Emily Nussbaum is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has also worked as an editor and writer for New York Magazine, where she wrote The Approval Matrix. Her work has appeared in Slate, The New York Times, Lingua Franca, Nerve, and other publications. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Below, Emily shares five key insights from her new book, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV. Listen to the audio version read by Emily herself in the Next Big Idea app.
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1. Reality TV is nothing new.
It was in 2003 that I first thought about writing a book about reality TV. At the time, Survivor was a hugely popular show that was a huge hit worldwide. The internet was still relatively new, and I had secretly started watching a strange show that was being streamed online (a series called Big Brother) without telling anyone. I found this new entertainment genre strange, fascinating, and a little embarrassing. I thought it would make a great book. But when I mentioned the idea to a friend, he had only one response: “You’d better write it soon.”
He said reality TV was a passing fad that would die out in a year or two. By the time I got back to writing about it, it had become a big industry. It never went anywhere, but I still thought of it as a modern genre. I thought it would go back to Survivor, or at most the Real World of the early ’90s. Like a lot of people, I saw it as a sign of a cultural change. It seemed like narcissism was on the rise now that cameras are everywhere, even on our phones. But when I started researching the book, I realized that wasn’t true at all. These shows have a much longer lineage, going back 70 years, to the days of live radio participatory shows.
In the 1940s, radio participatory shows created moral shock waves much like their modern counterparts. Bystanders were transfixed and appalled by the voices of ordinary people spilling their secrets to the world. Some participatory shows involved ordinary people being challenged or telling funny stories. Others were what might be called a tragic story format, like “Queen for a Day,” in which women competed to see who had the most miserable life, with the audience’s clap meter deciding the winner. There was “Blind Date,” in which soldiers and single women flirted through a wall, much like “The Dating Game” and “Love Is Blind” did many years later. And there was “Candid Microphone,” the first version of the “Candid Camera,” a controversial prank show that shocked the world by secretly recording its subjects. Critics were generally weary of the audience. Participatory shows were described as vulgar, crude, and exploitative. But regular viewers kept watching.
2. Reality TV is strike-breaking.
One of the main reasons reality TV has endured is that it’s cheap from a network’s perspective – a clever budget tactic, a way to churn out content without paying writers or actors. This was true in the early days, when radio actors were frustrated with competing with a horde of unpaid unknowns. It was true in the late 1960s, when mop-topped lunatic Chuck Barris infuriated Hollywood with cheesy, raunchy shows like “The Newly Wed Game” and “The Gong Show.” It was also true in 1989, when TV hopeful John Langley was struggling to sell a show called “Cops,” because Fox was desperately short of content in the aftermath of the strike.
“It’s a clever budget tactic, a way to churn out content without paying writers and actors.”
But cheap doesn’t mean uncreative. In the early 1990s, MTV wanted to produce a scripted soap opera about twenty-somethings living in New York City. The network realized that to make it happen, it would have to pay writers and actors and work with unions, something a small cable station couldn’t do. Instead, creative partners John Murray and Mary Ellis Bunim devised a way to make the show on a much lower budget. They found seven strangers to live in their house and explore what would happen if people stopped being polite and started talking. In the process, they transformed television. “The Real World” was the first reality show to have a thoroughly modern feel, with a makeshift home surrounded by cameras, a diverse cast of people who’d never met, settings of fights and flirtations, a modern editing style, and intimate confessions.
3. Reality TV broke the rules.
Cue the Sun’s definition of reality TV: take a cinéma vérité documentary (the flashy, highbrow, prestige arthouse approach to film, where you set up the camera and wait quietly for the truth to emerge) and cut the cinéma vérité documentary into something that can be repeated over and over, like cutting drugs with the faster, more aggressive, commercial format of television, and you get reality TV. It could be a game show. It could be a soap opera or a prank show. Sometimes, like Survivor’s brilliantly innovative format, it’s a combination of all three. Either way, the creators of great reality TV know how to build a system that ensures pressure is applied to the contestants, rather than just waiting for them to do something, and they break the rules by using any means possible to elicit shocking, moving, or funny responses.
The main rule that reality TV broke was obvious: it turned ordinary people into celebrities and shocked an entire culture. One of my favorite chapters in the book is about the 1973 show “An American Family,” an experimental documentary that aired on PBS about a California family called Bill and Pat Loud and their five teenage kids. In some ways, “An American Family” doesn’t look like the reality TV I’ve described it to be. It was dreamily slow-paced and pretty expensive. In reality, it was meant to be a cinéma vérité documentary that would air on a luxury network, but it captured a subject that would totally shock American audiences: a mother demanding a divorce on camera while her openly gay son (played by a very charismatic Lance Loud) was living in the Chelsea Hotel in downtown New York. The way the media and public reacted to “An American Family” turned the show into the first reality TV fiasco, and the Loud brothers themselves became the first true reality stars famous for being famous.
I interviewed the remaining Loud family and the Raymonds, who filmed them for the show. The pair no longer speak; the American Family experience has torn them apart.
4. Pay close attention to the people behind the camera.
My book features profiles and interviews with the people who have made reality TV a huge hit, including Candid Camera creator Allen Funt, The Gong Show host Chuck Barris, Cops creator John Langley, Real World masterminds John Murray and Mary Ellis Bunim, FOX Network’s Mike Darnell, The Bachelor creators Mike Fleiss and Lisa Levinson, and Survivor producer Mark Burnett. This quirky group was willing to cross all boundaries to make the show, but I was just as interested in everyone else who works in the reality TV genre. I interviewed more than 300 workers in the industry, including performers, on-site producers, camera and audio operators, casting agents, taskers, and editors. Most of them had to create their jobs from scratch because this kind of show didn’t exist.
“This quirky group was prepared to cross all boundaries to make the show a success.”
Producers told me about their craft when they first started working on set, getting performers to open up, cry on camera, and do other things. I talked to cameramen who described filming starving castaways stranded on a desert island for the first season of Survivor. Some reality-show editors bragged to me about their techniques, including the dark art of Frankenbytes, which take a handful of extraneous sounds and stitch them together into sentences no one has ever said.
What people see when they watch reality TV is a collaboration with an unseen side: every bit of drama is a remnant of a deeply complex, creative, and sometimes uneasy and uneven relationship between the people in front of the camera and those behind it.
5. The more false the reality, the more ethical it is.
Some of the most powerful aspects of reality TV — the shocking, poignant, surprising moments, the strong emotions like fear or love that are shown on people’s faces — are truly real. Much of the power of watching reality TV comes from watching the mixture of fake and real, the clever mix of real and manufactured elements that the people who make these shows use. But much of what makes the shows I write about in this book so powerful, and frankly so unsettling, is that the contestants really had no idea what they were getting into when they signed up to be made. The more naive the contestants were, the more genuine their reactions were. As the reality industry has grown, many of the contestants have become quite savvy.
People who audition for Survivor are fans of Survivor. It’s the same with shows like The Bachelor. A lot of young people, for financial reasons, are acting as themselves on Instagram and social media, acting as their own reality show producers in public. A lot of scripted shows have become much more artificial. They’re what industry people call soft scripted, and I’m talking about things like The Real Housewives and the Kardashians. In these shows, the stars are basically up to act out exaggerated versions of their lives, working closely with the camera people. They’re more like scripted actresses, but they don’t get the same kind of fee or residuals.
This presents a strange conundrum for reality TV: The more fake the show is, the more ethical it is. For decades, innocence was the secret sauce of reality TV production. These days, it’s in short supply.
To hear the audio version read by author Emily Nussbaum, download the Next Big Idea app now.
