NEW YORK, NY.- 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 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 at the time, 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.”

Jose said, “I feel bad about myself every single day that I wake up.” 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.

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.

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, Michigan; Charlotte, Texas; and Greensburg, Pennsylvania — places where career or social opportunities may be scarce.

If it weren’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, siblinglike 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.

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.”

“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% described themselves as a victim of a catfishing scam.

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.

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,” he said. “I know it can feel similarly fulfilling. 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.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.