Emily Nussbaum during the 2017 New Yorker Festival.Andrew Toth/Getty Images
Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV, a new non-fiction book by Pulitzer Prize-winning American critic Emily Nussbaum, chronicles the rise to dominance of television’s most maligned genre of programming.
In her research, the New Yorker writer discovered the 1940s radio ancestors of reality – before Jackass, or even Candid Camera, there was Candid Microphone; before The Real Housewives franchise, there was Queen for a Day.
She also explores the small-screen experiments that inspired the genre’s eventual boom: Before MTV’s The Real World: San Francisco made AIDS activist Pedro Zamora into a star in 1994, the 1973 PBS documentary series An American Family broke ground in gay representation by introducing viewers to Lance Loud.
Of course, Nussbaum also has a chapter on The Apprentice and its notorious star, too. The Globe and Mail’s J. Kelly Nestruck spoke to her over the phone about just how much reality bites.
Your book was an interesting walk through memory lane. I didn’t expect something like the 1990s special Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction to show up. I had completely forgotten that existed.
That was one of several rabbit holes that during research I became obsessed with. I realize that it’s an odd project that people might not imagine might be included in the history of reality television, but it has a strong relationship to it – that specific flavour of what Fox was doing during that period, the blend of fakery and truth and the presentation of itself as a kind of investigative journalism.
You quote New York Times critic TV James Poniewozik’s definition of reality TV early on: “Reality TV is nonfiction television of which I personally disapprove.” How did you end up drawing the line on what you include?
My personal definition for the history that I was tracing was documentary techniques – things that people think of as elements of cinema verité such as just recording and observing to capture the truth – being cut with, adulterated and speeded up with commercial formats that are designed for television like the soap opera, the game show, the prank show.
When people talk about reality TV, there’s often a sense of it as an immoral genre that says something about the times in which we live – the 21st century – and how society’s standards have sunk. But you trace it back to audience participation shows in the radio days.
That was a powerful surprise to me when I started doing research on the book because, like most people, I thought of it as a very modern genre, a side effect of new technologies, of the internet.
You point out the language of critics writing about these radio shows in the late forties is almost exactly the same.
I did not realize that until I was reading pieces responding to shows like Queen for a Day and Candid Microphone. It was a lot of the same conversation, this titillated and shocked response. Who are these strange people who are going out in public telling their secrets? What kind of narcissists are they? How tawdry is this? And also, the related question of audience participation shows’ role in the industry: They were ways not to pay writers and actors. All of those concerns, the moral concerns and the economic concerns, were made in that period earlier.
There’s already this idea that reality-style programming might be a sign of the apocalypse.
I also think that that’s part of the loop of the popularity of these shows: When somebody writes that the show that’s coming out is going to cause the end of the world, it’s actually very strong advertising to watch. The book is not an attempt to celebrate reality TV or denounce it. I did more than 300 interviews and the goal is to let people who love the genre and people who hate it alike understand the origins of it.
So, can I try and tease out your own opinions about reality TV? You quote Mike Fleiss, the creator of The Bachelor, who says of its relationship to the rise of Trumpism: “All that talk about the decline of Western civilization and the sign of the apocalypse? It turned out to be true.” Do you see a link between the rise of this genre and the potential decline of the United States into fascism?
Do I think that Trump was elected because he was on The Apprentice? Absolutely. Do I think that producer Mark Burnett is responsible for that? I do. I do think there are some dangerous and insidious things about reality TV. But there are also some liberating, glorious, beautiful and innovative things about it as well. I don’t want to lump together The Apprentice and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
You quote Fenton Bailey, co-creator of RuPaul’s Drag Race and reality TV defender, saying: “It incenses me to see people say that Trump was a reality TV president. No, he wasn’t. Here’s the thing about Trump. Trump is someone who has proven himself, again and again, to be able to corrupt everything he touches.”
That was his perspective on it. A lot of the people I talked to for the book are crew members who created this format. I would say their opinions on their own genre also vary widely. There are people who are ashamed of the work they did and think that it was destructive. And there are other people who are extremely proud of it and think it’s misunderstood.
I’m trying to celebrate the things about the genre that were genuinely innovative and creative at the same time as I’m trying to be clear about the things in it that are harmful or cruel or sinister. They don’t cancel each other out. Back to the forties, the radio show Queen for a Day, had working-class women talking about the ugly things that happened in their households and domestic violence and poverty. That show was both exploitative and cruel – and educational and revelatory by cracking open taboo subjects about women’s lives.
You come back to this a number of times, the Catch-22 of the evolution of reality genre that: “The savvier subjects became, the more self-aware about their roles, the less authentic the footage was, but arguably the more ethical.” What about the audiences? Is watching reality TV more ethical now that we’re more aware of how it’s made and it’s become self-referential?
My sense is that a lot of people who watch reality television, even real superfans, don’t know that much about how it’s made because the legal and labour landscape makes it impossible for them to learn a lot of the details. Because when people go on reality shows, they have to sign contracts that have extremely aggressive NDAs that forbid them from talking even in a straightforward way, often about what a producer asked them that led to the thing they said on camera.
I’m interested in having that repaired because I think that those cast and crews of reality shows deserve to be in a better labour landscape – I think those contracts should be illegal – and also, honestly, just on an educational level.
You write about a bit about Unreal, the drama series created by a former field producer on The Bachelor; when it first launched, it seemed like maybe it would puncture the genre by exposing some of what goes on, but then it turned into its own weird soap opera after the first season.
The first season really does stand alone. But there’s been a lot of scripted responses to reality television – from Albert Brooks making the movie Real Life about An American Family; to Reality Bites, which is sort of a response to The Real World; to all of these modern comedians like Nathan Fielder and Sacha Baron Cohen. Scripted and comedic creators are often really agitated by the phoniness of our or cruelty or whatever of various aspects of reality TV, but they’ve been inspired by them to create their own stuff in response. A lot of sitcoms are made using a lot of the aesthetic techniques of reality shows – like all those mockumentaries. In my book, I write about a camera operator from Survivor: Borneo who ended up working on the American version of The Office; he talked to me about training all of the camera operators to use all the same techniques, like peeking through the blinds. All of these little elements like the confessionals and certain kinds of flashbacks end up being really great comic tools.
The interview has been edited and condensed.