Find everything you log into your account
Find everything you log into your account
This is an edition of the newsletter Pulling Weeds With Chris Black, in which the columnist addresses existing cultural issues. Sign up here to have it delivered to your inbox every Thursday.
Reality TV has been a component of my life since I was a teenager, when I would hide in my parents’ basement, watch MTV, and religiously watch each and every new season of The Real World. Even then, “reality” was not a new genre; Hybrid docudrama had existed on television in one form or another since the 1970s, but I found the rawness of The Real World fascinating, rather than so-called must-have television. My love was born from there. I endured and never let go. My favorites span decades and networks: Road Rules, Flavor of Love, The Real Housewives Universe, Summerhouse, and Vanderpump Rules. (I just draw the line in The Bachelor. )
As a genre, real television is huge; It dominates our culture but also unites it, generating a certain kind of silly, low-stakes gossip that unites other people from all walks of life. Emily Nussbaum, editor of The New Yorker, probably wouldn’t share my decision with the outlet. however, he does a wonderful job of breaking it all down in his new eBook, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV. The e-book presents the genre in a tangible way, giving it the attention to detail it deserves. After reading an excerpt from The New Yorker, I had to phone Nussbaum to talk about all this. She in New York and I in Atlanta. We talked about An American Family, naivety at its core, being your own reality TV producer, Big Brother, the insecure trajectory of television, and my own touch with real TV fame in the early days.
When I saw the excerpt from his new eBook in the New Yorker, I lit up like a Christmas tree, because I’m a genuine global fanatic and have been a fan of Truth TV since it first aired. See what Truth TV has had since then. For my money, it’s the premier form of American entertainment.
I agree with that. We’re at an absolute standstill, and that’s part of the reason I wrote this book. It is for other people who hate the truth and love it, but those who hate it should act as if it is not as influential or central as it is. It’s an attempt to look at it and treat it thoughtfully because it’s like: what is this movie?”I will not be ignored. ” It is the television of truth.
It took so many forms. I know you mention The Apprentice and the ’70s show it all, An American Family. I had never heard of him, and I suppose many other people had not either.
Surely you are right; Many other people haven’t heard of it, but it’s at the center of the book, as it was the secret sauce to create the soap opera of truth and the star of truth. An American Family was an exhibition on PBS that was a documentary about Loud’s Circle of Kin, a wealthy circle of relatives from Santa Barbara, California. They were two fathers, five children, and in the series, the mother asked the father for a divorce while the cameras were there, so it happened on the air. The eldest son was Lance Loud, an incredibly culturally significant ancient figure. He was 19 years old. He was gay. He was an artist. He was very influenced by Warhol. He lived in the Chelsea Hotel.
It was surely shocking to see all those things I describe on their televisions. What I like to say about this exhibition is that it was made as a documentary, but it was seen as a demonstration of the truth. This was won through the public as a shocking display. something that other non-famous people have suddenly become famous for; you have learned all its secrets, as in a real soap opera. And the result was that the Louds themselves, who really intended to participate in what appeared to be a noble PBS documentary. . .
It looks a little different than what they got.
They have become national stars that other people hated and enjoyed and thought they knew. The e-book addresses the creation of the genre and its formats, but also addresses the creation of identities that have never existed before: the “reality TV star. “
Now there are other people who need to become real TV stars on TikTok, TV, or YouTube. It has become a desired career path. Even after the rise of truth television, other people didn’t know what they were getting into. What is going to happen now is clear. You’re going to become famous, then you’ll have products to sell, you’ll close an ebook deal. . . It’s viable if you’re willing to give it all away.
I used to think that more than I do now. The other people I write about in this eBook participated in exhibitions where there has never been a series like this before. His naivety was in a way the central detail of those exhibitions. People used to invent on the fly, and that’s not the case anymore. true. People who go on to Survivor have seen Survivor.
Yes, there are seasons. . .
But I think because this is a non-union industry where other people sign contracts with incredibly insidious and competitive NDAs that prohibit them from communicating how displays are made, a lot of other people think they know what they’re getting into, but they don’t. do not do it. t. I communicate with a lot of other people [in the book] who are satisfied with their reporting on Truth TV, but I also communicate with a lot of other people who were traumatized, and that includes other people on Love Is Blind. My article [about the Love Is Blind cast] was partly about the hard work and legal issues, but also about the mental aspect, where other people think they understand what’s ahead of them until they jump into it. I have a lot of empathy for other people on Truth TV, even the evil characters, because the concept that you can pass out and get noticed and make a living and deal with whatever comes to your mind, that’s not the case. organization of other people who can take care of it. And I have to say that Lance Loud in 1973 was one of them. He was a Warhol guy. He knew he was a star.
I read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s GQ essay on The Miz from The Real World and was fascinated. Over the years I had heard that there was essentially a manager who was up to the careers of all those people, and I wondered: how long can it last?The latter?
Long before I wrote this book, I wrote an article for Radar magazine in 2003 or 2004. There is a bar in Los Angeles called Belly that is owned by Mike Boogie. Do you know him?
Oh, of course.
I interview other people who know everything or who know nothing. But he wasn’t a big winner on Big Brother at the time. He subsequently won the series. But he owned this bar, I think with Ashton Kutcher, in Los Angeles, frequented by reality television stars, who were a new component of the Los Angeles population. But the funny thing was that it was as if they had all graduated from other universities. It was as if the survivors were Ivy League people. They were snobbish and reserved. They were on a very successful sports show, so they looked down on everyone who was on “those trashy dating shows” because The Bachelor was pretty new back then. But other people in the real world were close, and many of them were because they were teenagers when they went on this show. Their whole personality was shaped through experience and yes, they all had an agent who organized all those types of engagements. But many other people have a fantasy that you can do it. Really making a living, especially in those days, was not viable.
Now, there’s also a world, in Bravo in particular, where there’s a lot of mixing between programs. They see each other, they seem in other programs, and that will have to make the networks happy.
It’s a very different scenario now because screens have derivatives and you can transfer from one screen to the next. And thanks to social media, the nature of fame has replaced. Everyone owns the generation and other people are now their own truth. Producers. The era I’m writing about is the era of the progression of those genres, but it’s also an era where the generation continued to replace and influence the genre, like when Avid machines came along and replaced the kind of screens you can use. Just do it. But I’ve tracked down some of the first stars of truth television who tried to do the things you’re talking about. And you, Darva Conger, who was the bride in Who Wants to Marry a Billionaire?
Oh, how can I forget it?
I spoke with Darva, who was wonderful and outspoken, but after being on that show, she became the national laughingstock. She was teased a lot and humiliated, but then, in a very sensible way, she said, “I can’t do anything. “In this regard, I am known, I am going to try to make money from this. Then she appeared on the cover of Playboy, but then she did something very prescient, namely, she created what was essentially a form of life website, with Darva’s gardening tips, her kitchen stuff, and anything else that interested her as far as her home life was concerned. It was like Lance Loud. Se a few years ahead of his time because there was no infrastructure to begin with, so it just didn’t take off. Five years later, it would have been a genuine possibility.
What is your current consumption point?Will you never be able to see him again?
I became interested in writing this e-book because I am a compulsive internet watcher of the first season of Big Brother. I watched them sleep in California on my laptop, embarrassingly. So it’s not that I haven’t seen screens, but not yet a real TV fan as I know. Many other people mistakenly think that as I write this book, I am simply connecting to a Bravo IV. I interviewed a lot of other people and watched a lot of shows, and a lot of them are pretty wonderful. They are well made. Sometimes they are disturbing. But my current Truth TV viewing has definitely been compromised by knowing how sausages are made. I’ve never been a big viewer, however, I watched Love Is Blind and then wrote a research paper about it. Now, the visualization makes me much more uncomfortable.
So, where do we go from here? What will the next 10 years look like?
I said this when I was at New York Magazine, as a cultural editor and television critic: I’m very bad at predicting the future of television. But talking to other people in the industry, they are very distraught right now. In television, in general, there is so much turbulence related to the economy, to distribution, to streaming, that there are many unemployed people. I don’t know where the truth is going, but I don’t think it will ever dissolve. The era I hint at in the e-book is a series of experiments that everyone said were tricks, that they were going to die. And then Survivor comes out, and after that, the truth goes nowhere. It has become a massive industry with a well-established set of jobs. It was no longer other people making things up on the fly. And it expands to the point where there are so many other types of displays that it can’t really be narrowed down to just one thing. But no matter what happens in the future, other people will request those exhibits because they attracted an audience. They are vital to them. They are part of your relationships and friendships. They are part of their conversations.
I should mention that in the beginning I was running a band called Cartel and MTV contacted us to do a demo of the truth called Band in a Bubble.
Oh, my God.
It was an exhibition in Australia, and the label essentially said, “You have to do this,” so we did it. They built a domed bubble on the New York pier and installed webcams, and you can watch them record their album 24 hours a day. hours a day for two weeks. But the funny thing is that at the time I really liked TV, and then I learned how it worked. They said, “We order food and they only bring us alcohol. I learned that this is the way it is. “He worked on all those screens. This cannot be exclusive to us.
That’s the deal. It’s the techniques, and I’m looking to describe how they came up with those techniques.
But in one group they said: “We are together all the time. We’re not going to fight for that. ” We do this each and every night. “But on the tenth or fifteenth anniversary, some other people wrote that it was ahead of its time and they were destroyed.
Oh, that’s terrible. It was a rock band, wasn’t it?Because Truth TV is a destroyer of rock bands. Poor André from the first season of The Real World. He left that display, and everyone in his organization of fellow Gen Xers, obsessed with authenticity. , he was telling him, “You’re a sellout. You were in this weird show on MTV,” and he had a little nervous breakdown because of it. So I don’t think when you’re in a rock band it’s like that. It’s based on the concept that you’re raw and edgy, and then you show up with anything that comes across as cartoonish, like the Monkees.
The idea that they were making the album in the bubble was absolutely rigged. We already made the album and then simulated it. But when it came out, everyone said, “Well, that’s not smart because they recorded in that bubble,” and we couldn’t say, “But we didn’t!
So the producers knew you had already made this album?
They probably wouldn’t have known it was all over. And to be honest, I’m 24 years old and I’m in charge, which doesn’t make any sense either.
I think they want to relaunch the show, but they have to do it with the purity of cinéma-vérité, and they just have to involve other people and force them to make an album. Can I locate Band in a Bubble online?
I have the DVDs at my parents’ house.
I am about to approve it.
More from GQ
Connect