Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

by Emily Nussbaum

In the most sinister outcome, a reality star had been elected president, embraced by voters who mistook him for the masterful tycoon he played on NBC’s The Apprentice, and then revamped the Oval Office, running it as if it were the NBC boardroom.

Truman’s hidden by the darkness, so Christof commands, “Cue the sun!,” flooding the world with sunlight.

Early reality production was utterly reliant on the innocence of its stars, their inability to understand what they were consenting to: That was the genre’s secret sauce, its original sin.

Pundits hated the audience participation shows from the start, a response that was saturated with class revulsion: These were vulgar programs, created by vulgar people, for vulgar people, about vulgar people. Worst of all, they were insanely popular.

Crosby devoted dozens of droll columns to these protoreality shows, taking potshots at their absurdity, their frivolity, and their commercialism. He was genuinely disturbed by one trend, however—the “misery shows,” in the tradition of Mr. Anthony’s call-in advice show, the kind of programming that was fueled by, and also designed to produce, tears and trauma.

The way Meegan saw it, audience participation shows might be lurid, they might be cheaply produced strikebusters, but they were also something else: originals.

In an era when women were expected to marry early and have kids, then stay tight-lipped about anything that went wrong, these agonizing public displays of suffering were at once degrading and glorifying, like sainthood.

Beneath its layers of schmaltz, Queen for a Day sent an unsettling message: The nuclear family didn’t guarantee your safety.

The prank show would become the second stream of the reality genre, after the game show.

in its own era, Funt’s show was viewed not as a cute comedy but as a deeply destabilizing experiment. It was a rude, even radical, provocation to a culture that was grounded in repression.

It wasn’t enough to spy on people, to tape what they were saying. You also had to puncture their sense of normality somehow—to confuse or infuriate them, to throw them off-balance. Only then would their mask slip, letting you see a burst of authentic emotion.

Pranks like the dentist bit were more like cringe comedy. But Funt’s broader-ranging work—morally complex documentary experimentation that delved deeply into human behavior—drew intellectuals toward Funt’s work, among them sociologist David Riesman, who, in his 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd, described Funt as “the second most ingenious sociologist in America.” (His top pick: Paul Lazarsfeld, who invented influencer theory.)

Funt’s biggest innovation, however, was to introduce a crucial moment in each episode—“the reveal,” which became an institution around 1962.

The reveal added an extra beat to the comedy. But it also provided a moral escape hatch for the viewer, a cathartic release from any lingering sense of collusion. Once the subject understood that they had been filmed, they took back a bit of agency, some dignity and control.

There had always been a predatory thrum to Funt’s legacy, on back to the moment he first picked up that dentist’s drill. But if the producer felt comfortable, and maybe even a bit turned on, by blurring and crossing boundaries, it was difficult to separate that impulse from his gifts, the ones that had pushed television into a new stage. A better man might never have pressed record.

The Dating Game was an instant smash hit, and Barris bragged to journalists about the novelty of his approach to daytime entertainment, with its focus on “people, as opposed to playing with words and clues.” If his new blockbuster wasn’t a subtle show, it nailed the contradictory mood of the era, which was post–sexual revolution but prefeminist, with both gender roles and power dynamics in flux.

There were limits to the show’s flexibility, however: Although The Dating Game featured all-Black dating panels, it never mixed Black and white contestants.

Eubanks, a former DJ and concert promoter, wrote in thoughtful terms about how much the show’s tone had shifted as the culture shifted around it. A couple of decades into The Newlywed Game, the couples became more affectionate, more like teammates, in the wake of feminism. They had bickered more in the late ’60s—possibly, Eubanks theorized, because they were mimicking sitcoms like The Honeymooners. Marital meltdowns made good TV, but they depressed the host.

To most observers, however, the show mainly looked like a remake of Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour, a wildly popular audience participation classic, on both radio and television, which ran from 1934 through 1970. The Amateur Hour had discovered both Frank Sinatra and Maria Callas, but it was better known for mocking untalented nobodies.

Despite the chaperones on The Dating Game, the show had no background checks, even to make sure people were single. In 1978, this hands-off approach led to a disaster when one of the show’s winners, Rodney Alcala, turned out to be a serial killer.

If Candid Camera had launched the prank show, and Queen for a Day the game show, An American Family would initiate the third, and maybe the most powerful, thread of reality programming: the real-life soap opera.

As Andy Warhol said in another context, you’ll be famous for twenty-nine minutes, but you’ll also be demeaned, vilified, and eventually, dismissed. A lot of people are going to recognize more of themselves in you than they are willing to admit, and they’ll never forgive you for that.”

Like electricity deprived of an outlet, the reality impulse welled up in the late ’80s, forced to flow into any space that felt welcoming.

It surged, especially, into daytime talk shows, which had always acted as a truth serum for ordinary people.

Daytime talk shows were educational; they were exploitative; like Shimmer Floor Wax, they were both. A colorful personal story would get you seen and heard—and, also, jeered at, or at least interrogated by nosy strangers. That was the bargain TV had always struck, the price for being visible.

Langley understood that the first line of his obituary would be about Cops, the longest-lasting reality show ever—a show so successful it would outlast his death, a year later.

Cops would have a catalytic effect on television. Together with America’s Funniest Home Videos, it jump-started the reality genre, which had been static for nearly a decade. It changed the way the police were portrayed and perceived.

The police procedural’s calling card was gritty authenticity, with the cop as an existential hero, seeking truth in a world of slippery lies.

like Candid Camera, Cops was at its heart a prank show—an ambush show—with the cops as Allen Funt.

The first series that felt fully recognizable as modern reality TV, The Real World had forged the tools that would define the genre: the shared house, the deliberately diverse ensemble cast, and the “confessional.”

While the couple was walking home, co-director Alan Cohn gave Tracy and her date an ultimatum: He wasn’t going to leave until they kissed. Tracy wasn’t especially into the idea, but they did it, kissing under a streetlight. Jim Jones described the moment to me, jokingly, as “the original sin of reality television.”

The Real World casts always had the same gripes, he said. “They’d say, ‘We had that really good discussion of homelessness!’ We knew that if people wanted to watch that, they’ll watch CNN.”

With the possible exception of Eric—whom MTV had hired to be the MC of a dance show called Hangin’ w/MTV—each housemate was having a hard time adjusting to their new circumstances. Part of the problem was emotional, part was financial. It was the reality paradox that would, in later years, became endemic: They were superstars, but without the paycheck or social protection that usually accompanied mind-blowing celebrity.

That was the catch-22 of the reality genre: The savvier its subjects became, the more self-aware about their roles, the less authentic the footage was—but, arguably, the more ethical.

For many viewers, Pedro Zamora would become the first gay man, and the first person with AIDS, that they’d known intimately.

Alien Autopsy was less a reality show than a fake documentary that mimicked legitimate journalism, like the TV analogue to the Weekly World News. But it would wind up becoming the first draft of Fox’s cable news model, with its emphasis on entertainment over reporting.

Marketed correctly, these productions managed to be simultaneously authentic and phony, news and anti-news, without that feeling like any kind of contradiction.

Fox television trained its audience to adopt a similar attitude. Like Mulder, they should want to believe; like Scully, they could revel in their skepticism. That cynical credulity (or credulous cynicism) would become the defining quality of American culture, in the reality genre, on the news, and in politics.

That year, the entire TV industry was obsessed with an ABC quiz show called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, a tense, glamorous British import with high ratings. One weekend, Mike Darnell flew to Parsippany, New Jersey, to attend a wedding. Plane phones were new at the time, so he made a call—and when he heard Millionaire’s numbers were rising, he grew fixated on the problem. “All I could think about is, ‘Who? Who?? Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? What else do the people want?’ ” Darnell stared at the wedding; he thought about that quiz show jackpot. Then, like the genius who combined peanut butter and chocolate, he merged the two things: Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?

If The Real World had modernized the genre, Survivor supersized it.

What really made Survivor stand out, however, was its ingenious format, which managed to unite three key traditions: Allen Funt’s prank show model; the Chuck Barris-esque game show; and the real-life soap opera, which was launched by An American Family. This singular, powerful structure would ultimately influence nearly everything that followed it—and when Survivor broke out as a prime-time hit for CBS in 2000, it struck many viewers as a distinctly American program,

That was the underlying paradox of Mark Burnett’s success: Unlike early reality auteurs, writers like Allen Funt and Chuck Barris, or producers and directors like Craig Gilbert, Jon Murray, Mary-Ellis Bunim, and John Langley, Burnett’s Hollywood career had basically emerged in reverse order. At heart, he was a shrewd, passionate marketer with a product to sell: adventure racing. The best way to fund that product was to find sponsors. The best way to get sponsors was to give them a media platform. And television—which Burnett once described as “a necessary evil”—was the sturdiest media platform available, capable of reaching a global audience of consumers.

That was the paradox of the first season of Survivor: CBS had launched a wildly ambitious, masterfully structured television show, one that would elevate the scrappy, low-fi reality genre into something more like a slick, hypnotic blockbuster movie. They were inventing new production techniques on the fly—ways to gamify personal relationships, to turn real life into plot points, to make suffering beautiful. But the Survivor production was simultaneously understaffed and underbudgeted, full of people who were literally starving in both the cast and the crew. It was a brutal work environment that left those who endured it even prouder of what they had accomplished, given the conditions.

This work was more difficult than filming a scripted show. None of it could be planned in advance. During the shoot’s most satisfying moments, Einhorn felt as if they were building a new vocabulary of cinema, in profound but unspoken collaboration with their subjects.

It was a breakthrough for the reality genre, and more specifically a win for the approach that Survivor co-creator Duncan Gray described to me as “situationalism”: building an artificial setting so self-contained, a story was forced to blossom inside it, like a bonsai tree.

On August 23, 57.3 million fans of Survivor gathered, all around the world, to watch the finale—almost half of the people who were watching television that night. Partygoers dressed up as their favorite castaways and sipped Mai Tais. Charlie

Like Bart, she had come to believe that the reality genre was intrinsically unethical. “It’s not honest TV. It’s not what you think it is. Producers can make a person out of you.”

When the Norwegian minister of culture told Gary Carter that he had destroyed Norwegian culture, Carter snapped back at him: “I said, ‘You are the minister of culture. You take responsibility for your culture!’ All I did was put a frame around it and get Norwegians to perform being Norwegian.”

While Mega had defied Big Brother, hoping to gain control of the game, Will took the opposite approach: He turned himself into the production’s biggest ally. “This is how I help them produce the show. And subtly, by helping them produce the show, it helps me—then I’m in the storylines, I have face time.” It was an approach that, over the next decade, would become the default setting for reality stardom, as players grew increasingly comfortable with the notion of themselves as co-creators of their shows, preparing for a future as a reality celebrity—a

Scott Benton, bored and sleep-deprived on the overnight shift, found himself taking dares from his colleagues, playing random prerecorded Big Brother announcements over the speakers, disorienting the players and making them laugh. He didn’t dislike the cast, he told me; it was hard not to feel some tenderness for people you watched all day. But being in the control room felt like being a prison guard—it was tempting to use your power.