[MUSIC- Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Allison Stewart. For as long as reality TV has existed, people have been arguing that the genre is frivolous, mind-numbing, or even downright dangerous, but it has also become clear just how influential reality TV has been on American culture. Would Donald Trump have won in 2016 without The Apprentice? It's a genre that's not going anywhere, so it only makes sense that one of the smartest minds in television criticism has written about it.

Pulitzer Prize winner and New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum chronicles the history of reality TV from Candid Camera to Big Brother to The Bachelor in her new book, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV. In it, she writes, "Reality has often been treated as a substance sold under the counter, less an art form than a drug because it was forbidden, but the discomfort that has always radiated around these shows, their nosiness, their brutality, isn't an argument for looking away from them. It's a reason to look closer."

Cue the sun is out today, and tonight Emily will be speaking at the Strand Bookstore at 7:00 PM, but first, we are lucky that she is sitting right across from me in the studio. Emily, welcome to the show and happy publication day.

Emily Nussbaum: Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

Kousha Navidar: It's great to have you. I got to ask, just before the break, we had interviewed Jon Lovett, who is going to be an upcoming contestant on Survivor. What was your conversation like with him? What does it mean to you that there's a former speechwriter now who is a contestant on a reality show that you spent a lot of the book talking about?

Emily Nussbaum: Yes, absolutely. First of all, it's fascinating that he's on the show. It's also so interesting how that show has transmuted. When it started, it was this controversial, culture-destroying thing that people wrote these pieces about how it was the apocalypse. Now, it's this show that's changed a lot, both in terms of who goes on it, in terms of people's expectations of it, and in terms of it being an institution. People take it for granted that it's always existed, and now people look back on it nostalgically. I know a bunch of people who during the pandemic were watching early seasons with their kids, and the hit on the genre was always, nobody will ever want to rewatch these shows. Now it's actually like a cozy rerun kind of thing.

Kousha Navidar: In my family, it was a cozy rerun during the pandemic, interestingly enough. We're going to get to more about Survivor a little later in the interview, but right at the top, we've gotten some pushback on this show for talking about reality TV before. I'd like to start with making the case for why it's valuable to examine reality TV. Why do you think it's something so worth talking about?

Emily Nussbaum: I think it's worth talking about because not only is it a powerful industry, but at this point, the genre itself, and I define it in specific ways in the book and everything, but it's at the center of the culture. It's influenced so many things. Yes, Politics, absolutely, but also simply the way people think about themselves, the way they document their lives, the way they conduct their relationships.

I think in that sense, it's part of a bunch of junk art forms that people look down on and perceive as addictions, including television itself but like comic books, all the way back to novels, things that people think of as junky and harmful, and therefore, the only way to talk about them is to disapprove. When I wrote this book- I'm a TV critic a lot of the time, and I talk about whether I like things or don't like them, but that's not what this book is about. This book is about talking about a lesser talk about history. Where did this come from? I do think it's misunderstood. I tried in the book to tell it through the voices of the people who created it, going back decades.

Kousha Navidar: Well, there have been all kinds of moral panics about reality TV through the years. Has that been the case since the very beginning?

Emily Nussbaum: Yes, and that surprised me. When I first came up with the idea for the book, it was 2003, and the big boom post-Survivor had just been happening, and I was swept up in it. I was actually watching Big Brother stream on live, and I had this idea of, like, I'll write a book about this wild new Hollywood. When I actually got around to writing the book, I realized that that moral fervor, the excitement about it and the hostility to those shows went back to literally the '40s. I ended up writing about the origins of reality television and radio.

What really surprised me is when I read critical responses to it at the time, there were exactly the same arguments. People were like, what's happened to American culture? Why are people narcissists? Who are these weirdos spilling the beans? Also, people regarded the shows, not inaccurately, as a cheap, tawdry, budgetary tactic, a strikebreaker, a way to make stories without paying writers or actors. All those themes have continued through reality history.

On the other hand, those initial motives to make it like the titillating voyeuristic qualities to it and the cheap qualities also led to some really innovative experiments with documentary.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. I'm wondering, do you remember the first reality TV show that you watched?

Emily Nussbaum: That I watched? Well, it depends how you define it. Probably honestly, because I'm in my late 50s, everybody I talk to has a different set of references. I actually watched all those shows like Real People in the '80s that were on. The big thing for me was the first season of The Real World, because just generationally, that was so compelling to me when it went on. It was set in New York. It was people around my own age. I'd never seen anything like it. I have to say, when I interviewed all the people who were on the show, they'd never seen anything like it, and they didn't really know what they were getting into, which was a repeated motif among people who were on these shows.

Kousha Navidar: In fact, let's talk about The Real World for a second. I'm going to ask my engineer to skip a clip there because we have a clip from The Real World. Just as context for listeners, MTV has become one of the main networks pushing out reality program, and that really began with The Real World. Here's a little bit from that very first episode.

Speaker 1: I thought it was like, this is never going to happen. This is not going to happen. They can't do this to seven people. At first, I thought that they were going to put us in this little box and it was going to be a nightmare.

Speaker 2: This is the true story. True story.

Speaker 3: Of seven strangers.

Speaker 4: [chuckles] Picked to live in a loft.

Speaker 5: And have their lives taped.

Speaker 6: To find out what happens.

Speaker 4: What?

Speaker 7: When people stop being polite. Could you get the phone?

Speaker 3: And start getting real?

Speaker 1: The Real World.

Kousha Navidar: That was a little bit from the very first episode of The Real World. Emily, what was new and innovative about the real world when it first launched?

Emily Nussbaum: Well, in the book, I talk about The Real World as marking the beginning of the modern period in reality TV. I talk about reality TV and reality programming as dirty documentary, where you combine Cinéma vérité with things like game shows, soap operas and prank shows. The Real World marked the point that the soap opera thread which had come out in 1973, An American Family, which I have a chapter about as well, became modernized.

An American Family was a documentary that told the story of a family in this very close-up way, with all of the intimate things about their lives. The Real World did the same thing, but it was much more contrived situation. It invented a lot of the things that mark modern reality. It had that diverse cast where they cast seven people who would otherwise not have known one another, who were young artists from different backgrounds.

They put them in a house, and there had never been a show like that, where they artificially decorated a house, filled it with cameras and audio equipment, and then traced their lives. There's also all sorts of stuff, including that incredible credit sequence, that are unique to the show at the time, but ended up influencing everything, including this little flashbacks and all sorts of crazy, wild, tilty camera work and the editing. All that very distinctive stuff when you watch it on there, they were inventing it as it went along.

Also during that show, they created, to a large degree, the convention of a lot of the jobs of making reality TV, including the field producer. The field producer is the person who works on the show and works with the cast members, interviews them, and they created, the use of the confessional on the show, where the person's telling the story of what happened to them. All of that stuff was being made up as it went along. The Real World was a combination of genuinely documentary stuff and some interference, some manipulation, and there was a real struggle on the show about is that stuff ethical.

Kousha Navidar: Listeners, we're talking to Emily Nussbaum, who's a staff writer for the New Yorker, and her new book, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV, is out today. Today's publication day. Emily's also speaking tonight at The Strand at 7:00 PM.

We jumped ahead a little bit, talking about The Real World, but you mentioned An American Family as well. Before we go forward, I want to go back a little bit.

Emily Nussbaum: Sure.

Kousha Navidar: Before we had The Kardashian family to follow, there were the Louds. They're a wealthy California family who became the subject of this reality series that you mentioned called An American Family in the '70s, one of the more original televised versions of reality TV. Talk a little bit about that program. What were its initial aims?

Emily Nussbaum: This is one of my favorite chapters in the book. First of all, I know the Louds, if they hear this, will cringe at the comparison to the Kardashians, because they always hate that. Everyone who was involved in the show, that I interviewed for the book like the living Louds. I also talked to Pat Loud, the mother from the family who sadly died while I was writing the book, and the Raymonds who filmed it, they all regarded it not as a reality show. It was a cinema verite highbrow documentary on PBS exploring this provocative thing, which is an intimate life of a family.

When the show came out because of some of the subject matter, the parents got divorced on the air. Lance Loud, who became the star of the show, the oldest son who was visibly gay, an artist who lived in the Chelsea Hotel, the divorce and his homosexuality were such shocking things in 1973, which is when the show came out. People had seen nothing like this before.

The way I talk about it in the book is, the show was filmed as a documentary, but it was received as a reality show, which was as a moral crisis of people violating the differences between private and public who deserved to be famous. Everybody had an opinion. Everybody judged the Louds. Everybody wanted to weigh in, and it turned the Louds into the very first reality stars.

Kousha Navidar: I'm wondering. What did that celebritydom look like for the Louds?

Emily Nussbaum: For the Louds, I talk about this throughout the book, but there's a certain innocence to the period I'm covering where people genuinely didn't know what they were getting into. Grant Loud when I spoke to him, and it was complicated because he's now in his '60s, but of course, I think of him as a teenager because I've seen him on the show. He was saying, "It's hard to look back on that period and understand this, but we were doing it what felt for elevated artsy reasons to teach people about things."

Once the show came out, and they became super famous, they actually started doing a ton of press to try to tell their side of the story. This is a consistent thing. People want to seize back the control of what happened because it was very painful. A lot of the response was very cruel and very judgmental. There were vicious and often very homophobic pieces written about Lance Loud.

Unfortunately, as a lot of reality stars discover going out in public and trying to tell your side of the story often extends the cycle, because then people are like, "Why are you doing more?" People judged the Louds as looking for attention, and I think that's still the way people feel.

Kousha Navidar: I did see a clip while I was researching this from one of the Louds talking about wanting that kind of celebrity status. I think that's another thing that I see cut through Reality TV, is this search for celebritydom.

Emily Nussbaum: Absolutely.

Kousha Navidar: For you, what can we learn about An American Family in addition to things repeat themselves, but also in terms of the birth of Reality TV? Is there any precursor that we can see in An American Family that applies later on?

Emily Nussbaum: Yes. I think American family really does Mark the beginning of the show that merges documentary models with soap opera models. People received it as a real life soap opera, and they were so shocked and provoked by seeing people like themselves in all the intimacy of their lives on the air. I guess is what you're asking, like what from that show carries on?

Kousha Navidar: Carries on.

Emily Nussbaum: That's the part that does connect to me as much as the Louds, I know would not like this, but with the Bravo Shows and the Real Housewives and stuff like that, they are shows where people like to see real people as characters. When An American Family came out, because it was so new, people had a lot of confusion about how it was made. Some people thought it was scripted. Other people understood it was a documentary.

At this point, on shows that are soap opera, like shows, when people go on them, they understand that they are transforming their own personality into a character, and people are going to know them. Yes, absolutely, people go on Reality TV and always have to some degree because they want to be famous, because they want to be known, they want to go out in public, and they make that decision for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they regret it, and sometimes they embrace it.

The one person among the Louds who did embrace it was Lance Loud, because he was a real forerunner of the reality star who's a predator, naturally talented, charismatic individual who looks into the camera and wants it to see them. He was very influenced by Warhol. He'd written to Warhol literally when he was in his tweens, he wrote letters to Warhol, and that's how he saw it. At one point, I think he talked about himself as imagining himself in this Warhol movie. It's very before it's time.

Then there are lots of people that I talk about in the book who fit into this category all over the map. People like Omarosa on The Apprentice, there's a certain kind of person who when they go on the show, they are performing themselves. They know how to do it, and they're willing to do it despite the risks.

Kousha Navidar: That updated sophistication as we've seen it evolve is definitely making a difference in the genre itself. We have to take a quick break, but I want to talk more about that when we get back. We're here with Emily Nussbaum who's a staff writer for The New Yorker. The book is Cue the Sun, the Invention of Reality TV. We're going to take a quick break when we come back more about the genre today. Stay with us.

[music]

Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar, and I'm excited to be sitting down with Emily Nussbaum who's a staff writer for the New Yorker. Her new book is Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV. It's out today. Emily is also speaking tonight at The Strand at 7:00 PM.

Before the break we were talking about all of the precursors to the modern birth of the genre. You write that for a while, reality programs were seen as unique one-offs, not a whole category of television that was ripe for innovation. Why do you think it took television executives so long to figure out that there might be a whole industry here?

Emily Nussbaum: For a long time, and this was the criticism of the shows, but it was true, they were just seen as gimmicks. There are all sorts of reality shows I talk about in the book. I talk about the period when Chuck Barris had The Dating Game and The Newlywed game. That was a short brief. People regard it as a flash-in-the-pan thing where you get high ratings because it was a, what's it called a, I was going to say a festival, but it was a display for everybody. It was just like a shocking event that came, got huge ratings, and then died out.

I think part of it's because of the design of television at the point that Charlie Parsons, who created The Survivor format, was trying to sell his show. He couldn't sell it, in part because there are dramas, there are comedies, there are sports shows, there are news shows, but there was nothing like this kind of format. It took a long time for people to be able to conceive of this as something that would be an ongoing series that had any lasting value.

Kousha Navidar: You talk about The Survivor a lot, The Survivor, you talk about the show Survivor a lot in the book. You also mentioned Mark Burnett, who's one of the most influential and complicated figures in Reality TV. He's the creator and producer behind shows like Survivor and also the The Apprentice. How would you describe his TV legacy?

Emily Nussbaum: It's interesting because in this book, I write about both cast and crew, but I write a lot about the mostly guys- there were some women- who were the creators of Reality TV, and they have certain patterns. They're [unintelligible 00:17:01] larger than life, kind of mischievous, pushy entrepreneurial figures. They come from different backgrounds.

Mark was unique to me because he really was a marketer. He got into Reality TV primarily because he wanted to create a business. Initially, he was creating this adventure racing thing based on this adventure show he'd been on The Raid [unintelligible 00:17:24], but I don't think his goal was actually to create reality television. He did not create The Survivor format. The idea was invented by a British producer, Charlie Parsons, and with a team of people who came up with all the things people take for granted, like the tribes voting people out. That was actually its own invention, which I try in certain ways to celebrate in the book because I think it's a hugely influential and meaningful format everyone's tried to imitate.

Mark's part in this was that, he bought that format. He obviously produced it out the wazoo and turned it into just a blockbuster, but also he sold it to CBS. They couldn't get it on the air before that, and he sold it because he's a very savvy guy with advertising. He plugged it full of product integration in various deals. He actually cut a brilliant deal himself where he got half of the advertising revenues and he sold it to Les Moonves on the basis of, "If you put this on as a summer experiment and it literally gets zero ratings, you still lose no money." It was basically the ultimate deal.

It's slipped under the transom. You could rewrite history where he never got Survivor on the air. There had been a version of it produced in Sweden, but it could never have gotten onto American TV. I think it really would've changed history.

Kousha Navidar: The whole idea of it turning from flashes in the pan, you're talking about to this entire industry. Some of the biggest ones might not have even happened. It is this idea of Reality TV being completely misunderstood in some ways. For me, even the name Reality TV seems like a misnomer because so much of what we see on Reality TV is partially scripted, or manipulated, or edited. You talk to a lot of producers for this book. How honest did you feel like they were in the links that they went to make storylines work for what they wanted?

Emily Nussbaum: I'm sure some people didn't tell me everything, but I have to say, people were great. The sources for this book, they have great stories like juicy, the stories just from Survivor itself, I have two chapters on Survivor were fascinating because the truth is a lot of the producers are, I think legitimately proud of the accomplishments they've done. Some of them have done fairly shady things, and I feel like there were a lot of people who were pretty honest with me about that. There's a very manipulative side of this.

That mixture of fakery and realness is obviously native to the genre. I was trying to describe that in the book, but one of the best ways is by talking to the people who do it. I find there are two misunderstandings of reality. Honestly, I think there are some people who are like, "The whole thing's scripted, nothing's real, everybody's faking it." It's a way to separate yourself out and be like, "Oh, I can't get fooled." Obviously, some shows are, especially modern shows, soft scripted. I trace the development of that but that doesn't mean that there aren't actual people on it and that some of what's happening isn't authentic despite the contrivances of it.

To me, the Survivor aspect of it, and part of the reason I think it was such a lasting accomplishment is that it combined together the three major threads of reality experiments, all those gimmicks you were talking about. There was the thread of the soap opera that ran through American Family and The Real World. There were game shows and there were prank shows that went back to Candid Camera. The thing about Survivor is that it's essentially a game show that has so many prank show aspects that put such pressure on people they have to react, and that becomes like a soap opera. I think that's what inspired many things that came afterwards, both the real and the fake ones.

Kousha Navidar: It's like this trifecta, the perfect storm of reality TV show is what you're saying in some ways, right?

Emily Nussbaum: Yes, and I think it's funny because both because it was successful and because it was a pretty powerful and replicable format. Right after that I have a chapter called The Explosion. That's essentially the moment that it changes from a set of little experiments to just this vomiting out every possible show.

Kousha Navidar: Permutation, yes.

Emily Nussbaum: Yes. Suddenly there's celebrity and there's talent contests, and there's all different kinds of things. Everything gets amped up and steroided out, and some of them succeed and some of them fail, but it really was a massive gold rush.

Kousha Navidar: I thought it was interesting in the book how there are all of these permutations and you don't mention the Kardashians. Why was that?

Emily Nussbaum: That's because it goes past the point. This book runs from 1947 to around 2009. I do touch on the Kardashians because I talk about The Kardashians and the Real Housewives in the chapter on the development of Bravo and where Bravo came from. To me, those two things go together. The Kardashians are both the celebrity show and The Housewives show and a soft scripted show, but honestly, it's because I was trying to end the book at the period when the Kardashians appeared on the scene.

I think there should be another book. That's the next period and about the stuff that they presage but there are obviously, that's a tremendously influential show, partially for the show it is, which is this contrived, soft scripted show about people who are also, I assume the executive producers of the show, so they're in charge of this. Also, it's an economic model. They're marketing themselves and it's the ultimate in product integration.

Kousha Navidar: How much does the reality TV show as a genre seem to get influenced for you by the sophistication of these individuals who now want to go and appear? They are even more sophisticated than the Louds back in American family. They know that they want to be rich. They know that they can get famous from here. Is that affecting the genre for you?

Emily Nussbaum: Well, it is, but I think people can overestimate the level at which people can control what it means to be on a modern reality show. Yes, it's absolutely true that when people, for instance, go on Survivor, now they've watched Survivors, sometimes they're like PhDs in Survivor. They go on knowing all the strategies. The people I wrote about were literally, when they were on the show were like, "Are we allowed to form alliances?" "Is that unethical?" Nobody feels that anymore. When people go on The Bachelor similarly they know what The Bachelor is.

The truth is, when you go on a reality show, you might think you know what you're getting into, but you don't know very much about the structures of it and how production works. You sign a contract that has a very, very strict non-disclosure agreement, and you're not allowed to talk about what happened to you. Once you go into it, if anything really bad happens, it's forced into private arbitration.

I think that sometimes people overestimate how savvy and in control modern reality stars are. I'm not saying that some people don't go in with a clear-eyed sense of what the risks and what the benefits are and the idea of becoming an influencer and some of them succeed but I would say a larger proportion of people than you imagine go in thinking they can control it and not being able to.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. You also talk about in the final chapter of the book, The Apprentice, which I was also very interested in, which is of course what brought Donald Trump into the Homes of Americans for years. After looking at it deeply. Do you have any sense for yourself what you think of whether President Trump could have happened if it was not for The Apprentice?

Emily Nussbaum: Yes. I have a pretty clear-cut answer to that. I truly don't think that Trump would've been elected without The Apprentice. Obviously, there are many factors that led to him being elected. I think a lot of times politics writers, because they dismiss reality TV like everybody else did, didn't take that factor as seriously as they should have because that show, it's like a talent show about marketing. What that shows is it treats marketing and branding as ballroom dancing or singing on other talent shows. The big accomplishment of that show was rebranding Donald Trump. It was interesting to re-watch it, the first season is what I write about on this.

The first season is a very skillfully made show. It's right at the end of the period I'm talking about, by the point they made The Apprentice, those were real jobs. Everybody knew how to edit shows. They knew how to design all of the elements of it. It's beautifully filmed. There was a lot of money behind it comparatively, but you cannot separate that show from Trump. When I talked to people who made it, I talked to them all about how they felt at the time and how they feel now. Some of them feel understandably really guilty about what the show did for Trump but at the time, they saw it differently. He was not a potential president and a lot of them knew all of his flaws and all of his crimes, and they thought of him as a deadbeat and a clown but they thought of the show as a comedy.

Some of them told me they were surprised by how the cast felt, which was very different. The cast were business people by and large and the vast majority of them really respected Trump and wanted to work for him. I think that tension between the two sides of it is what drove the making of that first season but yes, I do feel that's Mark Burnett's responsibility.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. Yes. In the beginning of the interview, you had talked about historically how there are these criticisms of reality TV. One of them that you mentioned was a way of subverting writers and finding a way to make profitable content fast. Historically, reality TV has been seen as a way to even subvert unions especially during writer strikes like the one we saw last year. Have there been any successful movements to try to unionize reality TV producers?

Emily Nussbaum: Yes. Well, not successful with producers. Producers are largely non-unionized. In the book, I traced this real attempt in an earlier WGA strike to get scripted writers to be in solidarity with unscripted writers. People who work on reality shows do actually write stories in a lot of ways, out of a different material but it failed.

Actually to this day reality television is still on the air because it is broadly non-unionized. There have been some elements of it that are unionized. There was a more successful attempt to unionize editors under IAT, I never know how to pronounce that, sorry. [laughter]

Kousha Navidar: IATs, yes.

Emily Nussbaum: Camera operators are also more unionized. The one thing I don't really write about in the book is any attempt to unionize cast members because there was no attempt to do so until very, very recently. I actually wrote about this in a piece that I wrote for The New Yorker about the show Love Is Blind. That was about the first ripplings of an attempt to actually find some way to get rights, to get protections, to get some treatment of people on reality shows as workers.

That's never happened before. The whole period I trace in my book people genuinely weren't talking about that. Now they are and I think it is a little bit because of the Me Too movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the strikes. I think change the conversation about what people deserve when they're on a set. Reality TV is a lot of things. It's art, it's commerce, but it's also a workplace. I think that's the work people are doing now.

Kousha Navidar: What do you see as the future of reality tv? What direction do you think is going to go in?

Emily Nussbaum: I am the worst predictor of the future of television.

Kousha Navidar: Okay. [laughter].

Emily Nussbaum: I always would be asked that back when I was editing stuff about, I was, "I don't know." I always guess wrong. Literally one year, I guess two hit shows, that's it. I just can't say. People who work in reality TV, I call it reality TV in the book. They do not call it reality TV if you talk to them. They call it unscripted content. It's a much cleaned up more corporate-sounding term. I know they're under a lot of stress right now. This has been a very difficult year for people in that industry. There's a lot of pressure on people in television in general.

There's many shifts that just have to do with the industry in ways that I can't possibly get into in detail. I don't think it's going anywhere. There is a vast audience that grew up on these shows. They're passionate about them. I've talked to people while talking about the book, there are people who loathe all reality. Then there are people who it is the only thing they watch. It's really central to them. I think that that audience that loves these shows is going to continue to be out there. I think there might be a more ethical version that could be created and that is what remains to be seen.

Kousha Navidar: We don't know what's coming, but we will certainly watch it.

Emily Nussbaum: It sounds like. I agree.

Kousha Navidar: Emily Nussbaum is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her new book is Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV. It's out today. Emily's also going to be speaking tonight at The Strand at 7:00 PM. Emily, thanks for coming down hanging out with us.

Emily Nussbaum: Thank you so much for talking to me.

 

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