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August 28 - September 30, 2024
Although American Idol was more of a talent contest than a pure reality format, it became the first model of a powerful new subgenre: shows that celebrated artistic skill, from ballroom dancing to fashion design. In the process, it also managed to clear up Darnell’s bad-boy rep, sending him along on the path to other mainstream reality hits, overseeing wholesome competition shows like MasterChef and So You Think You Can Dance.
By February 2002, a new set of pundits chimed in. Rather than predicting the death of reality TV, they made a more alarming argument, that instead of being snuffed out by 9/11, the genre had been strengthened by the tragedy, which had given it a fresh purpose—as a numbing agent. “Reality TV didn’t emerge as compensation for a reality shortage, but as a buffer against the real,” argued media scholar Mark Andrejevic in a column called “Reality TV May Be Down but It’s Not Out.” “The genre offers a reality substitute that has the same flavor as the real thing, but without the disconcerting
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The Osbournes—and the celebreality that followed, especially Newlyweds, which traced the marriage of pop stars Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey—flipped the premise of reality TV upside down. Instead of turning ordinary people into stars, they turned stars into ordinary people.
Unckles’s experience wasn’t unusual. As reality shows bubbled up like lava, the genre’s undercurrent of exploitation intensified, particularly at more marginal productions, out of the spotlight.
what really made the show pop was its over-the-top aesthetic, an intoxicating fantasy of heterosexual romance as the ultimate high: first, chemistry; then the sting of rejection or the pageantry of courtship; and finally, the gradual, luxurious buildup toward a magical climax—yet another on-air proposal.
booze was the crucial ingredient on the first season of The Bachelor, the same way it was on other dating shows. Trays of cocktails circulated constantly; the refrigerators were full of refills. Although no one was forced to drink, there was nothing else for them to do: no books, no magazines, no TV.
as with Rhonda’s panic attack, any emotion could be repurposed, edited to look like a response to the bachelor, as opposed to The Bachelor. More than anything else, that was the contribution the show made to the genre: It established a bold new level of producer manipulation, forging powerful methods of both production and postproduction, ones that would become the default for many other reality shows.
Like the vast majority of reality shows, The Bachelor was nonunionized. Everyone worked around the clock, often sleeping near the set—and if you got fired, your contract forbade you from jumping to a competing show.
Over the years, Fleiss had produced one significant side project: the Hostel horror film franchise, which featured a different brand of torture. He spoke about his television legacy, with a tone of startling contempt. Reality TV had ruined everything, he told me. It helped elect Trump; it corroded people’s morals.
Joe Millionaire was an “eye-opening” experience, introducing him to a much more aggressive philosophy, in which editors were auteurs, powerful figures who were allowed to construct a story from scratch. In the edit bay, he learned to create “Frankenbites,” using bits of dialogue to form entirely new sentences. The permissiveness felt intoxicating:
The producers understood certain occult truths about human nature, among them that “the worst question is the best question.” Shapiro would ask, “So you love dick?” or “So, you’re, like, gay?” An irate, defensive response could be spun into sound bites in a way more rational dialogue could not.
What Shapiro understood as sociopathy, Hatta described simply as skilled producing.
Hatta admired the early episodes of UnREAL, which struck him as near-documentary flashbacks to their production room. He admired Shapiro’s drive. But he didn’t share her interest in industry reform, because the way Hatta saw it, reality TV was inseparable from—and, in fact, defined by—its brutal labor conditions.
UnREAL had another admirer, as well: Jessica Holcomb. 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?’
To Bailey, these programs were punk rock, made by artists who “couldn’t play their instruments and made an awful sound, but the energy was so incredible.” They were drag, too: a queer art form that turned trash into treasure.
Whatever the truth, these mirror-image stories capture the complexity of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. In one version, gay male creativity is a superpower, healing the world and building bridges. In the other, it’s realpolitik, an awareness of how to “trade up.” The magic of Queer Eye was how seamlessly it merged both themes and, in the process, sparked another makeover: renovating Bravo itself, turning the channel into a magnet for queer reality programming.
Together, Project Runway and Blow Out would come to define the Bravo brand: the glamorous talent contest and sleek, aspirational real-life soap opera, each of them layered with irony like a seven-layer dip.
In 2008, in The New York Times Magazine, Susan Dominus described Zalaznick’s impact on the cable network in class terms. She had effectively gentrified the sketchy neighborhood of reality programming, with all those basic bachelorettes and bug-eating contests, transforming it into a newly marketable landscape, one that felt “boutique and chic,” a glimmering Tribeca of the mind. “The formula may be lowbrow—attractive people pitted against one another, ruthless eliminations—but the content is, if not exactly highbrow, then certainly high-style,” wrote Dominus.
For many observers, The Real Housewives and KUWTK would come to define not just channels like Bravo or E!, but reality TV itself. These weren’t shaky-cam documentary experiments, capturing (or even pretending to capture) authentic, unpredictable human behavior. Instead, they proudly foregrounded their own artificiality, by casting women who already saw themselves as public figures.
For these women, femininity functioned as a form of vaudeville, or maybe a type of drag performance: Every emotion and desire was outlined in neon, so that it could seen from space.
For Zalaznick and Scott Dunlop, the one review that truly got the show was a piece written back in 2007, by former VH1 president Michael Hirschorn. In The Atlantic, Hirschorn had made the best case for the value of a set of shows the world dismissed as disposable. Maybe the Bravo lineup lacked the “visual panache” of prestige cable, Hirschorn wrote. But shows like The Real Housewives reflected something authentic, if you knew what to look for. They were mirrors of the bleakness of supposed privilege, reflecting themes that scripted drama had never captured, a fractured world in which
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however the sales process went down, The Apprentice was a blue-chip concept. It managed to unite the two most successful reality models of the era—twisty, scheming team competitions like Survivor and talent contests like American Idol—and then added a shameless capitalistic twist.
The first idea Silver pitched was less cynical, however: a competition to sell the most lemonade to New York pedestrians. This childlike, universal task, which wasn’t tied to any particular brand of lemonade, would become the center of the first episode. It was symbolic of the aspect of The Apprentice that was truly clever, and in its way, even idealistic, centered on a fantasy vision of capitalism as a meritocratic game, a joyful sport open to anyone—Mark Burnett’s vision of America.
In 2004, the year The Apprentice debuted, Patric Verrone, a writer for the animated series Futurama, was the secretary treasurer of the Writers Guild of America West, part of a cadre of radicals who called for more aggressive tactics, including swelling the union’s ranks by showing solidarity with writers from game shows and animated shows. Reality workers were a harder sell, he knew. The way most WGA writers saw it, the genre was the enemy—a wedge networks used to resist union demands, first in 1988, when the WGA struck for twenty-two weeks, and then again in 2001.
Yes, Trump was a phony-baloney, deep in debt, who was playing a cartoon version of himself. But that was the whole point of the reality genre: It was a guilty pleasure, grounded in what Trump (or really, his ghostwriter Tony Schwartz) had called, in The Art of the Deal, “truthful hyperbole.”
For Mike Fleiss, the creator of The Bachelor, Trump’s rise felt like an indelible stain on the genre, exposing something existentially rotten in the industry. “All that talk about the decline of Western civilization and the sign of the apocalypse? It turned out to be true,” he said.
That had always been the dark, resonant paradox of the reality genre: The less ethical a show was, the more authentic the footage it captured. The more trusting (or drunk or exhausted) the participants were, the more likely it was that they’d ultimately crack, releasing a flood of feeling that couldn’t be faked. This was most obvious on prank shows back to Candid Camera, but if you looked at things from a certain angle, all reality shows looked like prank shows.
Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006. When the iPhone debuted in 2007—a reality studio tucked in your back pocket—a new breed of self-promoters emerged, canny about the long game.
Online or off, these viewers threw themselves into spirited and sometimes surprisingly profound arguments about shows the world considered irredeemably shallow. For them, reality 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.
The most successful reality show had it all: a titillating flash of the authentic, framed by the dark glitter of the fake, like a dash of salt in dark chocolate. No taste was harder to resist.
