'I'm not here to make friends': The origin of reality TV's most cliché catchphrase

'I'm not here to make friends': The origin of reality TV's most cliché catchphrase. Reality TV had a huge boom in the late ’90s and early 2000s, thanks in part to “Survivor” and “Big Brother”. It was in the summer of 2008 that VH1 culture writer Rich Juzwiak was in the throes of watching and re-capping all of these reality TV shows. when he noticed people kept saying the same thing over and over again. “I’m not here to make friends”. Juzwiak spent months compiling clips from dozens of TV shows where someone mentioned the phrase. Even today in 2020, contestants on “The Bachelor” and UK’s “Love Island” are saying it when they stomp on someone else’s toes to get to their love interest. “Top Chef” cooks say it when they “throw someone under the bus” (another overused reality TV show phrase). Where did this come from? How did this become engrained in the very fabric and foundation of modern reality TV. It’s so beyond a cliché at this point, it’s almost a necessity for someone to say in order to identify themselves as the season’s villain. The first recorded mention of “I’m not here to make friends” was bestowed upon the public by Kelly Wiglesworth in the first season of “Survivor”. “How do you stay true to yourself and still maintain integrity while playing this game? You know what, you can’t. And I tell myself, ‘Oh I have enough friends, I didn’t come here to make friends…’”. Twenty-two-year-old Wiglesworth actually did make friends during that season. and while she ended up finishing in second place, she made a much larger impact by saying those six words into the camera during a confessional