Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

by Emily Nussbaum

And despite the genre’s reputation for crudeness, reality production added sophistication to the television medium. Adventure shows like Survivor spearheaded unusual new methods of filming action; many of the tools of modern TV comedy—the shaky-cam, the confessional, the insta-flashback—were adapted from reality shows, often in the guise of satirizing their excesses. Without the reality TV boom, there’s no The Office.

Still, Meegan acknowledged the true source of this boom, which was not egotism, but economics. Making scripted radio, which required writers, actors, and expensive sound effects, cost a fortune—and producers hated negotiating with unions. To stage an audience participation show, all they needed was a host and some unpaid volunteers, plus a sponsor to offer up prizes. At that price tag, even the jankiest content would turn on a fire hose of profit.

There were a few bumps. When the Fort Lauderdale raid started, the director tried to cut to a commercial. The audio guy panicked, so Langley grabbed the boom mic himself and raced into the house. Inside, to his amazement, they discovered that their target—a drug-trafficking Bahamian police officer—was in the living room, watching the same show that they were filming. The crew scrambled to turn the television set off. “It was so postmodern, it freaked me out. Dimensions within dimensions,” Langley told me, laughing.

To read the narration for the show, Fox hired actor Jonathan Frakes, who had played the studly Commander Riker on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Frakes knew he wasn’t their first choice, he told me. “Patrick [Stewart] turns all this shit down….” he joked. “Because I’m such a whore, I took this, and the producer hired me for another couple of jobs.” Alien Autopsy wound up steering Frakes into a fresh revenue stream as a narrator for paranormal shows, and in time, a starring role playing himself on the WB drama Roswell. With medium pride, he described Alien Autopsy as “if not the first of its kind, the first of its niche.”

Many of the applicants understood that they were playing a role. Joel Klug, a twenty-seven-year-old gym marketer, could see that he would be the show’s “abrasive womanizer, like, the guy who dumped you in high school,” so he deliberately insulted a female CBS executive.

Meanwhile, the castaways were struggling to figure out the game. On Tagi, river guide Kelly Wiglesworth had decided to focus on impressing her teammates, shucking coconuts, trying to make fire in humidity so extreme she felt like she could sip the air with a straw. At first, she butted heads with the geriatric military veteran Rudy, who felt like dead weight to her, unable to build a fire or tie a knot. “And I was like, ‘You are the most useless military man ever.’ And he was like, ‘Well, I was a Navy SEAL. We weren’t supposed to build fires…. We weren’t supposed to be seen. I just came in and killed people!’ And I was like, ‘Okay, point taken.’ ”

Friends and family urged him to turn the offer down, but Will—who had graduated from medical school and been accepted into a JD/MBA program—had an intuition that he was perfectly suited for the reality genre, with his looks, charisma, intelligence, and unusual gift for emotional compartmentalization.

Then, in a blink, everything changed. A week or two into his new job at ABC, the network began airing the glamorously terroristic quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Jackass was half-therapy, half-psychosis, the type of cathartic body horror that viewers either “got” or found repulsive.

Like everything else, these shifts were about money. It took months to glean brilliant footage for a reality show, to capture the subtleties of relationships as they emerged, organically. If your cast members already understood who they were supposed to argue with, you could tie a show up in ten days.

There was one silver lining to Manhunt: The cast members kept their promise to one another, with the winner writing everyone else a check. They stayed friends for years, continuing to get together for drinks. It was the first successful reality television union.

Although there were a few exceptions—among them the committed gay couple on the first season of The Amazing Race—cartoonish stereotypes were the industry default. Swishy gay men got cast for comedy, or sometimes to ignite a clash with a homophobe. Producers would pick one or two Black players, but no more.

The Runner did eventually get produced in 2016, in a far tamer, mostly online variation. Speaking to reality TV blogger Andy Dehnart, former Survivor executive producer Craig Piligian described the never-made OG version, nostalgically, as an “unsafely interactive” project. “The runner would have been tackled and tied and drawn—I got the fucking runner right here! He’s tied up in my fuckin’ basement, come give me my million dollars.”

By then, the chip on his shoulder had become a boulder. Fleiss was determined to create a golden format, something he could shove in the faces of his enemies. In fits of mania, he scribbled down ideas, titles that included Mail Order Brides, Intervention, Spot Your Former Lover, Social Climber, and Ruin Your Life.

Like Chuck Barris before him, Fleiss expressed open disdain for his own cast members, all those exhibitionists who no longer had to be cajoled to go wild. When he had first pitched the idea for the show, he said, people didn’t understand why someone would kiss another person on camera. “This new generation is just like, ‘Why would I ever kiss somebody off camera?’ That’s where they’re at,” he said.

In an interview with Cosmopolitan, Jessica revealed the magic words Shapiro said to get her to break down on The Bachelor: “ ‘You’ve been very honest about all the girls here being so much prettier than you and skinnier than you and better than you. How does it feel to know that you were right?’ ”

In a pop-culture environment that treated gay hairdressers and designers as swishy jokes, Queer Eye elevated them, celebrating them as skilled artisans. Even better, it portrayed gay men’s lives as so enviable that anyone, of any sexuality, would want to emulate them.