"Cue the Sun"

Emily Nussbaum is quite encylocpedic in her coverage, half of the book talked about shows before "The Survivor". Had I not watched "Unreal" already, I would have found the book even more eye-opening.

• When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. —Paul Virilio
• reality programming wasn’t all that new—and neither was the moral outrage that inevitably accompanied it, like a clap of thunder after a bolt of lightning. Both phenomena went back... to the mid-1940s, shortly after World War II, in the age of radio.
• * They were cruel carnivals, which traded in humiliation. They were dumb spectacles, made on the cheap. They were shoddy imitators of better types of art: less sophisticated than cinéma vérité documentary, shallower than fiction, too crass to have any lasting value. Reality shows were strike-breakers, too—the slimy beneficiaries of anti-labor tactics, funded by executives who didn’t want to pay writers and actors.
• allure: They offered something authentic, buried inside something fake. They stripped away the barrier between the star and the viewer. More than any other cultural product, they functioned as a mirror of the people who watched them
• * in this book I conceive of the genre as “dirty documentary”: It’s cinéma vérité filmmaking that has been cut with commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the price and intensify the effect.
• Some of them, like Gong Show host Chuck Barris and Fox impresario Mike Darnell, were distinguished by their P. T. Barnum–like enthusiasm—a gift for humbug (Barnum for “bullshit”) and a warm, seductive salesmanship. Others, like Candid Camera creator Allen Funt, had a Warholian coldness, a craving to observe and control. A few women—particularly Real World co-creator Mary-Ellis Bunim and the Prada-wearing trickster Lisa Levenson—helped shaped crucial elements of the genre. And a striking slice, from the 1990s onward, were gay men, like Real World co-creator Jon Murray, who had a deep understanding of behavior as performance.
• This meant a new kind of reality laborer, a group of workers who, during the early years of the genre, had to invent their own jobs from scratch. There were field producers who created an intimate bond with cast members; skilled editors who figured out how to cut a thrilling story from real life, by any means necessary; ... Mostly, though, the industry required a new mindset: an ability to tolerate moral ambiguity, creating strange, temporary, but intense professional relationships whose residue would be edited into (and, in a sense, become) the show itself.
• These shows cracked open forbidden topics like homosexuality and divorce, making private subjects public ones. And despite the genre’s reputation for crudeness, reality production added sophistication to the television medium. Adventure shows like Survivor spearheaded unusual new methods of filming action; many of the tools of modern TV comedy—the shaky-cam, the confessional, the insta-flashback—were adapted from reality shows, often in the guise of satirizing their excesses.

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• But more anarchic formats bubbled up as well, relying less on skill than on their guests’ willingness to uncork and let loose. On People Are Funny, contestants took wacky dares, like checking a seal in to The Knickerbocker Hotel.
• the “misery shows,” in the tradition of Mr. Anthony’s call-in advice show, the kind of programming that was fueled by, and also designed to produce, tears and trauma. <> In 1946, Crosby wrote a scorching pan of The Good Will Hour, repelled by Anthony’s “sanctimonious and infinitely complacent” schtick... It had a banger of a lede: <> About two thousand years ago, a Roman emperor used to pitch winsome young Christian girls into his eel pond and watch with great enjoyment while they were devoured by the eels.
• * a psychologist who decried the hollow lives of guests, in a sniffy description that might condemn many modern podcasters: “Being 35 years old and living in Brooklyn isn’t much of an achievement, but on the radio it sounds meritorious.”
• they had another source of appeal, as well. The voice of a regular person, quavering with amateurism, slid open what her experts described as a “psychological window,” a space for authentic feeling, letting in a gust of spontaneity and helping listeners to feel less alone. Not that that feeling was always a virtuous one
• Still, Queen for a Day stood out from the pack in its acute focus on female suffering, offering up a unique blend of abjection and Vegas glitz, like The Bachelor crossed with GoFundMe... In an era when women were expected to marry early and have kids, then stay tight-lipped about anything that went wrong, these agonizing public displays of suffering were at once degrading and glorifying, like sainthood. Beyond the stories themselves, the show’s focus was on the gasp, the sob, the pause—the “kinetics of distress,” as Marsha F. Cassidy put it
• Like so much of female pop culture—from Good Housekeeping magazine to The Real Housewives a half-century later—Queen for a Day was full of mixed messages. It was an exposé of poverty dripping with luxury ads; it was a just-us-girls gabfest hosted by a mansplaining sexist
• Candid Camera: Funt would become, instead, the first major auteur of reality television, the inventor of two crucial tools: the hidden-camera stunt and the producer-provocateur... It wasn’t enough to spy on people, to tape what they were saying. You also had to puncture their sense of normality somehow.. to throw them off-balance. Only then would their mask slip, letting you see a burst of authentic emotion.
• In a 1963 sketch, the actress Fannie Flagg pretended to be the first female pilot on American Airlines, triggering bug-eyed, alarmed expressions from bystanders.
• Cornell professor James Maas built an ongoing relationship with Funt, using Candid Camera sketches for decades to teach his Psychology 101 seminars.
• The producer even designed a special camera attachment, a “turret” with wide, medium, and close lenses, allowing the cameraman to pivot and capture the subject’s expression when Funt yelled, “Smile!” <> The reveal added an extra beat to the comedy. But it also provided a moral escape hatch for the viewer, a cathartic release from any lingering sense of collusion. Once the subject understood that they had been filmed, they took back a bit of agency, some dignity and control... It was one of Funt’s most brilliant insights: He needed to attend to the emotional state not only of the targets of his pranks, but of the audience at home. <> He had invented the mechanism that made it okay to watch.
• The Dating Game: If his new blockbuster wasn’t a subtle show, it nailed the contradictory mood of the era, which was post–sexual revolution but prefeminist, with both gender roles and power dynamics in flux. Abortion was illegal, a woman couldn’t get a credit card without a male co-signer, and many jobs were reserved for men.
• The Newlywed Game—which launched in 1966 and ran on and off for more than four decades—was a more transgressive project, a frothy game show designed to puncture one of America’s most sentimental institutions: heterosexual marriage... Eubanks himself referred to sex as “making whoopee,” slang from an old Eddie Cantor song. “We couldn’t say ‘God,’ we couldn’t say ‘toilet seat,’ we couldn’t say ‘make love,’ so we created our own vocabulary,”
• looking uncertain about how to respond. Then she blurted out, with a nervous grin: “…In the ass?” <> The moment would have been sordid had it not been for the reaction of her werewolf-handsome husband, Hank, who was gussied up in a maroon leisure suit and wide-collared peach shirt. He threw his head back and howled with laughter, waggling his eyebrows, not merely unembarrassed but seemingly awed by her candor. The image of the happy couple giggling cut right through the format, offering viewers a glimpse of a happy, uninhibited sex life—a joyful humanity upending a system that felt designed to humiliate them.
• Barris to Mike Metzger: he said, ‘Mike, I don’t think you got it.’ And I almost puked, you know. He said, ‘Mike, it’s 1977, it’s a different era. This is the 1965 version, it’s too fucking cute, it’s too sweet, it’s too innocent, you’ve got to get with it, man.’ He said, ‘Where are the hookers? Where are the comics? Where’s 1977?’
• Despite the chaperones on The Dating Game, the show had no background checks, even to make sure people were single. In 1978, this hands-off approach led to a disaster when one of the show’s winners, Rodney Alcala, turned out to be a serial killer.
• * Chuck Barris holed up in the Wyndham hotel, where he began to hammer out an “unauthorized autobiography” called Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a ragged, free-associative manifesto about his life.. He claimed that throughout his Hollywood career, he’d been working as an assassin for the CIA, killing targets while he was chaperoning Dating Game winners to the romantic capitals of the world.
• Just four months before the Watergate hearings, TV viewers had been mesmerized by a different set of tapes, which were filmed in a ranch house in California for a series called An American Family. Like the Nixon tapes, this documentary footage shattered old notions of what was private and what was public. It also sent reality television down a new path. If Candid Camera had launched the prank show, and Queen for a Day the game show, An American Family would initiate the third, and maybe the most powerful, thread of reality programming: the real-life soap opera.
• Lance Loud: With his hooded eyes, soft voice, and square jaw, his flowered shirt tied at the waist, the oldest Loud child was a font of Quentin Crisp–ish aphorisms, his behavior hovering, without any sense of contradiction, between authenticity and performance. There had never been anyone like him on television before. There had never been anything like the relationship they were documenting, either, the bond between a gay man and a mother who loved him deeply but also struggled to understand his choices.
• the divorce scene: The two continue exchanging information, their voices calm, as the camera homes in on Bill’s face, just as it had on Viva’s on Queen for a Day, giving off glimmers of shock, amusement, and weariness, sparks struck from a stone monument.
• It was doubtful, Smith wrote, that An American Family was the kind of show that WNET’s funders, who included President Nixon’s telecommunications advisers, ever intended to create... Most strikingly, anthropologist Margaret Mead, who had been the subject of Gilbert’s earlier documentary, praised the series as the launch of a new genre, “as important for our time as were the invention of drama and the novel for earlier generations: a new way to help people understand themselves.”
• The piece’s worst sting, however, came from Roiphe’s analysis of Lance, whom she described as “the evil flower of the Loud family.”
• * She also described the effects of appearing on camera: Being filmed for so long, so intimately, felt like missing REM sleep,
• Ephron would write Heartburn, a merry, score-settling bestseller full of delicious recipes. It was a case of instant karma: Heartburn would be attacked by critics for the same crime she’d dunned Pat for—spinning her public divorce into a personal brand. <> That irony wasn’t an exception when it came to the journalists who covered the Louds. Each of the family’s chief media critics had a bizarrely similar biography... There was something in the water in their social circle: a deep urge to confess, rooted in feminist rage, in the 1970s insight that the personal could be political—and also, commercial. Yet if these journalists’ life stories had parallels to Pat Loud’s, it didn’t seem to make them feel for her. If anything, it sharpened their knives.
• Lance’s final wish: “He wanted to do—” said Susan. “Confess everything,” said Alan. “It was like something a priest should be listening to, not even a therapist, the priest…. Someone to give him absolution.” Susan called it “the most extreme cinéma vérité moment ever. I can’t find the words. It was sad. I mean, obviously, it was really sad—but then, you knew, he was talking to the camera.”
• she had no gripe with Craig Gilbert, whom she called an “equal intellectual,” who shared true camaraderie with her mother. The Raymonds, she said, “never shied away from taking as much credit as possible.” Delilah said that she had also gained something when she had watched the show, back in 1973, curled on her mother’s bed. Seeing Pat’s face, alone, in her bedroom, in that brief shot the Raymonds caught on the night Bill left, Delilah felt startled—suddenly, she could see the divorce through her mother’s eyes, not her own.
• Pat Loud: She said that An American Family had led her to a bigger life than the one she had been leading—it helped her meet fascinating people, move to New York, and begin a career in publishing, with prized achievements like helping publish Andrew Holleran’s novel of gay life, Dancer from the Dance... What she wanted was simple: to rub her happy family in the face of Bill’s mistresses. They were the one audience she had ever imagined.
• If the ’70s had given off the funk of a stained shag carpet after a basement orgy, the ’80s were more like a plastic slipcovered sofa in the living room, ready for company... Fred Willard—who would satirize his jut-jawed Midwestern persona in Christopher Guest’s films—used that same vibe unironically as a host on Real People. The show profiled small-town eccentrics, like a man building a spaceship from used auto parts; celebrated military heroes, like the Navajo Code Talkers; and delved into quirky subcultures, like a society of bald men.
• * Giddings had met Castro during a period when the dictator was a scuba-diving enthusiast, a hobby that ended when someone made an attempt on his life by poisoning one of his diving suits.
• two hit prime-time formats: ABC’s America’s Funniest Home Videos and the Fox series Cops... The catalyst for these protoreality shows was, as ever, a labor strike: Members of the Writers Guild of America—a powerful force since the mid-1950s, when five entertainment unions had merged—walked off the job in March 1988
• Cops: In 1986, pulling off these busts was a technological marvel, requiring the use of a helicopter; a satellite-equipped van, which Langley used to bounce images using microwave dishes; and a live director in New York, who coordinated with Langley over the phone.
• in the beautiful home The Real World had built... It all felt like ancient history, that heated battle over authenticity—a Gen X obsession, as obsolete as the Shakers. The first series that felt fully recognizable as modern reality TV, The Real World had forged the tools that would define the genre: the shared house, the deliberately diverse ensemble cast, and the “confessional.”
• the cast doing the kinds of things artsy kids did in New York in 1992. .. Becky recorded music with her close friend Adam Schlesinger, a brilliant musician who would later form Fountains of Wayne with Chris Collingwood
• Instead, they went to bed together, in total silence. When he woke up, Richmond stared up at the ceiling, where there was a mirror that reflected their bodies. His first thought was I just wrote the next episode. His second thought was that he’d lost his job. <> The affair didn’t stay secret for long. When Verschoor went to the bar with his director of photography, they found his cast member and his director kissing. Both men froze, uncertain how to react. “Then we both said, ‘Go get the camera,’ ” said Verschoor.
• Norm did end up dating a man on The Real World (the future talk show host Charles Perez) and they kissed, on the air—a major TV breakthrough, especially given that Melrose Place, one of the rare network shows with a gay character, would lose advertisers two years later when they planned to air a scene with two men kissing.
• * Assigned to deliver a romance between Julie and Eric, he hunted through seventy hours of film, foraging for chemistry. One day, he found the ideal sequence: Eric slurping spaghetti off Julie’s plate, scored to “I’m Too Sexy,” by Right Said Fred. As if he were constructing fan fiction, he built a playful montage of the two falling for each other, with shots of Eric making cow eyes at Julie, then cuddling a kitten.
• Heather mocks Eric as a phony, fascinated by his own image; Andre speaks earnestly about wanting his band to be authentic. In a late episode, the group plays a prank on Kevin by swapping personalities, only to have Kevin take them seriously, worried that Julie—who purrs “sex sells” at him in crimson lipstick—had been corrupted by MTV. It’s a time capsule of a lost generation, consumed by the ultimate horror: selling out.
• The first film directed by Ben Stiller, Reality Bites was a Gen X romantic comedy, which satirized The Real World, just as Albert Brooks’s Real Life had once roasted An American Family. The movie’s heroine was Lelaina (Winona Ryder), a recent college grad who films a cinéma vérité documentary about her friends, only to have it co-opted by In Your Face, an MTVish cable network.
• * The first season of The Real World was a uniquely innocent experience, for both its cast and crew. From then on, the young people who signed up to appear on MTV might get hurt, but they understood what the show was. That was the catch-22 of the reality genre: The savvier its subjects became, the more self-aware about their roles, the less authentic the footage was—but, arguably, the more ethical.
• His death inspired national grieving, with President Clinton delivering a video eulogy at his service, calling him “a member of all of our families.” For many viewers, Pedro Zamora would become the first gay man, and the first person with AIDS, that they’d known intimately. <> Still, the season likely wouldn’t have worked without Pedro’s nemesis, the tattooed street courier Puck.. Even after Puck was expelled from the house, however, the MTV cameras continued to follow him, making him the first reality TV character to lean into the “villain edit.”
• * After the regular Alien Autopsy had worn out its welcome, Darnell simply repackaged the fraud as an exposé of the fraud, in the 1998 special World’s Greatest Hoaxes: Secrets Finally Revealed, which was also directed, written, and produced by Robert Kiviat. Meanwhile, the original special had become a campy pop-culture reference on shows like Seinfeld and The Simpsons... Darnell felt liberated at Fox, gleefully panning for ratings gold in the rapids of outrage... His parents, who had always been his biggest boosters (“According to my mom, I should’ve gotten an Emmy for ‘World’s Scariest Police Chases 3,’ okay?”), nearly had a brawl with a magician at a canasta night.
• Like Eye on L.A., Darnell had shoved the Overton window wide open, forcing his competitors to program leather bikinis.
• * Steve Chao, the president of Fox TV. Chao—the same “Harvard puke” who had bought Cops from John Langley—was a fellow oddball in the C-suites. The son of elite Chinese government officials, Chao had been raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and, after studying classics at Harvard, he’d written for the National Enquirer, and then, after business school, become a Rupert Murdoch protégé... In the most striking of these incidents, he had grabbed Mrs. Murdoch’s newly adopted puppy—which she was bragging had webbed feet—and tossed it into her swimming pool, to see whether it could swim.

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• What really made Survivor stand out, however, was its ingenious format, which managed to unite three key traditions: Allen Funt’s prank show model; the Chuck Barris-esque game show; and the real-life soap opera, which was launched by An American Family. This singular, powerful structure would ultimately influence nearly everything that followed it—and when Survivor broke out as a prime-time hit for CBS in 2000, it struck many viewers as a distinctly American program, big, brash, and Hollywood, as if manifest destiny had been crossbred with the Super Bowl.
• After that key breakthrough, the development process sped up, as they giddily dreamed up the two imaginary tribes, the games, the rewards, the crucial psychology of how the plot would play out. The group had finally begun to understand that they weren’t making a game show: Survive! was a drama with three acts.
• During filming, however, the Survive! blueprint played out beautifully. The castaways bonded and clashed, there were idyllic nature shots, there were sweaty physical challenges (the teams swung over a mud pool) and philosophical debates—among them an argument about killing a goat, an issue that seemed to emerge organically in every version of the show. Aesthetically, Expedition: Robinson looked cheaper than the grand, immersive series that Parsons had envisioned—... but it was exciting TV... Carter had two responses simultaneously. “I was horrified that someone would die on a show I was associated with—and also horrified that someone would die just before it would air.”
• With a valuable blend of naïveté and gumption, Burnett built a marketing package from scratch, cold-calling sponsors and journalists. He struck a deal with a sports equipment company; he talked Prime Ticket, a regional sports network owned by Fox television, into airing a segment on the race. He even managed to get coverage in Runner’s World by first convincing the editor in chief to run a story about him written by Martin Dugard, then calling Dugard and telling him the piece had already been presold to the magazine... in Dianne Burnett’s memoir, she describes her ex-husband upselling a client at Face so hard that the man had a seizure... At Discovery, Burnett spearheaded a radical new density of product integration
• Then Burnett highlighted something that hadn’t been in Parsons’s original prospectus: He explained that the series would be catnip to advertisers. Imagine, Burnett argued, how valuable a pizza slice—or an ice-cold beer or a cellphone—might seem, when they were offered to people who were starving on a desert island? <> If Moonves was still dubious, the numbers were unbeatable: Survivor not only wouldn’t cost $13 million, anymore, it had become a risk-free proposition.
• An early radio promo, “Can You Survive?,” had pulled in too many survivalists, so producer Mike Sears... brainstorming with line editor Beth Holmes. That slogan—“Outwit, Outplay, Outlast”—would attract a broader, livelier crowd of players
• Richard Hatch, a corporate consultant from Rhode Island, struck everyone as arrogant and often downright hostile... He also scrawled the words “the winner” on the Polaroid portrait they’d hung on the wall. During Richard’s final interview, he told the executives, “Listen, you know that you’re going to pick me, but what you don’t know is I’m going to win. And next year, I’ll host the show!”
• * As it turned out, there was no plan for the crew’s sleeping arrangements—and they were too far from camp to walk back in the dark. Feist wound up sleeping on the beach for three days, with cameras that cost $125,000. Sliding over his body were white sea snakes with tiny jaws, too small to bite, unless they snagged the webs between your fingers. Rats scampered in the sand, running from the snakes.
• Jude Weng: To critics of the show, eating live grubs would become a symbol of Survivor, a sign of how debased and humiliating the show was. To Weng, who was the daughter of a chef, that missed the point—they were a local delicacy, a source of protein. “Once you got past the movement on your tongue, it tasted like a cross between raw shrimp and bacon.”
• Einhorn relished that kind of film-craft; he loved the unspoken dance between him and the soundies, who held fifteen-foot booms, intuitively adjusting to maintain the “line,” the 180-degree relationship between two people interacting, to make the scene comprehensible to the viewer... This work was more difficult than filming a scripted show. None of it could be planned in advance. During the shoot’s most satisfying moments, Einhorn felt as if they were building a new vocabulary of cinema, in profound but unspoken collaboration with their subjects.
• Malaysian local: But the made-up voting ritual didn’t bother him: “If they were to prepare an exact local version, like a headhunter’s house or a longhouse, that would really upset the spirit. In a way, because it’s not exactly the same, it’s not disrespectful,” he said.
• Sue took her vengeance: At the final Tribal Council, she delivered a fiery monologue, condemning Kelly. When the jury’s votes were cast and tallied, Richard Hatch—the arrogant castaway Burnett had thought would be the first out—had won one million dollars... It was a breakthrough for the reality genre, and more specifically a win for the approach that Survivor co-creator Duncan Gray described to me as “situationalism”: building an artificial setting so self-contained, a story was forced to blossom inside it, like a bonsai tree.
• the first season of Survivor, which is centrally consumed with the question of whether it is ethical to compete in the first season of Survivor. Although everyone in the cast came to this conclusion from a different place—from Dirk’s evangelical faith to Greg’s antiauthoritarianism; from Gretchen’s earnest military code to Sonja’s Californian empathy—as an ensemble, the castaways nearly universally clung to the notion that the show must be a meritocracy, designed to produce a worthy winner... When you looked at the game through this idealistic lens, forming an alliance was itself a corrupt act
• * Then, on the way back to the cabin, she glimpsed something odd, glimmering in the sunrise—a big mass, something that looked like Styrofoam. With a jolt, she recognized what it was: the back of the Tribal Council set. It was Gretchen’s Truman Show moment, when it finally hit her that she had been living inside a game show.
• * Ladizinsky worked intuitively, scribbling notes on yellow pads to pinpoint funny moments. From his perspective, there was a cultural split between the producers, who were obsessed with the plotline, and the editors, who were all about images, emotions, and music. In his ideal episode, interviews would be used sparingly, even if that risked confusing the audience... When the Tagi tribe rafted away from the beach, he used an aerial shot to turn their boat into a speck in the ocean—and then he added a clever shot which had been taken through two abandoned crates, in imitation of a scene from Jaws, putting the viewer inside the mouth of the monster. It was a witty visual joke that had a deeper emotional undercurrent, the ideal edit.
• began dishing to him, spilling out surprising details about the production process, like the fact that the producers had at one point considered helping his starving tribe out by filling some empty fishing traps with fish. The tapioca that Dirk harvested had been planted by the crew, too, because it wasn’t indigenous to the island. To Dirk, these small bits of stagecraft felt profound.
• Whenever a castaway got voted out, Burnett asked them to write him a letter. Gretchen had written one of these notes, which she assumed was an honorable request for feedback on the production—although in retrospect, she wondered if Burnett was trying to unearth any complaints.
• * Camera operator Randall Einhorn told him that he hoped to use his reality skills to make something more wholesome, comparing his aesthetic goal to a tofu hot dog: “good food wrapped like bad food.” <> On The Office, Einhorn repurposed the tools he’d honed in Borneo, capturing stolen moments between Jim and Pam, just as he’d once filmed Greg and Colleen.
• a wave of mockumentary sitcoms, among them Parks and Recreation and Modern Family. These shows used the aesthetics of reality TV—its liquid, spylike camera work; its “gotcha” flashbacks, which could expose snatches of hypocrisy or hidden backstories; its touching confessionals—as fuel for new types of comedy, cannibalizing the genre that was, in the eyes of many sitcom writers, an economic threat to their existence.
• The other housemates—who felt left out of the steamy love affair—promptly nominated Bart and Sabine for expulsion, putting them in competition with each other. It was a dynamite twist and, from Römer’s account, a storyline that would recur, organically, in nearly 70 percent of the early Big Brother seasons in multiple countries. The house always turned against the newly infatuated couple;
• In a way, the show had become the flip side of Survivor. If the Borneo series operated as a surprisingly profound metaphor for cutthroat workplace politics, the Studio City show suggested a different type of office, the kind of place where you made bland chitchat all day, terrified of being disliked... A hideous fetish for solidarity had paralyzed the house... More unnerving, in late August, an enterprising skywriting pilot began dragging banners above the garden, carrying messages paid for by Jeff Oswald
• After that burnt pancake of a TV season, CBS tossed the batter. Römer flew back to Amsterdam. Everyone else got canned, apart from line producer Don Wollman and Julie Chen.
• * Will Kirby, who was known to his fans as “Dr. Evil.”.. Will took the opposite approach: He turned himself into the production’s biggest ally. “This is how I help them produce the show. And subtly, by helping them produce the show, it helps me—then I’m in the storylines, I have face time.” <> It was an approach that, over the next decade, would become the default setting for reality stardom
• Reality was like any other genre, Kroll told me: There was good stuff, there was shoddy stuff, there was everything in between. It was up to each individual to figure out their own ethical guidelines, the places they wouldn’t go—for him, that was hidden camera shows. But those choices were what it meant to be an adult.
• * You certainly had people who were working in the documentary world and were tired of being broke,” said Jon Kroll, who was making a good living on Big Brother and The Amazing Race. There was a subset of ex-military staffers, making a career change; there was an influx of graduates from Emerson College, as well.
• Roach and Lassally’s idea was even more extreme: The filmmakers planned to follow their teen subjects for eighteen more years, until they were eligible to run for high office. It was a bit like Michael Apted’s decades-spanning Up series, plus American High, swirled into The War Room—a slow-burn, emotionally intimate, absurdly far-reaching study of youthful ambition. <> For reasons that are likely obvious, this cicadalike production schedule didn’t pan out, even at big-pocketed HBO.
• Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld personally okayed access for Profiles. Frustrated that reality showrunners were being ushered behind the scenes while they were locked out, ABC News lodged a complaint about van Munster’s series to the entertainment division, while a senior news producer at another network griped to the Los Angeles Times, “If they’re getting access we’re not getting, there is something wrong.” <> On top of these soft-soap narrative treatments of the war, a new set of military-themed competition shows emerged
• The show’s first season featured an artisanal blend of faded stars: grizzled musicians (Vince Neil, MC Hammer), grown-up child stars (Corey Feldman, Emmanuel Lewis), a few veterans of network hits (90210’s Gabrielle Carteris and Baywatch babe Brande Roderick), and also Jerri Manthey, a recent villain on Survivor.
• When Newlyweds ended, Nick and Jessica... Even with the crew gone, the eerie feeling that they were being recorded continued to linger. Sometimes, when the couple needed to fight, they would sneak out to a vacant lot near their home, paranoid that the house was still bugged.
• Jackass: These stunts were centrally about impressing each other, no matter what the physical cost: In Steve-O’s disarming memoir, Professional Idiot, he describes stapling the word “Jackass” across his butt cheeks on the first day of filming, then later stapling his scrotum to his leg.
• * He found a jaw-dropping production snafu. Just before the game began, the cast had trained with Navy SEAL Hash Shaalan, who taught them real-life survival skills, like staying silent in the jungle. As a result, the footage of their hikes was entirely silent—just hours and hours of the cast walking in single file and using hand signals.
• Manhunt was just another Hollywood footnote—six low-rated reality TV episodes on UPN and out. But it was also a symbol of the darkly comic disarray on the fringes of Hollywood, which is where most shows got made. It was hard to get too outraged about fraud when you were working that hard, for so little money, in an industry that got so little respect. If everyone already assumed that your show was a fake, no matter what you did or how hard you worked, why even bother making it real? <> There was one silver lining to Manhunt: The cast members kept their promise to one another, with the winner writing everyone else a check. They stayed friends for years, continuing to get together for drinks. It was the first successful reality television union.
• Each year, the players got cannier about their own brands, their niches—and more aware of the bargain they made by playing themselves. <> There was also a natural next step, after the finale aired: a move to Los Angeles. There was even a bar at which reality cast members hung out, a place called Belly Lounge.. A reality finale was like college graduation, whether you’d matriculated at Survivor U—the Ivy equivalent, whose players looked down their noses at other shows—or some party school like Temptation Island State.
• For him, the key problem with The Joe Schmo Show had been consent: Since Matt didn’t—and couldn’t—know what he was signing up for, the show couldn’t, ultimately, be justified, whatever the intent of the people who made it... Although Hornsby never put it to me this way, you could make an argument that The Joe Schmo Show was worse, in a certain way, than sleazier shows. After all, was it better to be tricked by kind people or by monsters?
• Fleiss’s first romance show, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, had been a bedazzled Vegas satire of Miss America. The Bachelor was a more immersive experience, like being trapped inside an erotic terrarium, lulled by floating rose petals. In a world of tacky, The Bachelor was a fancy show... That quality came centrally from Levenson, who, by everyone’s account, including Fleiss’s, was the person who pioneered the intoxicating quality that she called “zhuzh” ... Levenson’s interpretation, was aspirational straight-girl camp
• she was required to do another interview, and the producer began badgering her, all over again, about who was there for “the right reasons”; somehow, he also brought up her grandfather’s death (Fleiss told me he didn’t know that her grandfather had died). Rhonda melted down. When she held her breath and started to hyperventilate, she caught a glimpse of her producer, making sure that the camera was still running.
• * In certain ways, the system operated as if it were a game show within the game show: In Bachelor Nation, Scott Jeffress, the show’s supervising producer, described peeling off $100 bills, rewarding producers for special achievements, like getting a girl to cry on camera.
• * That had always been the dark magic of The Bachelor: You could critique its bone-deep sexism, from the Madonna/whore editing to the notion of marriage as a woman’s ultimate life goal. The real risk of the show lay deeper, however: It was a butterfly net designed to catch feelings, the precious substance that had always fueled the genre.
• Although Sandman had worked on everything from Survivor to Manhunt, he ended up hating dating shows more than any other type of reality TV—and he was too old to work on these productions, anyway, which were oddly more rigorous than adventure competitions.
• A classic Fox subversion of network earnestness, the show took the greatest strength of The Bachelor—its zhuzh, that thick, glittery coating of romantic icing that made it so irresistible for viewers—and then exposed it as something rancid. On The Bachelor, love was the ultimate prize. On Joe Millionaire, it was bait for the prank, a sick joke that horny men played on greedy women.
• Ben Hatta: He compared his work with cast members to the movie Inception, to “planting seeds,” “doing therapy,” and also “doing a little puppeteering.”... Watching the edited episodes was a thrill. “It was like, ‘I got her to say that.’ Those are my words. You created television!…You don’t have that power in any other genre.” What Shapiro understood as sociopathy, Hatta described simply as skilled producing.
• The crew kept getting ear infections from their earpieces, so they scarfed down unprescribed antibiotics, which someone handed out on set.
• Shapiro... found a new way to play God. In 2013, she wrote and directed Sequin Raze, a short film about the night she broke Jessica Holcomb. In 2015, she expanded that into a series for Lifetime called UnREAL, an insider’s portrait of reality TV,
• Hatta admired the early episodes of UnREAL, which struck him as near-documentary flashbacks to their production room. He admired Shapiro’s drive. But he didn’t share her interest in industry reform, because the way Hatta saw it, reality TV was inseparable from—and, in fact, defined by—its brutal labor conditions. He considered it “a badge of honor” to have handled those awful hours, the low pay, and the pressure.
• A striking proportion of early reality producers were gay men, among them Survivor creator Charlie Parsons, Bunim/Murray’s Jon Murray, and Doug Ross at Evolution, as well as Mark Itkin, the top reality TV agent in Hollywood. Perhaps gay men were more attuned to the tensions between behavior and performance; maybe they were more willing to innovate, as outsiders. <> Still, gay representation only went so far—a character here and there, in mostly straight ensembles. Bailey dreamed of something more transgressive: queer aesthetics treated not as a side dish, but as the main course. It would take him many years to reach that promised land, as the culture gradually shifted around him, clearing the space for RuPaul to make his dazzling entrance.
• According to Fisher, the show’s eureka moment was slightly less idealistic. “There was this really good-lookin’ straight guy and this not so good-lookin’ girl, and Dave said, ‘Some gay guy should dress him up, and get him a better girl.’ That’s where the idea really came from.” Whatever the truth, these mirror-image stories capture the complexity of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. In one version, gay male creativity is a superpower, healing the world and building bridges. In the other, it’s realpolitik, an awareness of how to “trade up.” The magic of Queer Eye was how seamlessly it merged both themes and, in the process, sparked another makeover: renovating Bravo itself
• A few weeks later, they would film a series of “loft” segments, in which the group gathered on sofas, sipping cocktails, to watch each straight man’s “graduation” on the TV, as if they were urbane gods, toasting mere mortals.
• QE: There was criticism, too. Some gay observers saw the show as minstrelsy. Others viewed it as greasy consumerism, an attempt to make straight men as insecure as straight women already were.
• It would be years before the truth came out, which was that Weinstein had been using Project Runway as a hunting ground, starting with his harassment of Daniela Unruh. In 2020, in a Manhattan courtroom, Weinstein was toppled by a Project Runway production assistant named Miriam Haleyi,
• Project Runway struck many of the cable network’s viewers as a rare blast of sunshine, one of the first reality shows to celebrate skill and craftsmanship.
• * That season, everybody winged it a little, including Tim Gunn, who had to be warned not to thread a contestant’s bobbin lest he violate game show rules... To everyone’s surprise, this gimmicky moment led to a great design: a delicate gown made of corn husks, built by a young designer named Austin Scarlett. With no refrigeration, his dress nearly wilted, but it won the first round... Jay McCarroll told me that his own memories had long since been displaced by the edited version of the show. But he remembered that he briefly considered making a dress out of eggshells, before coming to his senses.
• Gunn himself pushed for his bosses to change the contract, and for many years, they lied to him, claiming they had altered the policy. Eventually Gunn—who wasn’t himself paid as talent during his first two seasons—found out about these lies, and after sixteen seasons, he left Project Runway in disgust, along with Heidi Klum; the two of them then created their own series, Making the Cut.
• * Zalaznick’s impact on the cable network in class terms. She had effectively gentrified the sketchy neighborhood of reality programming, with all those basic bachelorettes and bug-eating contests, transforming it into a newly marketable landscape, one that felt “boutique and chic,” a glimmering Tribeca of the mind. “The formula may be lowbrow—attractive people pitted against one another, ruthless eliminations—but the content is, if not exactly highbrow, then certainly high-style,”... As with gentrification in urban neighborhoods, this process happened in stages: first the stylish gay men, then the rich white women who loved to shop.
• it became The Real Housewives of Orange County—a double shout-out to Desperate Housewives and the teen show The O.C. Andy Cohen hated the title’s clunkiness, but Zalaznick could smell a franchise, with a Housewives in every city. In the promotional photos, the cast coyly held oranges, just as the Desperate Housewives cast had held apples: two brands of sweet temptation
• The truth was, however the sales process went down, The Apprentice was a blue-chip concept. It managed to unite the two most successful reality models of the era—twisty, scheming team competitions like Survivor and talent contests like American Idol—and then added a shameless capitalistic twist. It was the first reality show to treat corporate marketing itself as a creative act, a form of self-expression as joyful as ballroom dancing.
• The first to get booted was David Gould, an MBA from Stern Business School. He hadn’t done anything wrong during the challenge, so no one expected Trump to fire him. “We didn’t even have good footage on the guy,” producer Jamie Canniffe told me, with a laugh. “We were like, ‘How are we going to make this story?’ ” <> The first to get booted was David Gould, an MBA from Stern Business School. He hadn’t done anything wrong during the challenge, so no one expected Trump to fire him. “We didn’t even have good footage on the guy,” producer Jamie Canniffe told me, with a laugh. “We were like, ‘How are we going to make this story?’ ”
• Even Trump’s deputy judge Carolyn Kepcher, who ran the golf course, struck Pruitt as impressed by Kwame. <> Then Trump spoke up. “Yeah, but would America really buy a nigger winning?” he said, to no one in particular. For Pruitt, the shock of the moment had been dreamlike, surreal:
• Because Trump made so many impulsive choices, a lot of the job involved producers and editors brainstorming together, trying to make his firings logical, then architecting in foreshadowing, by whatever means necessary. In the raw footage, Trump struck her as “dumb as bricks.” He had screwed up so many scenes, the season wound up slathered with “ADR”—automated dialogue replacement—which meant rerecording Trump’s dialogue, then editing it in as voiceovers.
• * Reality workers tended to be young, single, and childless, without the advantages of their scripted-TV peers, like family money or connections. But mostly, they’d been trained to view nightmarish workplace conditions as normal, to take pride in simply surviving their jobs. Verrone called them “the Invincibles of the turn of the century.”
• To him, Mark Burnett was a modern Willy Wonka, which he meant as high praise: He was the ultimate marketer.
  That was the taboo truth about The Apprentice, in the end—the quality that made it more impressive, not less. Anyone could rebrand a mediocre businessman, some small-timer in need of a glow-up. But taking a failed tycoon who was a heavily in hock and too risky for almost any bank to lend to, a crude, impulsive, bigoted, multiply-bankrupt ignoramus, a sexual predator so reckless he openly harassed women on his show, then finding a way to make him look attractive enough to elect as the president of the United States? That was a coup, even if no one could brag about it.
  As Trump’s political career heated up, one member of the Apprentice cast spoke out: Kwame Jackson.
• Trump’s time in office would be studded by reality TV stunts, ultratheatrical, half-fake, half-real spectacles, beginning with that choreographed glide down the escalator. There was the live televised cabinet meeting, in which Mike Pence and Reince Priebus slavishly praised their boss, as if they were in the Apprentice boardroom. There was the time he tried to stage a Supreme Court choice as a race between two finalists. Trump even hired Omarosa to work for the administration, although that worked out as well for him as it had for Kwame.
• That had always been the dark, resonant paradox of the reality genre: The less ethical a show was, the more authentic the footage it captured. The more trusting (or drunk or exhausted) the participants were, the more likely it was that they’d ultimately crack, releasing a flood of feeling that couldn’t be faked. This was most obvious on prank shows back to Candid Camera, but if you looked at things from a certain angle, all reality shows looked like prank shows.
• When the iPhone debuted in 2007—a reality studio tucked in your back pocket—a new breed of self-promoters emerged, canny about the long game. Even if their worst moment got played on a loop, they understood there were ways to capitalize on that, by transubstantiating from a civilian into a brand, a magnet for partnerships.
• For these viewers, there was no controversy—any qualms about the medium had faded, long ago. The most successful reality show had it all: a titillating flash of the authentic, framed by the dark glitter of the fake, like a dash of salt in dark chocolate.