As a Zoomer who grew up glued to shows like Big Brother and Keeping Up With the Kardashians, it's hard to imagine a time that reality TV even tried to be ethical. Not that that matters to me. In fact, one of the reasons I most enjoy binge-watching Bravo is, to put it simply, watching the people on it suffer. In the last season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, when longtime cast member Kyle Richards sat her crying children down to tell them about her impending separation with their father, my husband could barely stand it. "This is evil," he said. I shrugged, knowing that he was probably right, but also having never really thought or cared about the morality of what I was watching. Reality TV stardom is a lucrative career, and by now everybody should know what they're getting into. Right? The crying kids are just collateral.
It wasn't until Cue the Sun, New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum's cultural history of the invention of reality TV, that I realized this wasn't always the case. If you're of a certain age, you may remember the first of the genre: Candid Microphone, which later became Candid Camera, in which people did not know what they were signing up for—and that was the point—until they were chased down and pressured into signing footage releases for $15. Then there was Queen for a Day, a radio show that hit screens in 1956, which Nussbaum describes as "a kind of upside down beauty pageant whose winner was the woman with the ugliest life." Housewives were encouraged to give sob stories to the audience in return for prizes. "The Bachelor crossed with GoFundMe," Nussbaum calls it.
These early iterations were popular. They had the main ingredients: the drama, the misery, the pitiful cast. In a 1979 show called Three's a Crowd, "a man's wife and his secretary competed over who knew him best." In those days, the problem for reality TV wasn't the entertainment value but the audience, who by the early '80s had, in Nussbaum's words, "grown less tolerant of snickering misogyny." So maybe it was never squeaky clean—when you join ambitious producers together with fame-hungry nobodys, somebody's getting screwed. But there were at least some people involved in the rise of reality TV who wanted to keep it authentic.
Fast-forward to the '90s, and MTV's The Real World saw seven strangers thrown together in a SoHo loft. The plot, according to the show's producers, Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray, "would emerge from their conflicts." The problem with this thesis is sometimes people are nice and just get on, which doesn't make for good television. According to Nussbaum, a few weeks into filming, the pair would try "a production method that Bunim, a seasoned soap opera producer, called 'throwing pebbles into the pond,'" by planting a prop, in the form of naked photos of one of the cast members, for the rest of the group to find. Not everybody was thrilled with the intervention, even though it was causing a well-needed ruckus. "Nearby, associate producer Danielle Foraldo was staring at the screen in distress. She had begged her bosses not to interfere with the house at all, convinced that any manipulation would taint the reality format's purity." Later on in filming, more of the Gen X crew would share Foraldo's concerns. Some would complain that the showrunners were "fucking with reality" with these pebbles. Others would rebel or quit. The show would survive 33 seasons, the last of which ran in 2017.
After The Real World became a hit, something changed. "It was the first reality show to succeed not due to the cast's naïveté but because of their sophistication, their eagerness to collaborate with the people filming them." Soon, reality TV stardom would become a career. The cast of the first season went on to be actors, singers, writers, producers, politicians. According to Nussbaum, after this, "the Real World casting process had evolved. Many of the people who sent in video tapes had a strong sense of what they were getting into." The influence of Candid Camera and other "gotcha" game and reality shows had officially died. Cast members became more self-aware about what was expected of them, which was to perform and get a nice brand deal or presenting job when they finished.
The late 1990s and 2000s is where things started to really explode. By now every network had reams of reality TV shows on their schedules. "Some of these reality projects were trash, plenty fizzled fast, but a handful—The Amazing Race, American Idol, and The Bachelor, in particular—became network tentpoles, which would run for decades." The problem, critics will tell you, is that this came at a price. When cast members are under such pressure to perform, they do things they wouldn't usually do. They become "just another victim of the lights, the pressures, and the audience." While Nussbaum's book is encyclopedic about the incredible journey of this genre, the pushbacks, the successes, and the key figures, what is fascinating about the reality TV boom is that it is a mirror of us, the audience.
"By the early aughts … a new audience, which had grown up watching these franchises, had fully embraced the genre, as a genre, without expecting it to be something it wasn't. … For them, reality programming had become a shared language, a way to talk about who they were and what they valued, what was fair and what was authentic, a debate conducted in in-jokes and memes, podcasts and charticles, through group text and office talk. Like all gossip, it was a coded way to talk about politics, large and small." There was something else too, an ingredient that had remained a constant throughout even the earliest of the reality TV format. Chuck Barris, famous game show creator and host of The Gong Show, told TV Guide in the '70s, "It's reassuring to find there is someone unhappier than you are."
Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV
by Emily Nussbaum
Random House, 464 pp., $30
Kara Kennedy is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.