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Reality television has been a part of my life since adolescence, when I would hole up in my parents’ basement, flip on MTV, and religiously watch each new season of The Real World. Even back then, “reality” wasn’t a new genre; hybrid docudrama had existed on TV in some form since the 1970s, but I found The Real World’s rawness riveting, often more than so-called must-see TV. My love grew from there. I latched on and never let go. My favorites span decades and networks: Road Rules, Flavor of Love, The Real Housewives universe, Summerhouse, and Vanderpump Rules. (I only draw the line at The Bachelor.)
As a genre, reality TV is enormous; it dominates our culture but also unites it, producing a certain strain of low-stakes silly gossip that brings people from all corners together. Emily Nussbaum, a staff writer at The New Yorker, might not share my devotion to the medium, but she does a great job of breaking it all down in her new book, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV. The book unpacks the genre in a tangible way, giving it the attention to detail it deserves. After reading an excerpt in The New Yorker, I had to get Nussbaum on the phone to chat about it all. She was in New York City, and I was in Atlanta. We discussed An American Family, naivete as a central component, being your own reality producer, Big Brother, the uncertain future of television, and my own brush with reality-TV fame in the early aughts.
When I saw the excerpt from your new book in The New Yorker, I lit up like a Christmas tree, because I’m a Real World diehard, and I've been a reality-TV person ever since it first aired. It's crazy to watch what reality TV’s become since then. For my money, it's the predominant form of American entertainment.
I would agree with that. It's at the absolute dead center, and it's part of the reason I wrote the book. It’s both for people who hate reality and love it, but the people who hate it often want to act like it's not as influential or central as it is. It's an attempt to put eyes on it and treat it thoughtfully because it's like–what is that movie? "I won’t be ignored." That's reality TV.
It's taken on so many forms. I know you touch on The Apprentice and that show from the '70s that started it all, An American Family. I'd never heard of that one, and I’d guess that a lot of people haven't.
You're absolutely right; a lot of people haven't heard of it, but it's central to the book, because it was the secret sauce of the creation of both the reality soap opera and the reality star. An American Family was a show on PBS that was a documentary about the Loud family, an affluent family from Santa Barbara, California. It was two parents, five kids, and in the course of the series, the mother asked the father for a divorce while the cameras were around, so it happened on the air. Their oldest son was Lance Loud, who is an incredibly important historical figure, culturally. He was 19. He was gay. He was an artist. He was very influenced by Warhol. He was living at the Chelsea Hotel.
All of this stuff that I'm describing was absolutely shocking for people to see on their televisions. What I always like to say about that show is that it was made as a documentary, but it was watched as a reality show. It was received by the audience as a shocking thing where non-famous people were suddenly famous; you learned all their secrets, like a real-life soap opera. And the result was that the Louds themselves, who had really intended to participate in what seemed like a high-minded PBS documentary–
Sounds a little different than what they got.
They became national stars that people hated and loved and thought they knew. So the book traces the creation of the genre and its formats, but it also traces the creation of identities that never existed before—the “reality star.”
There are people now who set out to be reality stars on TikTok, television, or YouTube. That’s become a desired career path. Even after the reality-TV boom, people didn't always know what they were getting into. Now it's clear what's going to happen. You're going to get famous, then you're going to have products to sell, you're going to have a book deal.… It's viable if you're willing to lay it all out there.
I used to think that more than I do now. The people I write about in this book were often being cast on shows where there had never been a show like it before. Their naivete was kind of the central component of those shows. People were making it up as they went along and that's no longer true. People who go on Survivor have watched Survivor.
Right, there are 75 seasons…
But I think because it's a non-unionized industry where people sign contracts with extremely insidious and aggressive NDAs that forbid them from talking about how the shows are made, a lot of people think they know what they're getting into, but they don't. I talk to plenty of people [in the book] who are happy with their experiences on reality TV, but I also talk to a lot of people who were really traumatized, and that includes people on Love Is Blind. My piece [on cast members from Love Is Blind] was partially about the labor and legal issues, but it was also about the psychological aspect, where people think they understand what they’re in for until they're on it. I have a lot of empathy for people on reality TV, even for the villainous figures, because the notion that you can just go out and become famous, make a living, and handle whatever's coming to you, there's only a small set of people that actually can handle it. And I have to say, Lance Loud in 1973 was one of them. He was a Warhol guy. He knew he was being a star.
I remember reading John Jeremiah Sullivan’s GQ essay about The Miz from The Real World and being so fascinated. I'd heard over the years that there was basically one manager who was in charge of all of those people's careers, and I thought, How long can this last?
Long before I wrote this book, I wrote a piece for Radar magazine in 2003 or 2004. There was a bar in LA called Belly that was owned by Mike Boogie. You're familiar?
Oh, of course.
I do interviews with people who either know everything about this or know nothing. But he was not a big winner on Big Brother at that point. Later he went on to sort of win the show. But he owned this bar, I think with Ashton Kutcher, in LA that was frequented by reality stars, which was a new part of the LA population. But what was funny was that it was like they'd all graduated from different colleges. It was as though the Survivors were the Ivy League people. They were snobby and kept to themselves. They were on an athletic show that was a big hit, so they all looked down on people who were on “those sleazy dating shows," because The Bachelor was pretty new then. But The Real World people were close, and a lot of it was because they were teenagers when they went on that show. Their whole personality was formed by the experience, and yeah, they all had one agent who set up all of these kinds of engagements. But the fantasy a lot of people had that you could make a real living, especially at that time, wasn’t viable.
Now, there's also a world, on Bravo especially, where there's a lot of intermingling between shows. They're dating each other, they're appearing on the other shows, and that must make the networks very happy.
It's a very different situation now because shows have spinoffs, and you can jump from show to show. And because of social media, the nature of reality fame has changed. Everyone has the technology, and people are now their own reality producers. The period I'm writing about is the period of the development of these genres, but it's also a period where technology kept changing and inflecting the genre, like when Avid machines came along and changed what kinds of shows you could make. But I’ve traced some early reality stars who have tried to do the stuff you're talking about. Do you remember Darva Conger, who was the bride on Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?
Oh, how could I forget?
I talked to Darva, who was great and really candid, but after she was on that show she was a national laughingstock. She was very mocked and humiliated, but in the aftermath, in a very savvy way, she was like, I can't do anything about this, I'm notorious, I'm going to try to make some money off it. So she did appear on the cover of Playboy, but then she did something very prescient, which is that she created what was basically a lifestyle website, with Darva's gardening tips, cooking stuff, and anything she was into in terms of her home life. It was like Lance Loud. She was a few years before her time because there was no infrastructure to launch yourself, so it just didn't take off. Just five years later, that would have been a real possibility.
What is your reality consumption level now? Are you sick of it? Can you never watch it again?
I got interested in writing this book because I was a compulsive web watcher of season one of Big Brother. I was watching them sleep in California on my laptop, embarrassingly. So it's not like I haven't watched shows, but I'm not a reality-TV fan, per se. A lot of people have the misconception that in writing this book, I was just hooking myself up to an IV of Bravo. I was interviewing so many people and I watched a lot of shows, and a lot of those early seasons are kind of wonderful. They're well-made. Sometimes, they're disturbing. But my current watching of reality TV has definitely been harmed by knowing how the sausage is made. I was never a big viewer, but I did watch Love Is Blind, and then I wrote an investigative piece about it. Now, the show makes me feel a lot more uncomfortable.
So, where do we go from here? What do the next 10 years look like?
I always said this back when I was at New York Magazine, as the culture editor and as a TV critic: I am terrible at predicting the future of TV. But from talking to people in the industry, people are very disturbed right now. In TV, in general, there are so many shakeups that have to do with the economy, with distribution, with streaming, so there are a lot of people out of work. I don't know where reality goes, but I don't think it's ever going to dissolve. The period that I trace in the book is a series of experiments that everybody kept saying were gimmicks, that it was going to die. And then Survivor comes out, and after that, reality is going nowhere. It became a huge industry with an established set of jobs. It was no longer people just making it up as they went along. And it expanded to the point where there are so many different kinds of shows, that you can't really sum it up as one thing. But whatever happens in the future, people will demand these shows because an audience has been raised on them. They’re important to them. They're part of their relationships and friendships. They're part of their conversations.
I should mention that in the early aughts, I used to manage a band called Cartel and we were approached by MTV to do a reality show called Band in a Bubble.
Oh my God.
It had been a show in Australia, and the record label basically said, "You have to do this," so we did it. They built a dome bubble on the pier in New York and set up webcams, and you could watch them recording their album 24 hours a day for two weeks. But what's funny is that I liked reality TV then, and then I learned how it worked. They were like, "We're asking for food, and they're only bringing us alcohol." I realized that was how it worked in all those shows. That can’t be exclusive to us.
That's the deal. Those are the techniques, and I try to describe how they came up with those techniques.
But with a band, they were like, "We're drunk all the time together. We're not going to fight about this. We do this every night." But on the 10th or 15th anniversary, a few people wrote about how it was ahead of its time, and they got destroyed.
Oh, that's terrible. It was a rock band, right? Because reality TV's a rock band destroyer. Poor Andre from the first season of The Real World. He left that show, and everybody in his Gen X, authenticity-obsessed peer group was like, "You're a sellout. You were on this weird show on MTV," and he had a little bit of a nervous breakdown from it. So I don't think that's unusual when you're in a rock band that depends on the idea that you're raw and edgy, and then you appear on something that seems cartoonish, like the Monkees.
The idea that they were making the album in the bubble was all faked. We made the album before and then went in and faked it. But when it came out, everyone was like, "Well, this isn't good because they recorded it in this bubble," and we couldn't be like, "But we didn't!"
So the producers knew that you had made the album before?
They might not have known it was completely done. And to be fair, I was 24 and in charge, which also doesn't make any sense.
I think they need to revive the show, but they need to do it with cinema-verité purity, and they need to just throw people in and make them make an album. I will watch that. Can I find Band in a Bubble online?
I have the DVDs in my parents' house.
I'm about to go look it up.