Reality TV is irritating but irresistible
There is more to the format than meets the eye
In New Zealand a contestant on “Race to Survive” has been disqualified for killing and eating a weka, an endangered flightless bird. In Britain a performer on “Strictly Come Dancing” has left the show after kicking his on-air partner. In America the makers of “The Real Housewives of New York City” are being sued by a housewife who says producers got her drunk to make for better television.
Few genres of entertainment cause as much outrage as
Yet by digging through decades of trash TV, Emily Nussbaum, a staff writer for the New Yorker who won the Pulitzer prize for criticism in 2016, has discovered treasure. Reality shows offer “something authentic, buried inside something fake”, she writes in “Cue the Sun!” (whose title is a line from “The Truman Show”, a satirical movie about the reality genre). Her detailed history reveals how the reality format tackled thorny social themes years before respectable, scripted programming got around to broaching them. If the results are ugly, that is often because the shows are holding up a mirror to the audience.
Viewers outraged by modern reality programmes should consider what came before. “Goodwill Court”, an early radio show in which disputes played out for the entertainment of listeners, had one episode featuring a birth mother and foster mother fighting for custody of their baby. On “Queen for a Day”, a TV show in the 1950s and 60s in which women competed for a reward of their choosing, one woman’s prize was to get her concentration-camp tattoo removed. “The New Treasure Hunt”, a show in the 1970s, had a particularly cruel gimmick: the fancy-looking prizes were fake. (One contestant fainted.)
Reality shows established themselves as commercial winners, requiring the employment of neither writers nor actors. This also made them strike-proof. A Hollywood writers’ strike in 1988 was the catalyst for a boom in reality programming including “Cops”, which after 36 seasons has become the longest-running series in the reality genre. Strikes in 2023 by writers and actors had a similar effect: 85% of the new series ordered in America in the second half of last year were unscripted shows, around ten percentage points higher than the usual share, according to Ampere Analysis, a research firm.
Despite their low budgets, reality TV shows promise high ratings—and the biggest shocks have tended to deliver the biggest numbers. Producers have become experts at “panning for ratings gold in the rapids of outrage”, as Ms Nussbaum puts it. “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?”, a Fox special in 1995, purported to show the dissection of a little green man in Roswell, New Mexico. The alien corpse was actually a plaster cast filled with sheep brains, chicken entrails and jam, something Fox executives were well aware of, according to some who worked on the show. It did not matter: a quarter of all Americans watching TV that night tuned in to see it. (Three years later, the producers scored another ratings hit with an exposé of their own fraud, in “World’s Greatest Hoaxes”.)
Yet reality shows also delivered shocks of a healthier sort. At a time when some southern TV stations in America refused to air programmes with racially integrated casts, reality shows like “Queen for a Day” slipped through the net. And unlike scripted TV at the time, they treated minorities as emotionally complex individuals, not caricatures. Something similar happened in the 1980s-90s when, as scripted TV fawned over the wealthy in shows such as “Dallas” and “Dynasty”, reality programmes including “The Jerry Springer Show” featured “all the categories that mainstream culture viewed as marginal”, Ms Nussbaum writes: the mentally ill, the disabled, the fat, the addicted. Critics saw it as a freak show. It was also a glimpse of a world otherwise unseen.
Reality shows also expose subjects that other formats avoid. They were among the first to normalise the depiction of gay people, initially through “An American Family”, the first real-life soap opera, which aired in 1973. Lance Loud, the gay son of the family, made a lasting impact on many viewers, including a young Jon Murray, who went on to make MTV’s “The Real World” 20 years later. A star of that show was Pedro Zamora, an HIV-positive gay man, at whose funeral then-president Bill Clinton gave a eulogy. Fans of “Queer Eye” included George W. Bush, who joked that its makeover team should do a number on John Ashcroft, his attorney-general.
Reality TV’s exploitation of its civilian “stars” is where the case against it is strongest. Participants have endured physical injury (including hypothermia on “The Chamber”, a grisly torture-based game show from the early 2000s, and severe burns on “Survivor”). More often, they face emotional trauma. The first person voted off the Swedish version of “Survivor” committed suicide (the show aired anyway). The first winner of the Dutch “Big Brother” had a nervous breakdown. Many struggle to deal with fame that comes without fortune. The original cast of “The Real World” were paid just $2,600 each.
Many producers see their subjects as raw material to be moulded at will. In the 2000s producers of “The Bachelor”, a dating game-show, got bonuses for making female contestants cry; they brought up eating disorders or dead grandparents to jerk the tears. If that did not work, editors created “Frankenbites”, stitching together contestants’ words to make sentences they never said. Participants, at least, have also become more cynical, conscious of the opportunities that minor celebrity now brings. As a producer on “The Bachelor” puts it, contestants once asked why they would kiss someone on camera; now they ask why they would bother to kiss someone off camera.
If that is reminiscent of social-media “influencer” behaviour, it is no coincidence. With their blend of slapstick humour and violence, reality shows like “Cops” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos” were “the first draft of internet culture”, Ms Nussbaum argues. Just as social networks provide snapshots of users that are at once airbrushed and authentic, reality TV offers a skewed yet telling take on real life. That makes it valuable not just to the producers who profited from it, but to popular culture more broadly. To understand where the modern newsfeed came from, study the dirty documentary.
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