod, he said, were once shipped by boat in vats from Alaska to China, but the fish would arrive mushy and tasteless. Eventually catfish were added to the vats to keep the cod healthy. “There are those people who are catfish in life,” he said. In his mind, his wife was one of them. “They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh.”

Life, he added, would be “boring and dull if we didn’t have somebody nipping at our fin.”

When asked how catfishing became rampant, and the concept so widely understood, Schulman, now 39 and a father of three, said that while people have been conned and scammed forever, the fast-changing online and social climate of the early 2010s produced a perfect storm — a lawless digital landscape where once-accepted expectations around romance, friendship and connection blurred, making it increasingly complex to parse authenticity from artifice.

Instagram was introduced in 2010, and then Snapchat in 2011. The dating app Grindr arrived in 2009, then Tinder in 2012. Concepts that now seem banal — starting relationships online with strangers — were still seen as bizarre and rare. On the heels of the documentary, Schulman was inundated with emails from people with stories similar to his.

The idea really entered the public consciousness in early 2013, when Deadspin reported on a scandal surrounding the Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o. He led his team to the national championship game and was a Heisman Trophy finalist, all in the shadow of the death of his girlfriend early in the season. But the girlfriend, Deadspin discovered, was never real.

Te’o was the victim of a catfishing hoax, but the situation was so incomprehensible at that time, theories swirled about his possible involvement in the fraud.

Te’o said he was the target of “someone’s sick joke and constant lies,” and called the situation “painful and humiliating.” In a news conference, Notre Dame’s athletic director mentioned the show “Catfish” by name. The term exploded on Twitter and Google searches soared.

Naya Tuiasosopo, as she is now known after coming out as a transgender woman, had used photos of a woman named Diane O’Meara to create Te’o’s fake girlfriend, Lennay Kekua.

In 2022, Tuiasosopo was interviewed for the Netflix two-part documentary “Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist.” Like many catfish, she comes off as less of a coldblooded con artist than someone battling inner turmoil. “I still feel horrible, and sometimes I wish that everything had been undone,” she said, “but then also another part of me was like, I learned so much about who I am today and who I wanted to become because of the lessons I learned through the life of Lennay.”

Crawford, the show’s co-host, is often asked how people continue to get duped, given all we now know. “The majority of America, the middle areas and the places that we go on the show, are towns that might not even have one stoplight,” she told me over the phone. “Your dating pool is the same people that you went to kindergarten with.”

The ability to go online and meet a beautiful person that lives in some fun city can provide an escape from reality, an exciting outlet to a new life, Crawford said.

“We have to hold space and compassion for people who don’t have that kind of access,” she said. “There’s a whole world of those kinds of people. It really does play a role in this catfishing world.”

Presenting people objectively and compassionately is the show’s “secret X factor,” Schulman said, and a reason it continues to be a mainstay on MTV. The show takes special care in giving both parties a chance to tell their stories, leaving viewers to draw their own conclusions, to feel sympathy or not.

“Even though they think they’re watching to see this sort of monster reveal at the end and relish in the hideousness of this person, we sort of trick them into realizing that we’re all that person,” he said. “Some of us are better at hiding it or dealing with it, or are lucky enough to have family who help us through our tough times.”

It’s that redemption quality that has become most interesting about the show to John Maroney and David Metzler, executive producers from Critical Content, the production company behind “Catfish,” who have both worked on the show since its inception. “A lot of times you leave an episode almost feeling more for the catfish than you do the hopeful,” Maroney said. “For me, there’s humanity in every episode, even the craziest story.”

“CATFISH” HAS ENDURED in part because it’s maintained a commitment to conveying a starker reality than the Bravo-fied version of reality TV that’s dominant today — one filled with beautiful, wealthy people thriving in bustling cities.

That doesn’t mean the show has escaped naysayers who struggle to believe its scenarios aren’t staged to some degree. But the confrontations on “Catfish” are done in a single take, and the hosts and hopefuls never really know what they are about to walk into. “We just roll into a scene and film it as it’s happening, not cutting, and then it’s over,” Schulman told me. Sometimes the investigations don’t deliver what might be expected: the times when the catfish were not catfish at all, but who they said they were; or the times when a hopeful and catfish, in cahoots, fake the situation to get on television. These episodes air like the others.

The show’s position at the intersection of humanity and technology has even prompted some research, including a widely cited study, from 2020, led by Marissa Mosley, assistant professor in the department of human development and family studies at the University of New Hampshire.

For the study, titled “adult attachment and online dating deception: a theory modernized,” 1,107 adults were surveyed and about 70 percent described themselves as a victim of a catfishing scam. On average, participants were 25 years old, which reflects the largely millennial and Gen Z cohort featured on the show.

“It’s really tough to see people just so desperate for connection and not being able to have it manifest in reality,” Mosley, an avid watcher of “Catfish,” said during a video interview. In the same way the show was able to offer a preview of how digital communication would redefine connection, it was also able to sound a warning about the isolation and loneliness so many Americans grapple with, a growing problem that the surgeon general called an epidemic last year. “We have to renegotiate our relationship with technology,” he wrote.

Mosley’s study looked at this phenomenon by examining aspects of anxious and avoidant attachment styles, which reveal themselves in romantic or emotionally intimate situations. Anxiously attached people can become frenetically preoccupied with their ability to have and keep love. Avoidant people tend to conflate intimacy with lost independence and suffocation.

Mosley’s study found that people who were highly anxious and avoidant, what Mosley called “a fearful type of attachment,” were more likely to be catfished or be catfish themselves.

Catfishing is a perfect way to fulfill those needs, she said, because that fear of abandonment can be coupled with withdrawing, especially when distressed: Engage in catfishing, get a relationship going, have a sense of perceived control, but pull away just as easily.

“Technology’s fascinating because it gives us that increased accessibility and availability, but also very limited accountability,” she said. “It’s like, ‘I want you close, but not too close.’”

In our conversation, Schulman meditated on the roles of fantasy and convenience in the many sticky situations he’s navigated over the past 12 years.

“What the show boils down to is that people just desperately want to feel some sort of meaningful human connection, and the internet can facilitate that to some degree. I know it can feel similarly fulfilling,” he said. “It can create sort of a silhouette, but it’s almost like a shell of the intimate relationship.”

“Unfortunately,” he added, gazing briefly beyond the self-facing camera on his computer, “when you poke your finger in there, it’s empty inside.”

Read by Maya Salam

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.