Reality TV is experiencing some growing pains. During last year’s WGA and SAG strike, the former The Real Housewives of New York City Star Bethenny Frankel has ignited an industry conversation about the lack of protection and fair pay for reality performers. Since then, Bravo and its network spokesman Andy Cohen have been hit with a series of lawsuits alleging discrimination and sexual harassment. At the same time, Netflix has seen its fair share of worrying complaints surrounding it love is blind The latest report of franchise misconduct comes from a New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaumwho spoke to former cast members about the dating competition’s alleged toxic workplace and manipulative production techniques.
However, in his new book, Nussbaum isn’t really concerned with opining on these issues — or finding solutions to them. About the sun! The invention of reality TV. When I asked him if he felt reality shows could be made with a moral conscience, he bluntly replied, “I’m not in the industry, so my answer is, I don’t care.”
She followed up by saying that she feels reality stars are “very vulnerable” and deserve fair compensation. But unlike his Pulitzer Prize-winning book about scripted TV, I like to see, his latest book is certainly not a work of criticism. Rather, he set out to explore the concept of “realism as craft”. Although the genre is more popular than ever, what goes into the process of developing a show, finding talent and creating new cinematic techniques is generally taken for granted. with Cue the Sun!He credits the genre with the same level of creativity we usually attribute to filmmaking and music writing.
“The goal of this book was not to say ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ on reality TV,” Nussbaum said. “It was tried to be told through human voices on both sides of the camera. It is a story of many experiments. It’s about people inventing jobs that didn’t exist.”
in that regard, Cue the Sun! An essential text to understand how reality TV – or “dirty documentaries” as Nussbaum calls it – reached its current tipping point. The nearly 400-page book includes interviews with former reality television contestants, producers, editors and assistants. It began in the 1940s and culminated in a truly culture-changing program in the early 2000s, an exciting chronicle of the low-budget, “guilty pleasure” genre. Apprentice. what Cue the sun! Ultimate expression of the paradoxical and uncomfortable nature of reality TV, it’s a boundary-pushing artform that often relies on a lot of nastiness to keep the wheels turning.
The most exciting chapter in Nussbaum’s book focuses on the lore of the long-running CBS hit to survive, beginning with its strange beginnings as a Scottish radio experiment. It inspired the controversial Swedish television show Expedition: Robinson, which premiered in 1997 and raised serious ethical questions after the series’ first eliminated contestant committed suicide. Discouraged by this incident, producer Mark Barnett brought the series to America in 2000. to survive.
“I wasn’t interested in that to survive when I started the book,” says Nussbaum. “But when I finished writing about it, I was convinced that to survive The format was an invention of the telephone or car level.”
It was several years after its arrival to survive That Nussbaum was inspired to write a book. In 2003, he began to feel that reality TV was becoming its own movement as the new Hollywood era.
“I discovered that reality TV had its roots in radio as far back as World War II,” she says. “Already there was an explosion of programming involving regular people and the moral outrage that always accompanied it.”
Those programs included radio shows candid microphone, which premiered in 1947 and its television equivalent candid camera, which aired the following year. Both series were created and hosted by prankster Allen Funt. His elaborate techniques on forgotten subjects using hidden cameras predate the work of “real writers” such as Nathan Fielder and Sacha Baron Cohen.
Like a modern docu-comedy though Rehearsal And Jury duty Described as the experimental “prestige” that takes on the unscripted genre, Nussbaum presents these types of shows as the purest form of reality TV, a style that complicated it before viewers demanded salaciousness and melodrama.
He draws similar parallels between 60s game shows Queen for a day and the 1970s PBS docuseries An American Family such as with modern programs real housewives And Keeping up with the Kardashians. Both shows gave TV its first taste of melodramatic, slice-of-life reality programming. on Queen for a day, the women would essentially compete to win prizes like household appliances A group of women surrounding the image of host Jack Bailey trade — and often, exaggerate — reminders of their personal plight for audience sympathy. real housewives reconciliation
Nussbaum writes that producer involvement in the creation of this unscripted soap opera can be traced directly to PBS. an american family, which follows the upper-middle-class Loud family. On paper, the Californian suburbs represented the American Dream, until the show revealed some cracks in their family portrait, culminating in the divorce of the central couple, Bill and Pat Loud. What was originally designed as an advanced, experimental documentary by filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond quickly became tainted by creator Craig Gilbert, who meddled with the subjects of the show and edited footage to make interactions appear far more salacious than they actually were.
Nussbaum analyzes the later years of TV when documentaries became “dirty”, as reality shows proved cheaper and easier to produce. In various cases, they have served as Rating generator during network crisis. Nussbaum’s definition of reality TV in the ’90s — “cinema verite filmmaking laced with commercial contaminants, like street drugs, to lower prices and intensify effects” — is extremely accurate. The “street drug” quality is particularly evident in a chapter about Fox in the late ’90s, which broadcast fake journalism. Alien autopsy and lazily packaged clip shows, most famously the police.
When it comes to manipulating facts for an “intense” effect, though, unmarried Suffrage reigns supreme. Since its premiere in 2002, the competition show has become notorious for its twisted production techniques. “I could find the moment when tools started to be used to create more imaginative, more extreme distortions of what happened on camera,” says Nussbaum. “It had a lot to do with it [the newly available] technology,” she says.
One of these techniques is the “Frankenbite,” which involves deconstructing a quote and stitching it together to create a new, unspoken soundbite. Book chapters unmarried Also explores the common practice of recording participants without their knowledge – otherwise known as “hot mics” – taking quotes out of context and pressuring people to provide usable quotes.
In the book, season one contestant Rhonda Rittenhouse recalls being badgered to the point of tears by producers about her reasoning for coming on the show. After several rounds of questioning, she finally said, “I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to meet Alex. [Michel]” The question of whether a contestant was “there for the right reasons” eventually became a motto for the franchise, as well as subsequent dating competitions, e.g. love is blind.
An interesting part of that chapter is an interview with its former assistant Ben Hatta unmarriedIts creator is Mike Fleiss. Although his former colleague, producer Sarah Shapiro, would go on to produce the Lifetime series unreal based on unmarriedIts corrupt practices, Hatta told Nussbaum, he was not interested in reforming the reality. Indeed, he saw it as “inseparable from – and indeed, defined by – poor working conditions”.
“He was basically like, ‘I don’t want to change it because the whole genre is going to disappear,'” Nussboom said. “I don’t think it’s crazy. Because the truth is, shows are greenlit because they’re profitable. And the reason they’re profitable is because the people who make them, on either side of the camera, do nothing.”
Today, we see the effects of being on a reality TV show as many of its stars describe and gloss over their own lives in a completely unauthentic way. Arguably, its most damaging effect is the way the people making these shows have come to accept a twisted moral code in order to create the best product.
“People really bond over producing something that makes most of the outside world jaw-dropping because it’s so deceptive, manipulative and unethical,” says Nussbaum. “But the truth is, if you work hard with a team that encourages you to do these things, I think it’s easy to start seeing them as normal.”
While network executives and producers continue to fight for the status quo, former and current reality stars are boldly speaking out about what should and shouldn’t be tolerated in the workplace. A unified code of conduct, let alone a union for reality stars, has yet to be established. For now, though, fans can at least sense that reality TV is being taken seriously as an art form, most recently in Nussbaum’s work. Whether that change in perception will result in a better workplace remains to be seen.
“That pearl-clutching, finger-pointing, outrage, can’t-look-away quality is embedded in reality TV,” says Nussbaum. “That’s what drives it and often makes it popular.”
