Although reality TV’s presentation of authenticity has been contested since the genre emerged at the turn of the century, discourse dedicated to debunking its halfhearted claim to the real continues to persist. This article adopts a psychoanalytic framework to explain this compulsion in the context of a broader ideological disposition that finds enjoyment in the detection of artifice. To do this, it examines reality TV from the perspective of Lacan’s discussion of the eye and trompe-l’oeil to argue that reality TV is appealing because its depictions of authenticity can so easily be (mis)recognized as (im)possible.