Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

by Emily Nussbaum

In 1948, the dryly scathing radio critic John Crosby, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, joked that there were so many audience participation shows on the air, they’d soon outnumber the fans who enjoyed them: “Eventually ALL the people will be tearing around from one radio studio to another, answering the questions and carting home the iceboxes. Nobody will have time to listen to the darn thing.”

Like Crosby, Meegan took a few shots at the new genre, quoting 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.”

For years, there was a widespread rumor that one wife had responded to Eubanks’s standard “making whoopee” question with a hilariously literal answer: “That’d be up the butt, Bob!” Eubanks himself claimed the story was an urban legend, offering $10,000 to anyone who could prove him wrong—but eventually, the clip, which had never been rerun, reemerged on a 2002 bloopers special. The actual interaction, from a 1977 episode, was a little bit different from the one in the rumor: When Eubanks asked one of the wives to describe the weirdest place she had ever considered “making whoopee,” the woman, Olga Perez—a sweet-faced lady with plump cheeks and a missing tooth, her eyebrows plucked thin as reeds—paused, briefly, looking uncertain about how to respond. Then she blurted out, with a nervous grin: “…In the ass?”

The one other significant reality format of the period was The People’s Court, which lacked sharks or Fidel Castro but was the first television show to feature binding arbitration.

When his team was done filming, Feist radioed headquarters to let them know that they were ready to sleep. They told him to go ahead. “And I go, ‘Where do they sleep?’ They go, ‘In the tents.’ And I go, ‘What tents?’ ” Headquarters put him on hold. 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.

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. Reality performers roomed together; they dated and networked, hopscotching seasons and franchises.

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.

Trump could be crude in these scenes, reliably gross about the female contestants (Walker remembered him referring to one woman as “the one with big implants” and to Omarosa simply as “the Black chick”), and sometimes cruel.

At one meeting, the inner circle, along with Trump’s two deputies, Kepcher and Ross, began to discuss the players. As usual, they sketched out the options for Trump, debating which person he might fire and why. The way Pruitt remembered it, the mood leaned toward Kwame, who had delivered a fantastic concert, working hard to overcome significant obstacles—among them, the fact that he had been backstabbed by Omarosa, who was allowed back into the game by the producers after she was “fired.” Bill’s event had gone smoothly, but it was an easier task and he hadn’t contributed as much. 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: “I remember where I was looking, I remember what I was seeing, certainly what I was hearing…. Coughing, stammering, Carolyn’s face flushed…. And then there was that nervous laughter. Not compliance by any means, but it’s like, ‘Next!,’ like—‘Skip that!’ ” No one said anything in response: “I think someone came in strategically with another question.”

None of the other people who were present responded to inquiries. But one person who wasn’t present that day did remember Trump saying something similar: In his memoir, Disloyal, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, who was often on set in his role as the co-president of Trump’s TV production company, described a conversation with Trump, which took place four years after the finale, at the launch of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago. That night, Trump, who was reminiscing about his decision to choose Rancic, had told Cohen, “There was no way I was going to let this Black fag win.”