Maybe I’m being hyper-critical, or just getting old, but I’m getting a little tired of fledgling streaming service Linda Ikeji TV and its ghetto porn content. Granted, the platform has a slew of posh, bourgeois reality shows like King Tonto and Big Brother-adjacent filler Made in Gidi, but Mushin is making my cynicism get the best of me.

After introducing its flagship show Oyinbo Wives of Lagos last year, LiTV followed up with Ajegunle, With Love months later. Ajegunle, With Love is gritty, multi-voiced reality television showcasing the Nigerian ghetto archetype Ajegunle, and packaging it as entertainment. The narration is split into five human perspectives with a dose of nuance, and it seemed to me then as a genuine, balanced portrayal of an environment long regarded as ugly.

During the week, LiTV released the trailer for Mushin, a new reality series coming to the platform. On Linda Ikeji’s personal Instagram, she alerts us that Mushin will be worse than its predecessor Ajegunle With Love, in the context of steep, harsh realities. From drug abuse to wasted dreams and the women exchanging sex for shelter and patriarchal protection, Mushin feels like a dark, journalistic voyage, like something fashioned after the oft-unsavoury news pieces presented by Ruth Benamaisia-Opia for NTA’s Weekend File.

Some of you have seen our reality show out of Ajegunle but you’re about to see something way worse. A reality show shot in one of the roughest parts of Lagos, Mushin. . The street fights, unbelievable drug use, attempted rape (that LITV crew stopped) violence against women, youths with dreams and talent that are wasted in that area, young women who live in uncompleted buildings with men who sleep with them to allow them stay in these buildings for protection and as rent, is something you’ve never seen before. . . Mushin – coming soon on lindaikeji.tv. . On the web, its lindaikeji.tv, you can also download our app on Playstore and Appstore

A post shared by Linda Ikeji TV (@lindaikejitv) on Jul 4, 2018 at 4:03am PDT

The tales are usually distressing and horrendous, and often reported from places eroded with poverty. But they pull at your heartstrings, and make you helplessly angry, at yourself for being cocooned in class privilege and at the government for massively failing on its basic responsibilities. Personally, I have long been desensitised by the collapsing dysfunction of Nigeria that nothing really surprises me anymore. Case in point, Falz’s This Is Nigeria parody or whatever that regurgitates age-old national problems with a few modern updates.

That said, who is Mushin for anyway? If I were American or French, especially a well-off American or French coming across Mushin or any content like that, surely I will be devastated. At the end of the day, though, Mushin is fetishised entertainment which is beginning to look like an aesthetic for LiTV, a subscription for crude, caustic television built on the decay of society.

Bernard Dayo

When Bernard Dayo isn’t writing about pop culture, he’s watching horror movies and reading comics and trying to pretend his addiction to Netflix isn’t a serious condition.