Reality TV has been blamed for a number of distinctly 21st-century phenomena, from the ubiquity of celebrity culture to the resurrection of Donald Trump. But, as TV critic Emily Nussbaum writes in her new book, the history of reality TV is surprisingly long. Before *The Real World*, there was *An American Family*. Before the savvy Kardashians, there were the naive Louds, who had no clue—when they agreed to let a PBS crew into their Santa Barbara home in 1973—that their domestic squabbles and personal quirks would end up fodder for prominent columnists and millions of viewers nationwide. Nussbaum combed through newspaper archives (turning up gems like a young Nora Ephron condemning the Loud matriarch for her “letting-it-all-hang-out candor”) and interviewed around three hundred people—from camera crews and field producers to executives and contestants (including almost all of the original cast members of *An American Family* and *The Real World*). “I was trying to tell the untold story of a genre that is usually treated trivially or fannishly or with condemnation,” she says, “not as something worth thinking about deeply.” Nussbaum’s sweeping, meticulously researched book proves that reality TV deserves serious attention—and can shed light on the roots of American cynicism (*An American Family* may have played a role), the human appetite for gossip, and the power of minority representation onscreen.
I was as surprised as you were. I assumed that it was basically a modern genre—that *An American Family* was the big beginning of it, and *The Real World* was probably what it went back to. But once I started looking into radio shows, I realized that there had been this huge boom, starting around World War II. They called them “audience participation shows.” One of the reasons they started bubbling up was because they cost nothing. It had always been a way not to pay actors and not to pay writers. It was a strike-breaking mechanism. There was a huge moral outrage about it in the press. People thought the same things they often do about reality TV: they were tawdry. They were a sign of something ugly in the culture.
I’m talking about shows like *Queen for a Day*. It was like a beauty pageant for who had the ugliest life. A panel of women were chosen from a live audience and they would talk about being unemployed, being abandoned by their husband, having sick kids. The winner was chosen by an applause-o-meter. Whoever won became “queen for a day” and was showered with presents. In one way, the show was very sexist and misogynist. In other ways, it was kind of liberating because it was women telling the truth about their lives. There weren’t any women like this on television. There were working class women. There was a greater racial range than on other shows. It was like a consciousness-raising group. And that contradiction—between something being really tawdry, offensive, and exploitative, but also opening the door to representation and breaking taboos—was native to it in the 40s, and it remains so every decade.
A lot of younger people haven’t heard of *An American Family*, which was a documentary series on PBS about an affluent family in California named the Louds. This show was so shocking that every newspaper had finger-wagging, outraged, fascinated think pieces about it. It was like a few years ago with *Keeping Up With the Kardashians*—everyone had to have an opinion. In the course of the season, which was filmed cinema verite style for seven months, there was a divorce between the parents on screen. There was also the scandalous sight of their oldest son, Lance Loud, who was 19, living in the “gay” part of Los Angeles, and obviously gay in a way that had never been seen on television before. He had fantastic charisma and a sense of himself as a star. He was really the first self-aware reality star in that way.
I think there’s something historically very queer about reality TV. The first character that really struck me as representing that was Pedro Zamora from *The Real World: San Francisco*. Pedro was a Cuban-American gay guy who had AIDS. He really made a conscious decision: “This [The Real World] is a platform that is going to enable the population to get to know a person like me, who they think is totally alien.” And he was so charming and warm, it completely worked. A striking amount of reality show creators were gay, like John Murray, who created *The Real World*, and Charlie Parsons, who helped create *Queer Eye for the Straight Guy*. I don’t know whether that’s because gay men were excluded and marginalized, so ended up being in a more marginalized art form; or whether it has to do with a certain arch awareness of behavior.
Then you get to Bravo—which was founded, pretty much, based on *The Real World*. It does sound bananas, right? Just using the word “queer” was very shocking. Three of the guys, including Carson Kressley—who’s the most flamboyant, funny, fantastically charismatic character on that show, and who worked in fashion—had not come out to his family. And so Carson had to talk to them before he was on the cover of TV Guide. He said it made his coming out a really celebratory thing, because it overlapped completely with his rise to fame and his professional success. So for his mom and her friends, it was not just that Carson was out as gay; it was that Carson was a TV star. A lot of things have changed since then, but I think that that show had a really powerful effect on the culture. It presents gay men not as the objects of mockery, or even as the kooky best friend, but as living lives that were so aspirational and admirable that goofy straight guys could only hope to replicate them.
I talked to field producers, editors, camera operators, audio operators, people who had done PA jobs, creators of shows. There were certain conventional questions I’d ask: What’s your favorite type of show to film? What type of show don’t you like to work on? What’s the line you won’t cross? There were a set of people who said prank shows, because they’re nonconsensual. But I was surprised at how many people said dating shows. There was something about causing somebody to fall in love and then lying to them and filming their heartbreak that felt more intimate—even to people who didn’t mind doing a show where people starved or were chased by sharks. I also think it’s because a lot of these shows are about young women. I talked to a camera guy who’s a very salty, hardened guy—I don’t think he was exactly the most feminist guy in the world. Even he found some of the exploitative stuff on *The Bachelor* and *The Bachelorette* really ugly. He was filming women getting drunk and vomiting. He was sort of peeking through blinds.
I would also like to say: dating shows are not modern. Dating shows go back to radio. *The Bachelor* came from *Bride and Groom*, which was a show in 1943 where they put soldiers on one side of a wall and single women on the other side of a wall—just like in *The Bachelor*. So I do think there’s something universal about the desire to be a voyeur in somebody else’s flirtation and love affair.
No. What can I say? At a certain point, when you’ve visited the factory, you feel a little uncomfortable about the conditions in which the sausage is made. Yes, when people go on reality TV, they’ve seen previous episodes; they’re choosing to go on. There’s a life after reality TV. There’s an economy. But my sense that they absolutely understood the repercussions—I think was not true. I feel this even more after interviewing people who were on *The Real World*. I think they deliberately cast people who didn’t watch reality TV.
The truth is, the contractual and labor environment is unacceptable. When people sign those contracts—those contracts have aggressive NDAs. If they are exploited, if they are abused, it has to go into private arbitration. That keeps the audience from understanding exactly what is happening. I’m not somebody who hates reality television, but I don’t think it’s great when people are like, “Reality stars—who cares what happens to them?” I hope the book enables people to feel more compassionate and nuanced feelings about people who work on reality shows on both sides of the camera. There’s a desire to judge a person who’s out in public. That’s part of the thrill people get from those shows, but I do think that’s the one thing people should be a little self-critical about. I’m not trying to turn people off shows. But closing your eyes and ears to what you’re really watching is not helpful either.
