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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A NEW BOOK TACKLES THE SPLENDOR AND SQUALOR OF REALITY TV  
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Kyndall Cunningham
June 26, 2024
Vox
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_ Critic Emily Nussbaum makes the case for the guilty pleasure as an
art form. _

Chris Harrison, Peter Weber, and Madison Prewett on The Bachelor‘s
season 24 finale in 2020. , ABC via Getty Images

 

Kyndall Cunningham
[[link removed]] is a culture writer
interested in reality TV, movies, pop music, Black media, and
celebrity culture. Previously, she wrote for the Daily Beast and
contributed to several publications, including Vulture, W Magazine,
and Bitch Media.

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Reality TV is experiencing some growing pains. During last year’s
WGA and SAG strikes, former _Real Housewives of New York
City_ star Bethenny Frankel
[[link removed]] ignited
an industry conversation about the lack of protections and fair pay
for reality performers. Since then, Bravo and its network spokesperson
Andy Cohen have been hit with a stream of lawsuits alleging
discrimination and sexual harassment. At the same time, Netflix has
seen its fair share of alarming complaints around its _Love Is
Blind_ franchise. One of the latest reports of misconduct came
from New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum
[[link removed]],
who spoke with former cast members about the dating competition’s
allegedly toxic workplace and manipulative production tactics.

However, Nussbaum isn’t really concerned with opining about these
issues — or finding a solution to them — in her new book, _Cue
The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV_. When I asked her whether she
felt reality shows could be made with a moral conscience, she answered
bluntly, “I’m not in the industry, so my answer is, I don’t
care.”

She followed up by saying that she feels reality stars are “very
unprotected” and deserve fair compensation. But unlike her Pulitzer
Prize-winning book about scripted TV, _I Like To Watch_, her latest
book is decidedly not a work of criticism. Rather, she set out to
explore the idea of “reality as craft.” While the genre is more
popular than ever, what goes into the process of developing shows,
finding talent, and creating new cinematic techniques is generally
taken for granted. With _Cue The Sun!_, she credits the genre with
the same level of creativity we normally ascribe to filmmaking and
writing music.

[The cover of Emily Nussbaum's latest book "Cue The Sun!: The
Invention of Reality TV."]

Emily Nussbaum’s _Cue The Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV_, came
out on June 25, 2024.

 Random House

“The goal with this book was not to say ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs
down’ on reality TV,” Nussbaum says. “It was to try to tell it
through the voices of the people on both sides of the camera. It's the
story of a lot of experiments. It's about people inventing jobs that
didn't exist.”

In that regard, _Cue The Sun!_ is a required text for anyone who
wants to understand how reality TV — or as Nussbaum calls it,
“dirty documentary” — arrived at its current tipping point. The
almost 400-page book includes interviews with former reality
television participants, producers, editors, and assistants. It’s a
riveting chronicle of the low-budget, “guilty pleasure” genre,
beginning in the 1940s and concluding in the early 2000s with the
truly culture-shifting program, _The Apprentice_. What _Cue The
Sun!_ ultimately exposes is the paradoxical and queasy nature of
reality TV, a boundary-pushing artform that often relies on a lot of
depravity to keep the wheels turning.

The most riveting chapter in Nussbaum’s book focuses on the lore of
the long-running CBS hit _Survivor_, starting with its odd beginnings
as a Scottish radio experiment. This inspired the controversial
Swedish television show _Expedition: Robinson_, which premiered in
1997 and raised serious ethical questions after the series’ first
eliminated contestant committed suicide. Undeterred by this incident,
producer Mark Burnett brought the series to America in 2000 in the
form of _Survivor_.

“I wasn’t that interested in _Survivor _when I started the
book,” says Nussbaum. “But by the time I finished writing about
it, I was convinced that the_ Survivor_ format was an invention on
the level of the telephone or the car.”

It was a few years after the arrival of _Survivor_ that Nussbaum
felt inspired to write a book. In 2003, she could feel reality TV
becoming its own sort of movement, like the New Hollywood era.

“I discovered reality TV had roots all the way back to World War II
on radio,” she says. “There was already a burst of programming
featuring regular people and the moral outrage that always accompanied
it.”

Those programs included the radio show _Candid Microphone, _which
premiered in 1947, and its televised equivalent _Candid Camera_,
which aired the following year. Both series were created and hosted by
pioneering prankster Allen Funt. His elaborate tricks on his oblivious
subjects using hidden cameras precedes the work of “reality
auteurs” like Nathan Fielder and Sacha Baron Cohen.

While modern docu-comedies like _The Rehearsal_ and _Jury
Duty_ have been described as experimental “prestige” takes on the
unscripted genre, Nussbaum presents these types of shows as the purest
form of reality TV, a style that prevailed before audiences’ demands
for salaciousness and melodrama made it a lot more complicated.

She draws similar parallels between the ’60s game show _Queen For A
Day_ and 1970s PBS docuseries _An American Family_ with modern
programs like _Real Housewives_ and _Keeping Up With the
Kardashians_. Both shows gave TV its first taste of melodramatic,
slice-of-life reality programs. On _Queen For A Day_, women would
essentially compete for who had the worst life in order to win prizes,
like household appliances. The image of host Jack Bailey surrounded by
a group of women trading in — and oftentimes, exaggerating — their
personal woes for the audience’s sympathy feels reminiscent of
a _Real Housewives _reunion.

[The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast — Annemarie Wiley, Dorit
Kemsley, Erika Jayne, Kyle Richards, Andy Cohen, Sutton Stracke,
Garcelle Beauvais, and Crystal Minkoff — and host Andy Cohen at the
Season 13 reunion. ]

The _Real Housewives of Beverly Hills _cast and Andy Cohen at the
season 13 reunion on February 21, 2024.

 Griffin Nagel/Bravo via Getty Images

Nussbaum writes that the producer interference that goes into creating
these unscripted soap operas can be directly traced to PBS’s _An
American Family,_which followed the upper-middle-class Loud family. On
paper, the California suburbanites represented the American dream,
until the show revealed some cracks in their family portrait,
culminating in the divorce of the central couple, Bill and Pat Loud.
What was originally designed as an elevated, experimental documentary
by filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond quickly became tainted by creator
Craig Gilbert, who interfered with the show’s subjects and edited
footage to make interactions appear much more salacious than they
actually were.

Nussbaum analyzes the subsequent years of TV when documentaries became
“dirtied,” as reality shows proved to be inexpensive and easy to
make. In several cases, they’ve served as ratings generators in
times of network crises
[[link removed].].
By the time the ’90s rolled around, Nussbaum’s definition of
reality TV — “cinema verité filmmaking that has been cut with
commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the
price and intensify the effect” — is extremely accurate. The
“street-drug” quality is especially apparent in a chapter about
late ’90s Fox, which broadcasted fake journalism shows like _Alien
Autopsy
[[link removed]]_ and
lazily packaged clip shows, most famously _Cops_.

When it comes to the manipulation of reality subjects for an
“intensified” effect, though, _The Bachelor_ franchise reigns
supreme. Since its premiere in 2002, the competition show has become
infamous for its devious production tactics. “I could sort of trace
the moment that shows started using tools to create more contrived,
more extreme distortions of what had happened on camera,” Nussbaum
says. “A lot of that had to do with [the newly available]
technology,” she says.

One of those techniques was the “Frankenbite,” which involved
deconstructing a quote and stitching it back together to form a new,
unsaid soundbite. The book’s chapter on _The Bachelor_ also
explores the still-common practice of recording participants without
their knowledge — otherwise known as the “hot mic” — taking
quotes out of context, and pressuring people into providing usable
quotes.

In the book, season one contestant Rhonda Rittenhouse recalls being
badgered to the point of tears by producers about her reasoning for
coming on the show. After multiple rounds of questioning, she finally
said, “I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to meet Alex
[Michel].” The question of whether a contestant was “there for the
right reasons” ultimately became a motto for the franchise, as well
as later dating competitions, like _Love Is Blind_
[[link removed]].

One striking part of that chapter is an interview with Ben Hatta, the
former assistant of _The Bachelor_’s creator Mike Fleiss. While his
former co-worker, producer Sarah Shapiro, would go on to create the
Lifetime series _UnREAL_ based on _The Bachelor_’s corrupt
practices, Hatta told Nussbaum that he wasn’t interested in reality
reform. In fact, he viewed it as “inseparable from — and, in fact,
defined by bad working conditions.”

“He was basically like, ‘I don’t want it to change because the
entire genre would disappear,’” Nussbuam says. “I don’t think
that’s crazy. Because the truth is, the shows are greenlighted
because they are profitable. And the reason they’re profitable is
because the people who make them, on both sides of the camera, make
nothing.”

Today, we can see the effects of being on reality TV shows in the way
many of its stars narrativize and gamify their own lives to the point
of complete inauthenticity. Arguably, its most harmful effect is the
way the people making these shows have come to accept a twisted moral
code in order to produce the best product.

“People really bond over doing things in production that would make
much of the outside world’s jaw drop because it’s so insidious,
manipulative, and unethical,” says Nussbaum. “But the truth is, if
you’re working hard with a team of people who encourage you to do
those things, I think it’s easy to start seeing them as normal.”

While network executives and producers continue to fight for the
status quo, former and current reality stars are boldly speaking out
about what should and should not be tolerated at work. A unified code
of conduct, let alone a union specifically for reality stars, has yet
to be established. For now, though, fans can at least appreciate that
reality TV is being taken seriously as an art form, most recently in
Nussbaum’s work. Whether that change in perception will result in a
better workplace is yet to be seen.

“That pearl-clutching, finger-pointing, outrage, can’t-look-away
quality is embedded in reality TV,” Nussbaum says. “It’s what
drives it and is often what makes it popular.”

_____

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