The history of reality TV, from radio roots to Trump’s triumph

By Brian Braiker

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Love it or hate it, reality TV as a genre isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

It’s also probably not going to stop being divisive anytime soon, either. From the earliest days of television — when Allen Funt’s “Candid Microphone” made the leap onto the screen to become “Candid Camera” — through “Survivor” and onto “The Apprentice” and “The Real Housewives” and the Kardashians and so on, reality TV has been decried as the end of Western civilization. It’s exploitative, it’s rude, it’s crude. It makes the wrong people famous. It manipulates its subjects and its audience.

And yet we can’t stop watching.

Somehow over the course of the past couple decades, reality TV has become an enduring genre unto itself, a cultural juggernaut: “I’m not here to make friends.” “Will you accept this rose?” “Voted off the island.” “You’re fired!” all have entered the lexicon.

This week Emily Nussbaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer for the New Yorker, joins us on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” to discuss her new book, “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV.” The book takes its title from the deeply prophetic 1998 Jim Carrey movie, “The Truman Show” — which, by the way, really holds up — and is a deeply reported, largely non-judgmental, warts-and-all history of the genre (which Nussbaum calls “dirty documentary”), and how it came to be such a dominant force. Her argument: It’s long overdue that we take seriously this thing that so many people dismiss as silly.

The following is a transcript of our conversation, which airs as an episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast,” edited for clarity. Listen in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.

“Reality TV” is a shorthand. We all sort of understand what it is. But let’s start by defining our terms, because — like pop music or jazz or whatever — there’s so many different strands of what we think of as “reality TV.” It’s not just one thing. How are you defining reality TV?
Well, that was a big issue for me actually in writing the book. When I came up with the original idea for the book, it was 2003 and it was a few years after “Survivor” had come out. There was this huge production boom, and I was interested in it because it seemed like a new modern genre. It seemed like this big explosion in Hollywood. I personally was obsessed with watching the first season of “Big Brother,” which was streaming online. To me, it felt like it was very much about the internet and modern culture and all this stuff, but by the time I got around to actually writing the book in 2020, obviously it was an established genre.

Well, you had a friend who told you, “It’s a bubble,” and if you’re going to write that in 2003, you better write that book fast because it’s not going to last.
This is why I abandoned it, partially. We were out with this friend pitching book ideas and I said, “Oh, there’s this whole thing going on in Hollywood. I’m going to go out there and write this gonzo, immersive reported book about reality production.” And he said, “Better write that fast.” I dropped it. But, when I came back to it, I still had the same idea, it felt like a modern genre. So it was only once I started doing research that I realized how far back it went. The book ended up starting in radio in the 1940s.

Which blew my mind.
And most people would not define that as reality television. So I’ll tell you what the definition that I give in the book is, — and this is how I think of it and how to distinguish it from other things that are adjacent, like news and documentaries, sports. I call it “dirty documentary.” And basically what I say is that it’s what happens when you take cinema vérité, which people think of as this elevated, fancy, elite—

The Maysles brothers.
Yeah. And then you cut it with dirty commercial powerful elements like game shows, prank shows, soap operas. You cut it into little clips. But basically you come up with some kind of format that takes cinema vérité and makes it more pressured, more predictable, and basically squeezes the participants for some kind of reaction and also makes it into something that’s serialized, that works on radio and works on television. So it’s kind of a corruption of what people think of this fancy pants pure thing, but it’s also wildly entertaining and it produces something that is a little dirty but also powerful and has this nugget of authenticity and realness buried inside it that really draws audiences and also unsettles audiences.

A lot of these shows right from the beginning made audiences feel two simultaneous things. “What is this? Who are these people? Why are they doing these embarrassing outlandish things? And why can’t I look away from it?” I mean, it’s a very powerful set of experiments. And a lot of what I trace in this book is the experimental period. It’s like the spaghetti-on-the-wall period where a bunch of crazy intense people decided to mess around with all of the models of radio and television, not necessarily for particularly upright reasons. A lot of times they were just trying to save money and not pay actors and writers, but the result was all these novel new structures.

Over time, it becomes institutionalized or formalized. But there are other fun terms of art in the book too like “emotainment” and “dramality.”
Those are not my phrases.

Yours is dirty documentary.
The thing is, all of the people who created these shows, from fairly early on, didn’t want to call it “reality TV.” Reality TV is what the media called it, and for obvious reasons, people involved in the industry generally like to call it “unscripted programming,” which is this anodyne corporate phrase. I understand it on a labor level, but it doesn’t really express how people experience these shows, which is as reality TV, which upsets people because it sounds like it’s real and they know there are fake elements to it.

You go back before formats that we would probably recognize as reality TV like “An American Family.” But even further back, “Candid Camera” is one of your earliest examples, which I didn’t realize had its roots in radio as “Candid Microphone.” Reality TV predates TV.
I am obsessed with this because I also didn’t realize it. I knew when I started working on the book that I was going to include “Candid Camera,” Allen Funt’s an important figure. He was the host and creator of the show, and that’s the creation of the prank show. But I also, like most people, didn’t know that it had been a popular and divisive radio show. It’s fascinating and you can find audio clips of it online if you look them up. And honestly, it’s so interesting.

That period in the ’40s was not where I expected to start with this book, but the more research I did, the more I realized this is not just “Candid Microphone.” There was a huge boom in programs during that time of shows that took ordinary people and put them on the radio. And what you have to understand is, the radio was the medium of the period.

Everybody listened to it. They had it in their kitchens and their bars and cars. There were all of these serialized, scripted shows where people could make good money. And then they started putting out these tawdry shows. They didn’t call them reality. They called them “audience participation radio.” There were millions of pieces in the press that basically said a series of things that took me by surprise because they were exactly how people talked about reality TV at the turn of the century. They said, “These are cheap shows. They’re ugly and cruel. They’re exploitative. They have huge high ratings. They’re a way of not paying actors. They’re a way of not paying writers. They’re strike breakers, so they’re dangerous in that way.”

“It’s the death of Western culture.”
But they also said things like, “Where are all of these people coming from that want to tell their personal business in front of the world? Who are these narcissists? What’s happening to American culture? Is it filled with a bunch of showoffs? Why are these people famous for being famous? This is embarrassing, but isn’t it amazing? This is different than anything else that’s out there.”

That moral crisis that was provoked by audience participation radio repeats over and over again throughout this book. Every time these shows come out, there are a bunch of critics that absolutely horrified but also riveted by these shows that seem simultaneously liberating and exploitative, and you just can’t separate the two things.

So I talk about, yeah, “Candid Microphone,” very important show, and “Candid Camera.” I talk about “Queen for a Day,” which was this crazy show where a group of ordinary women told stories of the unhappiness of their lives. It was a competition. Whoever had the worst life as selected by a group of live audience members clapping — there was an applause meter — and whoever won was showered in gifts. This was a very, very popular show, and these shows were shocks to the system of radio. Everybody looked down on them.

Oh, “Queen for a Day” started as radio? I know it was a TV show.
A lot of these shows started as radio, and then when television, which began as a live medium started, the natural thing was to pull from the materials that had been popular on radio.

“Queen for a Day,” it was like “The Bachelor.” It was misogynist, but also fascinating and kind of exciting confessional women’s culture that women rallied around and the culture generally looked down on because it involved the lives of women. When it was on radio, women would gather at a theater. It was like a live event you’d go to with your friends and there’d be a host on stage and they would do a live radio show. And then when it was on TV, they changed it a bit, but it was still a live audience on television. And at the beginning of it, this super smarmy host they had, he would turn right into the camera and he would go, “Would you like to be queen for a day?” So it was very much aimed at housewives fantasizing about being on the shows and winning all these prizes.

I was delighted to hear there was a radio show called the “Brooklyn Eagle Quiz on Current Events” that started in 1923 apparently.
This was a fun book to research. I interviewed more than 300 people. I tried to interview all of the major figures who created these important shows, and I was trying to tell the story through their voice, the people who made the shows, the people who starred on the shows. But also I had to self-educate about all these subjects I didn’t really know about. And yeah, the Brooklyn Eagle, I think that was essentially the invention of the quiz show and the man-on-the-street radio show.

It was pretty early if it wasn’t first.
Every new medium, there’s just a bunch of experiments where you go, “What can we do with this?” And often it involves taking ordinary people and just putting them in front of the microphone. A lot of this was about making private things public. That’s one of the things radio did. And this is what was so uncomfortable about these shows, was instead of it being official stuff — politicians or lectures or performances — it was ordinary people on the street being asked questions, being in front of a microphone, being quizzed, being put under pressure, telling embarrassing stories, being pranked, all of this kind of stuff. It was this very loose emotional material that was really influential and transformative and everything you see on reality television today that involves that same icky complex feeling of watching people under pressure, but that’s how you know that some of what’s happening is real because you’re seeing them really be surprised or shocked or sad.

Obviously, reality TV is a lot faker at this point, but there’s still this element where it’s just seeing an authentic human emotion physically expressed is catnip for people.

Which was an explicit goal of Allen Funt’s too, you point out. At least on radio, which is a very intimate medium, at least you don’t see the people. When it moves to television, suddenly you’re seeing their faces and it’s a lot less anonymous.
That’s the big thing. You could be a little famous on radio, but people wouldn’t recognize you on the street. When they moved “Candid Microphone” to television, they had to come up with a whole bunch of ways to make it more comfortable for viewers, because seeing somebody being embarrassed is very different than hearing them be embarrassed. They created that thing called the reveal, which is essentially where Allen Funt says to the person he’s pranking, “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera,” and it relieves the audience because it breaks the tension because now the person’s not being pranked, now they’re in on it.

They did a lot of different things because Allen Funt always defended his show as this very socially positive thing, but it got a lot of criticism, for good reason. People found it cruel, and it suggested a world of surveillance and people being tricked. There was a lot of writing about it that was either morally conflicted or very damning. It’s funny because a lot of these things, it’s all nostalgia [now]. When I talk to people about what I wrote this book about and I mention “Candid Camera,” they usually say something like, they’re like, “Oh, I remember watching that as a kid. That was sweeter time. That’s so different than modern reality TV.” And I’m like, “In 1947 or 1963, people were actually very upset by things about that show. It wasn’t a sweet nostalgic watch.” But Allen Funt worked very hard to put cute or also sometimes genuinely sociologically interesting things on the show and tried to make it feel less cruel, because otherwise it’d be unwatchable, and it was a very watchable show.

Moving forward to “An American Family,” that’s the first moment where something that you would recognize as reality TV. It’s a docu-series on PBS. 1973. Instant phenomenon. They basically live with the Loud family.
If “Candid Camera” is the first prank show and “Queen for a Day” is one of the early game shows, this was the first reality soap opera, but it was made in a very high-brow way as a PBS documentary about a wealthy family in Santa Barbara, California. The Louds. And the center of attention for the show is the fact that the parents on the show, Pat and Bill Loud, literally went through a divorce while they were being filmed. Pat asked Bill for a divorce while the cameras were on. And also their son, Lance Loud, was openly gay and an artist and lived in Chelsea and was this very flamboyant figure who was really shocking to TV audiences in 1973.

The thing about the show, which a lot of people listening to this probably don’t know about, but that year when that show came out, it was everywhere. It was a really shocking big social scandal. It was a show that was made as a documentary but watched as a reality show, which is to say people were very excited about it. They felt like they knew the Louds and they judged them a lot. They talked about them the way they talk about the Real Housewives and stuff like that. This turned the Louds into the first reality stars. So to me, that’s why that show is important. It doesn’t really look like modern reality TV. It looks like a documentary, but it was basically because it created the idea of a real life soap opera and because it created the idea of the reality stars.

And at the same time, as you said, it was meant to be a social experiment, it was high-minded, cinema vérité. And yet this history of manipulating the stars on these shows is also there from day one.
These are all social experiments and the people who make them all offend them as socially meaningful, but there’s often, as in many shows, including this show, tragic and dark elements of it. I’m very grateful to the subjects of this book for talking to me about things, and I’m specifically grateful to the Louds and also Alan and Susan and Raymond who filmed the show for talking to me because this is a very important show and they have different versions of the story. And that’s true throughout the book. I talked to a lot of people about real clashes.

Craig Gilbert, who was the creator of “An American Family,” died right as I started writing the book. He died at the beginning of the pandemic, which is when I started my research. He had lived in the West Village for years. And by that point, everyone involved in that show was completely estranged. It’s one of my favorite chapters, partially because I think the people in it are very interesting. I think the making of that show is very historically important, but also I just think it’s an emotionally very powerful story about the well-intentioned attempt to create this documentary that ended up being for many of the people involved a really painful fiasco. But for people who watched it, ended up being very meaningful, influential. And when you read the rest of the book, you see that a lot of other people in the book watched “An American Family” and were very influenced by it.

John Murray, who created “The Real World,” had watched that show when he was 17, and he was a young gay man who wasn’t out, and he saw Lance Loud. That was hugely influential. But he was also like, “What is this show that doesn’t have a voiceover? It almost feels like eavesdropping.” It really affected him. And there were several other people in the book who either watched that show or watched the parody movie that was made after that show.

That Albert Brooks made, yes.
The Albert Brooks movie, “Real Life,” which is a parody and sort of an attack on “An American Family.” I have to say, between “An American Family” and “Real Life,” that show and that period, they just have this lasting repercussions that pass through everything else that happens.

And then you have “The Real World,” which you just mentioned. I was pretty obsessed with the show. I was a senior in high school. That, if you were to ask most people, would mark the real beginning of modern reality TV.
That, if you ask most people our age. [Laughs]. Doing this book tour has been so great. Sometimes I talk to Boomers who are familiar with either “An American Family” or “Candid Camera” and stuff like that, “Queen for a Day.” And then I talk to younger people who don’t really know any of this older history. Maybe they know the beginning of “Survivor,” but they really know Bravo and “The Bachelor.” And then you talk to Gen X people, and Gen X people know “The Real World.” I’m that age, so I have a real soft spot to my heart for the first season of that show, the third season. It was important to me when I wrote about that show to talk to as many people as possible.

A lot of this book is about first seasons. I can’t cover every season of “Survivor.” It’s about the creation of the format. So the first season of “The Real World” was a strikingly innocent experience for a lot of the cast members. I talked to all the cast members, I talked to lots of people who were behind the camera. It’s like a really great story because among other things, the show, and this is true of several shows I write about, almost stopped dead right at the beginning because the cast members felt manipulated by the producers. And the manipulation was real, but it was at such a low level that I think most people in reality production now would be like, “What? They were upset about what?”

What they were upset about was that if anybody’s watched it, Eric, the model, he had appeared naked in this photography book. It was sort of his big break. He was in this book, “Bear Pond.” The producers decided, because nothing was happening in the house, nobody was hooking up or fighting, they decided to put the book in the house to try to spark something like a flirtation or a fight. And when the cast realized that this had been planted in the house, Eric just turned toward the camera and was like, “What is going on?” And the whole thing blew up and they literally shut down production and they all had to have this big debate. “What are we making? What kind of show is this? Is it a documentary? Is it a game show? Are we puppets? Are we cast members? Are we actors?” It was really up for grabs. And so a lot of that chapter is about the struggle while they were making the show to figure out what kind of show they were making, what kind of jobs they were doing.

You talked about “An American Family” being the real beginning of reality TV, but I actually think of “The Real World” as that, because it’s much more like a reality show, the way it’s edited and the way the characters are set up. And it was directly inspired by “An American Family.” John Murray wanted to make this kind of experimental show and collaborating with Mary Alice Bynum, they made the show, but it wasn’t easy. John Murray was exhausted at the end of that season. And a lot of the cast members, in a way that also strikes me as distinctly Gen X in a way that I’m very sympathetic with and also find, and they find often, kind of touching in retrospect, they had a very pure sense of, “Wait, what? That didn’t happen on day two that happened on day one.”

Anything that happened in that show that felt like it was manipulating the story was anathema to them. And I think when people do shows now, they can definitely be exploited and hurt, and this is a big concern for me. People are, I don’t know whether it’s more savvy or more numb or more accepting, but that’s part of the bargain you make when you go on a show like that. When they made “The Real World,” there was no show like that, so they had to make it up from scratch.

You completely anticipated my next question. There was, especially among the cast and Gen X in general, this obsession with authenticity.
Not selling out and being authentic.

Not selling out. Whereas the goal today is to sell out. That’s the goal.
I agree. And it’s funny, I remember talking to Julie from that first season of “The Real World,” and she told me among other things, that they had been given free Levi’s jeans because Levi’s was a sponsor of the show, but they didn’t understand that they were supposed to wear them. They were supposed to market them. But that was not something they were thinking of. They were young artists in New York. Some of them were particularly traumatized by this. And I was surprised Andre, who was in a rock band, Reigndance. Andre’s not even a big character that season, and I think he comes off really well. I don’t think he comes off badly at all.

He had cool hair. I remember liking his hair.
He has long hair. He was sort of made fun of her napping a lot. He’s not central to the drama that goes on in the show. When the show ended, he experienced a really bad period. He went into a tailspin, and part of that was because he was in a heavy metal band and he was hugely made fun of by other people in the music industry because they saw what MTV was doing on “The Real World” as incredibly lame and cheesy and a super sellout, and he hated seeing himself on screen. He cut his hair immediately. He broke up with his girlfriend, his band broke up. He actually changed music genres. He was really thrown by it.

I actually feel very sympathetic to this. There was no sense of what it meant to be famous in that way. And a lot of people in the book that I spoke to who were on these shows experienced this traumatic kind of reality fame where you went from being totally unrecognizable to being hugely visible and recognizable, but without any of the money or a potential career or any of the kind of protection that real celebrities have. A lot of this ends up being about the slow movement of what it means to be reality famous.

Anyone living today knows that the world is filled with people who are neither famous nor unfamous. There’s a continuum. People are influencers, people have followers online. People have a much more public presence. It’s just a different world. And a lot of what reality television did was provide this shock of unfamouses becoming a little bit famous, and then people reacting to that, and that’s part of its influence on the world.

There are countless examples of influence. One of my favorites, and probably the most meaningful is, I vividly remember season three with Pedro and Puck in San Francisco. I distinctly remember being moved by Pedro’s story. Even at the time, I felt like something remarkable was happening. And I hated Puck. Hated him. But you were supposed to.
In my opinion, it’s one of the best seasons ever of reality television. I had exactly the same experience, and I think that Pedro Zamora, who’s a Cuban American gay man from Florida who had AIDS, he went on the show in a way that was very different than the way the people on the first season of “The Real World” had had. He’d watched “The Real World.” Unlike them, he was not unprepared in the same way, and he understood that it was a platform on which for him to educate people about gayness and AIDS. But he wasn’t doing it by delivering speeches, he was doing it by being himself on screen. And anyone who watches that season of TV is really struck by how it’s an incredible story with fantastic characters and a definite hero and a villain. That’s incredible storytelling.

But the thing that people experienced from it is they felt like they knew Pedro Zamora, and tragically he died right after the show came out. During the time that he was on the show, he had an enormous influence on people. And I feel like he really did shift the political conversation through the experience of empathy and intimacy. And that was something that you could only do on a show like that, and he recognized its potential.

But I will say Puck, as dislikable as he was, is really what makes that season pop. You can’t watch a show that’s just about a bunch of varied, but essentially nice twentysomething people.

You need the tension.
It ends up being this almost some sort of symbolic fable about, what do you do if you have a group of nice people who want to get along and then you have one fucking asshole?

Chaos agent, yeah.
Picking his nose and saying horrible things and sticking his finger in the peanut butter. What do you do with that kind of housemate? And so it ends up being a story about that.

It’s funny because Judd, who was on that season, told me that he felt like the show was very soft on Puck, which I think is probably true. He was like, “Puck was a racist Nazi-ish.” He wasn’t just a mischievous figure. He said that he had a T-shirt that had guns in the shape of a swastika. Judd loves the season, but he felt like the edit of Puck was a little soft because if it really came through what kind of guy he was, it wouldn’t have been fun.

I think that that’s an element that of a lot of these shows where it’s not that what happened on that show wasn’t real. What happened on the show was real, people were authentically behaving in certain ways, but of course they knew they were on camera and editing changes things and you can adjust it. I do think when you look back on that season, it holds up as a remarkable work of storytelling in a way that would not be true on a scripted show. It relied on the fact that those were actual young people. And I think the experience of people on “The Real World” is pretty distinct anyway, because a lot of people went on the show when they were 19 or 20. That’s pretty different time to suddenly become famous.

We talked about Pedro, and he was the breakout star there, we mentioned that Lance Loud was openly gay, which was groundbreaking in 1973. The first winner of “Survivor” was gay.
Richard Hatch.

And then down the road we have RuPaul. I wonder if you can speak to the queer streak that runs through the history of reality TV.
It’s a big theme in this book. There’s a complicated thing that you can say about representation in reality TV in general because there were a lot of kinds of people who weren’t showing up on mainstream TV, who showed up on reality television, and this included the women like the working class women on “Queen for a Day” who were actually more racially varied than people on scripted TV.

There’s stuff that you can say about race, about gender, about class in terms of presentation, whether people are exploited or treated as stereotypes, whether they’re tokenized, or whether they gain a new audience. But the queer part of it is to me different. This theme ended up really running through the book because there are certain formative moments that have to do with the same thing. It’s the sight and sound of a gay man being openly gay on television. It happens again and again. There’s Lance Loud, there’s Pedro Zamora, there’s Richard Hatch. There’s important stuff on Bravo, like “Queer Eye” and stuff like that, and “Project Runway.” There are other examples. There’s Norm who’s on the first season of The Real World as well. And a lot of the creators of reality shows are also gay, not all of them obviously, but a significant enough portion of them that I really started thinking, “What is it about the genre? Is there’s something queer about the genre?” This doesn’t apply to every show. It probably doesn’t apply to “Cops.”

I was just going to say, “not ‘Cops’,” yeah. [Laughs.]
There’s something about the divide, especially before people come out, between authentic behavior and performance, the idea of being read as gay and the excitement of there being somebody on television who was courageous enough to be openly gay. This was transformative to TV, but people also I think found it fascinating and weirdly entertaining in both good and bad ways. There’s a camp element to a lot of this.

I find it overall positive because it really expanded the representation of gay people in general, but specifically of gay men. And Richard Hatch won the first season of “Survivor” during a period when there were very few gay people on television. And he wasn’t the hero of that show. He’s like a cold, weird guy. But he also wasn’t a stereotype. He’s a weird person. He was a corporate consultant who was from Rhode Island who was really good at fishing. He was middle-aged. He had a big belly, he had an adopted son. There was a lot of stuff that just broke up what people’s stereotypes on television of what some stereotypical gay man would be. He was just too idiosyncratic.

And while a lot of people don’t know this, there were two other gay cast members on the first season of “Survivor.” And honestly, I think if they had been out on the show, it would’ve made that show even more evocative in terms of showing the range and variety of gay people in the world. And the other two people who were gay on that show were women. It was Sonia, I think she was the first person—

First to go.
She’s an older woman who was a breast cancer survivor who unfortunately died recently, but we did a wonderful interview. I could have quoted her forever. She’s great. But she was a lesbian and she ended up not being out on the show for complicated reasons, personally because she left early. But she did talk about her sexuality on the show. And then Ramona, who was in her 30s. She was one of the two Black people on the show, and she’s bisexual. She was a chemist. And she also left relatively early. So that show actually had three gay characters on it.

It’s a high percentage.
Before a lot of other breakthroughs for representation, reality television had a place for gay people. It’s a complicated subject to discuss. Somebody could write something separate only on that. But I was also very interested in the fact that John Murray is gay, and I think that’s part of what he was doing with “The Real World” and what he was thinking about in terms of representation and authenticity on television. And so is obviously RuPaul, but also Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, who are the partners who ended up producing that show. They talked a lot to me about the queerness and carnival quality of reality.

You have an interesting line in the Bravo chapter about the gentrification of the genre where first come the gays, then come the fancy ladies.
That is how Bravo works. The thing is what people don’t realize about Bravo, in the world where a lot of people think of as Bravo as reality television, people who watch Bravo are not necessarily interested in other reality shows. To them, that is the Bravo universe. It began as a weird high art cable channel. And then what happened is to a complicated series of events, they bought the show that was then called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” It was created by another major gay reality showrunner. That show was a show that had five gay guys who made over a straight guy. And it was a big, big breakthrough success. And it was very exciting for people because it was a show that treated gay men who were artisans, who were fashion people and who did design and food stuff as superheroes, like fairy godmothers, godfathers on the show.

And it was interesting that a couple of them weren’t even out when the show debuted. That’s nuts.
Yes, it was a crazy thing. Three people out of the five were not out to their families when “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” came out. And I always ask people this as a thing when I’m talking about the show, where, “Guess which three guys this was?” And then they always, at a certain point they’re like, “Wait. Not Carson.” Because Carson, who was the very hilarious, flamboyant blonde guy who’s maintained a career in some reality shows and stuff, and he was the fashion guy on the show. To a lot of people, and I think Carson would say this too, he seems obviously gay. But in his family, even though he had this big fashion career for Ralph Lauren and was traveling around the world, he had to go home and talk to his parents before he was on the cover of TV Guide on a show called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”

But he said that it actually ended up being a great thing for him because it made his coming out into a celebration. His coming out as gay overlapped with him becoming famous and successful. And so his mother could be proud of him and it eased the way, but it was just a very different period in terms of public gay identity. And that show, I think, had a big impact. But so did “Project Runway,” which was another big show on Bravo. And for a while, that’s what Bravo was.

So the Housewives came later, and they’re not a huge presence in my book, but they’re what that network developed into. But Queer Eye started it all because the head of Bravo basically took Queer Eye and was like, “This is our one successful show. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to make a network that’s going to be for gay men and straight women who are urban consumers,” and she called them the affluencers. “And we’re going to take every element of Queer Eye and we’re going to run it through. So we’re going to have a fashion set, we’re going to have food, all of these different things.” And that’s how she set out to program the network. What you see on Bravo is the end result of that, which is, as you say, a gentrified form of a genre that had been largely thought of as grubby and a little low rent.

And now it’s Andy Cohen’s empire.
Yes.

Going back to “Survivor,” I was agog at how completely slapdash and frankly dangerous the first season was. They arrive and the crew doesn’t have anywhere to sleep, which blew my mind.
I love that story of this wonderful cameraman producer on the first season of “Survivor.” He lands on the beach and he’s so excited because some people were not excited to make the show, but there were a subset of people who were like, “This is going to be something big.” They got it, and he was one of those. And when he landed and everybody was getting off the boats and vomiting and falling all over the place, he was like, “This is it. This is wild and uncontrolled. I love it.” He’s filming it and then he calls the other producers on the other side of the island and he says, “Okay, we’re done filming. Where should we sleep?” And they were like, “Sleep in the tents,” or something. And he was like, “What tents?”

“What tents?!”
And there was nothing set up, and so they had to sleep on the beach with snakes and rats literally slithering over them and their extremely expensive camera equipment. It’s a great story. I have a whole chapter on that first season. The budget was lower, it changed in later seasons. People who’ve worked on later seasons of “Survivor,” the crew was not starving. The cast is not starving either because it doesn’t really make good TV. It’s funny because it’s not like that was the first time “Survivor” had been produced. It’s originally a British show.

It has its roots also in radio — in Scotland of all places.
Everything has its roots in radio. So I always knew when I started writing the book that Mark Burnett had not created “Survivor.” I knew that a British producer named Charlie Parsons had helped invent the format. And I knew that it had been first created there and produced in Sweden as “Expedition Robinson.” So I knew there was a long history before the American version of it.

What I didn’t realize was, originally, the version came from a Scottish radio show where it was a big scandal. So the basic element of this is that there was a Scottish radio show on which they decided to send a bunch of people into the wilderness carrying nothing but a book with survival tips. And then they would call in on the phone every day to say how things had gone. And then one day they called in and they were like, “We had to kill a goat with our bare hands.” And this was this very big hit on this radio show. It became a huge national scandal to the point that there were literally parliament debates about animal cruelty and changing the law. And then it turned out that that was actually somewhat of a hoax. A farmer had actually killed the goat.

Anyway, I know this is a long insane story, but the point is, this crazy experimental radio show, an assistant producer from that show then left that show and moved to London where he got a job with Charlie Parson on his own crazy show, and he pitched this idea. He said, “We did this weird thing.” They ended up doing a different version of it in Tahiti. There were a lot of experiments and strange European background to this show before it eventually became a hit in the United States that at a certain point everyone thought of as extremely American.

When I started writing this book, I was only mildly interested in “Survivor.” It was sort of a hit mainstream reality show, and it wasn’t really my thing. By the time I finished the research, I was like, “’Survivor’ is one of the most important cultural creations in history.” It’s not that I love the show. It’s that the creation of the format, which as I point out in the book, it’s a game show that functions like a prank show and produces a soap opera. That thing, which had never existed before, where you have those teams and they have these challenges and they vote each other off, and then there are all these contrasting characters and they lie, people take it for granted now. They either think it’s good or bad, but it feels like it’s always been here. People had to invent that.

It gave us “The Bachelor,” it gave us “Love Island.”
Everything jumps off that. People were just trying to make the next “Survivor,” and a volcano exploded and a lot of hideous shows poured out of it. Everybody just started messing with those parts and trying to create the next big thing. And this went on for years and years and years. But “Survivor” is still around. And it’s so funny because when it came out, it was just as controversial as “Candid Microphone” was at the beginning, “American Family.” In certain ways, “The Real World” bothered people as well. And when “Survivor” came out, there were lots of pieces that said, “This is going to destroy the world. It’s the apocalypse. People are being forced to eat bugs.” And now, how do people think of “Survivor?” When I was writing this book, it was clear to me that it had become a nostalgic favorite that people watch with their teenage kids, and they watch the old seasons. It’s nuts.

I’m not a huge connoisseur. I never really got into “Survivor,” but I did watch a few episodes of the season with Mike White, which is really fun.
I love that Mike White went on that show.

Love it. He had already done “School of Rock.” He was established. And he’s like, “I love ‘Survivor.’ I’m going to go on it.” Pre-“White Lotus,” obviously.
Mike White doesn’t really fit into the book because by the time he went on to “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race,” it was after the period that I’m writing about. But I kind of wish I had interviewed him because I myself swing back and forth. Depending on who I’m talking about, I could tell you the strongest case against reality television and I could also defend it. But I have to say he is one of the smartest defenders of reality and somebody who really knows what he’s talking about. And obviously, he’s an artistic genius. But he went on the show and he got why it was meaningful and fun to be a reality star.

You should have him write the foreword to your paperback edition. There’s so much ground we can cover. You mentioned “Cops.” There’s “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Both came out the same year. They both represent strains of slapstick and violence and capturing some kind of real moments.
And importantly, they both came out because there was an impending strike.

That was my next point, was that these are cheap to make. They bust the unions, they get around the strikes. “Survivor” is another example of a show that benefited from a strike. The economics of this are also really interesting.
I always feel like I want to mention that because the fact that it’s a largely non-unionized industry that a lot of people within it are really exploited and mistreated, poorly paid, and there’s no guidance over it, and this goes for both cast and crew, is extremely important. But the contradiction of the book is that sometimes under these terrible circumstances, people still make interesting things.

And when you were talking about how bad the conditions were on the first season of “Survivor,” whenever I talk to people from the show, it’s one of those weird things where they were proud of having created the show under such bad conditions. It’s not that they thought the conditions were fair or good or anything, but they were like, “Look what we did.”

Sometimes ugly conditions create a culture of people who work on the show who have a real chip on their shoulder. A lot of people get into, and still get into, reality production is because it’s accessible. In regular Hollywood, you sometimes have to have a connection. You have to be rich, you have to be related to somebody. A lot of people get into reality TV because they want to get work in Hollywood, and this is a route in. And so as a result, there’s a very scrappy community of people who work in it, and they have very different attitudes toward the work they do. Some people will really defend it, and some people are disgusted by it. Some people are proud of the work they did, but then reject it. There was a camera guy on “Survivor” who was very proud of his work, but he doesn’t like reality TV, and he went on to become the head camera director guy on “The Office.”

Which is a reality-esque comedy, or takes its cues from it.
Exactly.

Do you want to get into the piece at all that you wrote recently about unfair legal and labor conditions? Because you sort of alluded to it on reality shows. “Love is Blind.” There are punitive NDAs, general ethical shadiness across the board. Do you think the genre is in a time of reckoning or is it sort of the same as it ever was?
I can only hope so, from your mouth to God’s ears. When I was writing this book, it was clear that it’s many different things like a lot of television. There’s technological change, there’s artistic change, there’s cultural subjects, but it’s also a workplace. And there’s a labor question that runs through the book, but most of it has to do with the crew.

During the time that I was writing this book, nobody was talking about labor conditions for cast members. I talk about psychological damage for cast members, but not really about the idea that there should be any kind of organizing for cast members. Around the time I was finishing the book, all of these things started happening. And there’s been much more conversation about a labor movement and a legal reckoning for reality shows. I think this is great. So after I finished the book, my wonderful editor at the New Yorker assigned me to write about a series of lawsuits going on with the show “Love Is Blind.” I don’t watch a lot of reality TV, but I had actually watched “Love Is Blind” and really enjoyed it. I have to say now I have trouble watching the show.

Harder to watch now.
That’s a different kind of piece. The book is a reported book about the creation of the genre. This was an investigative piece in which I was writing about these lawsuits and actually trying to expose stuff that the company wants to keep undercover.

The essence of it is about the very beginnings of a movement for cast members that says they are also doing a job and they should have some kind of protection. I don’t know whether this takes the form of a labor thing like a union for people who work for Bravo or whether it takes the form of legal change, laws governing how people can be treated.
When I was writing that piece, I became inflamed with how wrong and unfair the conditions are because the one piece of naivety I think I carried over when I wrote the book — because the book is not about what’s going on now — I was like, “Well, to a certain extent, when people become reality stars now there is an economy for them. They may not get paid a lot, but they can become an influencer online. They can jump from show to show.” And I assumed because reality TV is so popular that although people still got hurt, that there were some level of greater savvy about it.

I knew they signed these awful contracts, but that piece made me much more aware of the fact that when you sign onto a reality show, you sign a contract that should not be legal, that basically has such a strong non-disclosure agreement that it says that you can’t say anything about the show without the agreement of the people who are your bosses. So you can’t talk about your experience, you can’t complain about ways in which they misrepresented you, but you also can’t even describe how it was made. And if you’re really exploited or abused, you’re pushed into private arbitration. So that’s what a lot of the activism that’s going on now is about.

One of the main things I felt coming out of that piece, and this applies to both the book and the piece, is that I want people who watch reality television to be deeply educated about how it’s made, both because when you’re interested in something and love it, you should know something about the craft of it, but also because your loyalty should be with the people who work on the show, including the cast members. It shouldn’t be with the people who create the show. It should be with the people who are making the thing that you love, and you should support their rights, because I actually feel like the audience has to change their attitude on this in order for these things to make progress.

Would Donald Trump have been elected president if it were not for “The Apprentice?”
No. He would not have been elected president if it was not for “The Apprentice.” I actually don’t even think it’s an ambiguous statement. I know some people think that’s a subject of debate, but you and I both remember who Donald Trump was before “The Apprentice.” Donald Trump was a formerly famous failed businessman in New York. He’d gone bankrupt multiple times and he had become sort of a national joke and he appeared on sitcoms doing a cartoon version of himself. Some people liked him, but he was not somebody that people wanted to elect president. And then he made “The Apprentice,” and that totally rebranded him. And that’s what “The Apprentice” was about. The first season I actually think is a good season of reality TV in a lot of ways, but you can’t separate it from what it did, which was take a failed product and polish it up and rebranded and sell it to the world.

Lipstick on a pig.
A lot of the people who made the show were not quite aware of what they were doing, but they did know who Donald Trump was and they knew that the guy who comes across on the air was not the real guy who is a corrupt person. It’s weird to have ended the book on that place, given what’s going on now. It was not clear that Trump was going to be running or that we were going to be facing the election coming up so fast right now. I didn’t want the whole book to be about Trump.

The reason I ended it there is because, “The Apprentice,” Trump aside, marks the point at which the reality industry is a mature, powerful industry, and it also is itself an innovative moment because it takes the competition shows like “Survivor,” with teams and challenges, and combines them with talent shows like “American Idol” and “Project Runway.” So basically, it’s a competition show where people compete over talent, and the talent is marketing. And so it’s a show about advertising and it portrays Wall Street and marketing as joyous and creative as ballroom dancing.

It’s almost a utopian version of Wall Street where half of the people are women and it’s actually relatively diverse and everybody is doing these kinds of fun projects like selling lemonade and stuff like that. There’s a lot about that show, even leaving Trump aside, that’s kind of a fascinating development. And in the book I overlap it with the failure of the labor attempt to unionize reality producers, which remains a failure. Reality producers are not unionized. It’s an important project without Trump, but it also marks perhaps the most notable moment that the reality industry showed, not only that it wasn’t going away, but that it would leave a lasting imprint on the world, which is that it elected a president, and then he proceeded to govern using a lot of the tools of reality shows.

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.