Something You Should Know - The Good News About Feeling Sad & What You Never Knew About Reality TV?

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

So many things can affect the way food and drinks taste. This episode begins with a look at how just one element of the ambience in a room can alter people’s perception of wine – and make cheap wine taste expensive. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091215171510.htm With all the talk of how to find happiness, you might think sadness should be avoided at all costs. Yet, you are about to hear about all the benefits of sadness, including the fact that it is a necessary and beneficial emotion. That’s according to David Huron a professor at Ohio State University and author of the book The Science of Sadness: A New Understanding of Emotion. Listen as he explains when a good cry can be helpful or hurtful – and why we cry when we are both sad and happy. After hearing this conversation you won't look at sadness quite the same as you did. (By the way...David is giving away a pdf of his book so you don’t have to buy it. Here is the link https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5772/The-Science-of-SadnessA-New-Understanding-of. If you do want a hard copy, here is the link on Amazon. (https://amzn.to/3yy8cSy) Reality TV – you either love it or hate. Where did it come from? Why is it so popular? How “real” is reality TV or is mostly faked? For a look at the fascinating history and development of reality TV, I am joined by Emily Nussbaum. She is a staff writer and former television critic for The New Yorker. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Emily is author of the book Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV (https://amzn.to/46GsiGK). Some people put butter on their bread, while others dip it in olive oil. Which is healthier? That turns out to be a tricky question. Listen as I explain why. https://www.foxnews.com/health/tanyas-tasty-tips-olive-oil-or-butter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The search for truth never ends. Introducing June's Journey, a hidden object mobile game with a captivating story. Connect with friends, explore the roaring 20s, and enjoy thrilling activities and challenges while supporting environmental causes. After seven years, the adventure continues with our immersive travels feature. Explore distant cultures and engage in exciting experiences. There's always something new to discover. Are you ready?

Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, how to make cheap wine taste expensive and all you need is a light bulb. Then the good news about sadness and what you didn't know about crying. There are some good things to say about crying, mutual crying in particular. You're never so socially connected with someone else as when you're both engaged at the same time and crying. But crying by yourself just makes people feel worse. That's what the research shows. And there's no long-term benefits from that. Also, what do you like on your bread? Butter or olive oil? And why does it matter?

And the reality of reality TV. Where did it come from? And why is it so popular? These shows are horrible was the reaction of critics, definitely. They were like, these are disgusting, tawdry, dangerous, narcissistic shows. But these shows were also enormously popular. People loved them. All this today on Something You Should Know.

This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, and welcome to what is, as of today, the latest episode of Something You Should Know. But if you're a new listener, or a relatively new listener, it's worth reminding you that there are literally hundreds of other episodes of Something You Should Know in the archives that you can easily access through the app that you're listening to this on.

Most of those episodes are very evergreen, really interesting, and I invite you, when you have some time, to just explore and see if some of the topics resonate with you and give a listen. I think you'll enjoy it. First up today, the ambient lighting in a restaurant or in a bar can actually have an effect on how your wine tastes. An experiment was done that showed that wine was rated higher in taste by participants when it was sampled in a room with red or blue ambient light than in a room with green or white light. They also said they would pay more for the very same wine when they tasted it in a red or blue lit room. It's already been proven that the color of the drink itself

influences how people taste it, but this was the first experiment that showed that just the lighting of the drink itself influences how people taste it, but this was the first experiment that showed that just the lighting of the room could have such a powerful effect on a drink's flavor. So I guess the moral of the story is, if you want to sell people cheap wine at a high price, light up the red light bulbs and everybody should be happy. And that is something you should know. Generally, I think it's safe to say that people want to be happy. And there's plenty of talk in the media about how to achieve happiness. What you don't hear a lot about is sadness.

Yet we've all felt sad, even struggled with sadness when it sometimes becomes overwhelming. And maybe, just maybe, sadness is a useful and necessary emotion that we need to understand better. Is sadness the absence of happiness? If you're sad, does that mean something's wrong with you? Is it okay to just let your sadness be, or should you try to get unsad? Are there different kinds of sadness? What's the difference between sadness, grief, and melancholy? Or are they just different words for the same thing? Here to discuss all this and reveal what I guess you would call the bright side of sadness is David Huron.

He is a professor at Ohio State University and author of the book, The Science of Sadness, A New Understanding of Emotion. Hi, David. Welcome to Something You Should Know. It's my pleasure to be able to join you, Mike. So first, why don't you tell me what sadness is from how you look at it and you study it? Because everybody's felt it, but what is it that we're feeling? Well, it's mostly a negative emotion. There are really three main sadness states and they serve different purposes. There's melancholy, which is a sort of feeling glum or blue or forlorn. We're kind of resigned and that's characterized by reflection. We tend to think

a lot and we tend to resist efforts to cheer us up. And then there's grief, and that's very much linked to weeping. So, feeling sobbing or feeling choked up. And then there's nostalgia. Nostalgia is different from melancholy and grief because melancholy and grief are mostly unpleasant, negatively valenced experiences. But most nostalgic experiences are actually a mixture of bitter sweetness, we usually say. And in fact, it's mostly positively valenced. So mostly people enjoy a bout of nostalgia. So why, since it's mostly positive, why do you lump it in with grief? Because there is a sad element to it. And the sad element is usually related to the loss of something that

was valued in the past. So it could be a lost relationship or a place that you really enjoyed, an event or an object. It's mostly relationship oriented, but you could also be nostalgic for your grandmother's peach pie or a favorite pair of shoes that you can no longer buy. And so why is it important to understand more about sadness? I mean, as I said, everybody feels it some more than others, but what is it doing? Is it doing anything for us or it just it's an emotion that comes and it goes? Oh, it's very much beneficial. It's part of living the good life, actually, is having sadness in the right circumstances. I would hasten to add, though, that like many forms of emotions, there are pathological forms of sadness.

So the pathological form of melancholy is depression, and that has no benefit at all. And there are pathological forms of weeping, for example, there's something called pseudobulbar affect, which is uncontrolled weeping. It usually happens from a stroke or from some sort of brain injury. At any rate, so first of all, it's important to distinguish the normal forms of sadness, normal forms of melancholy and grief, and the abnormal forms, such as PBA, pseudobulbar affect, or depression. But we can point to research that directly indicates the benefits of melancholy, the benefits of grief or weeping, and the benefits of nostalgia. And so what are those benefits of grief and weeping and melancholy, the benefits of grief or weeping, and the benefits of nostalgia.

And so what are those benefits of grief and weeping and melancholy? Let's start off with melancholy. Normally, people are tuned to the optimistic side. We tend to think that we're more handsome or beautiful than even our friends would deem us to be. We tend to think that we're going to live longer than other people. Everybody thinks that they're a better driver than the average. Now, optimism is generally a good thing. So nothing ventured, nothing gained. It encourages us to do all sorts of things. You might think that when we're sad, what we do is we switch these rose-tinted lenses for some sort of blue-tinted lenses. And we think, oh, I'm no good. I'm a schmuck. I can't do anything right and so on. But actually, when we're in a melancholic state, it turns out that we are our most accurate in our self-appraisals and in our thinking. And there's a huge amount of

research on this. So compared with a happy or a neutral state, melancholy promotes more detailed oriented thinking. We rely less on stereotypes. We're less biased in our judgments. Our memories are more accurate. We're less gullible. We're more patient. We're more socially attentive. We're more polite. We have a heightened sense of fairness, for example. We're more skeptical. We're better at judging riskiness. And we also tend to invite options more. So instead of just blasting ahead with a single idea, we're more willing to consider the options and we're more willing to change directions. So there are a lot of cognitive benefits to melancholy. Yeah, I guess so.

And so what about grief? Grief has very different benefits than melancholy. So melancholy is really all about changing the way we think about the world and how we're going to plan ahead to try to deal with the stress that cause us to feel sad in the first place. Grief is a very different thing. So, we can make a distinction generally in emotions between those emotions that are evident to others and those emotions that are completely private. So, when we think of emotion displays, we think of anger and, you know, smiling and disgust and so forth, things that you can clearly see. But most emotions that people experience are not visible. A person can feel lonely or jealous or bored or nostalgic, even feel in love,

not to mention feelings of hunger. These feelings are opaque. People don't see those things. So when we talk about something like weeping, the whole biological purpose and social purpose is to engage others. So our reaction to someone when we see someone crying is this enormous feeling of empathy, this enormous feelings of compassion and commiseration. And it's this response of other people around us that ultimately helps us out. So one way of thinking about it, that the difference between melancholy and grief is that when we're addressing a stress of some sort, you know, whether the stress is you've been fired from your job or your house is burned down or something like that,

and we think what resources are available to me to help me deal with this stressor? So one is our own thoughts, just thinking clearly about things and trying to strategize. And the other very important resource is the people around us. So if we can solicit their help, that can also help us deal with the stressor in many, many cases. So, melancholy is an internal state, whereas grief or weeping is really intended, it's a social response to dealing with stress. But people cry, people weep, not only because they're sad, right? People weep or cry in all sorts of circumstances, including, you know, tears of joy and so on, tears of pain, tears of laughter. So it turns out that these responses, the tearful responses, end up having the same effect on

observers as tears of sadness, tears of grief. So what they mostly do is they encourage observers to really engage us even if they're not able to help us in in the end even if it's just a hug these things can be very important to the people who are suffering the stresses well what about these tears of joy that you know like when you're watching a movie and there's some wonderful happy ending and it's actually embarrassing sometimes, I think, when you're crying at a movie. You don't want people to notice. You don't want people to engage you.

You feel kind of foolish crying. That's very good. There was a lovely study done by one of the major airlines a few years ago. You know, when people are going for a long-distance journey and they're watching a movie or something, it's often the case that in a movie there'll be a tearjerker part. And in the survey, they were interested in how their passengers responded to these. And people can be embarrassed when they're, you know, if you're sitting in the middle seat with strangers on either side and you've been brought to tears, it can be very unsettling. What was interesting was that women tended to respond by pretending that there was something caught in their eye. And men tended to respond by taking a blanket and

putting it over their head. So, there is a cost to weepingeping and the cost is a loss of social status. So it's the reason why infants and children can cry so much because they've already relatively low status. Once you reach puberty, once you engage in a lot of social interaction and status becomes important, then people really make an effort not to cry. But that's simply because of the loss of social status with regard to observers. So there are excellent reasons why you should, in many circumstances, try to mask the experience of crying. We're talking about sadness in a happy kind of way. And my guest is David Huron. He's author of the book, The Science of Sadness, A New Understanding of Emotion.

Mama, look at me. Vroom, vroom. I'm going really fast. I just got my license. Can I borrow the car, please, Mom? Kids go from zero to 18 in no time. You'll be relieved they have 24-7 roadside assistance with intact insurance. Mom, can we go to Nana's house tomorrow? Go to Jack's place today. I'll just take the car. Don't wait up, okay?

Kids go from zero to 18 in no time, don't they? At Intact Insurance, we insure your car so you can enjoy the ride. Visit Intact.ca or talk to your broker. Conditions apply. From the kitchen to the laundry room. Your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances.

Shop now, in-store, or online at bestbuy.ca. Exclusions apply. So, David, do we know why we cry when we're happy, tears of joy kind of thing? Because it is interesting that the same symptom, crying, tears, is the same for when you're really, really sad, and just the opposite when you're really, really happy. So the point of crying is not to express the feeling state that we're in, but to change the behavior of the observers. So when you think about it, here's a way to think

about emotions and their displays. If we're playing poker and I'm dealt a really nice hand, it would be foolish of me to start smiling and being gleeful in any way, because that would just tip everybody's hand as to what cards I'm holding. To the extent that emotions predict future behavior, we have a kind of radar that we're constantly trying to infer what state a person is in because it helps us predict what their behavior is going to be. But this is to the detriment of the person who's making the display. In many cases, and that's the reason why the vast majority of emotions don't have a display, is we shouldn't be communicating to everybody what it is that we're feeling, because all we're doing is telling them, giving them information about how our future behavior

might be. There's only one circumstance in which we want them to know what our future behavior might be, and that is if they respond to that in a way that's beneficial to us. So let's take an example of tears of pleasure, tears of joy. You know, the classic example here would be the weeping beauty pageant winner. You would have thought that the ones who should be weeping are all the women on the stage who didn't win. So why is it that a beauty pageant winner is crying? In particular, why don't they behave in a way like, say, a boxing champion? You could imagine a situation where a beauty pageant winner thrusts her arms into the air and says, I am the greatest.

And she turns to the other contestants and says, tough luck, suckers. Well, this would be wholly out of keeping with what it is that we expect of a beauty pageant winner. We want them to be magnanimous. We want them to be humane and reach out to other people. And so, the response of the audience to the crying is exactly the same response that we have when they're crying of grief. That is, we feel very positively disposed and want to be helpful to the person who has tears in their eyes, whether they're tears of joy or whether they're tears of grief. But I'll admit to watching a movie all by myself and getting a little teary-eyed at the end, and there is no observer. I'm not displaying anything to anybody else. That points to another thing that's important about many of these displays,

and that is the automaticity of the display. So these things are innate, and part of what testifies to that innateness is the fact that we have very difficult time trying to control them. So they will happen in situations where there's nobody around as well. So I'd like you to address, because I'm sure you've noticed, we live in a world, in a culture that is just obsessed with happiness. There are 4,000 podcasts about happiness, some best-selling books about happiness, that we all just need to cheer up and be happy.

And you've taken, like, the other road and talked about the benefits of sadness. So what do you make of all that? All of the emotions that we have exist because they're part of what makes us socially and biologically adapted. So, the negative emotions have a bad rap, but they're very important. So, let me give you an example, loneliness. So, the feeling of loneliness is uncomfortable, it's not nice, but what the feeling of loneliness does is it encourages us

to make social contact. In the long run, the feeling of loneliness is going to motivate us to make that kind of social contact and social connections and bonding with others that's going to benefit us. Or another example would be the feeling of pain. So, nobody wants to feel pain, but pain is a very useful teacher and very useful in telling us, you know, don't do that. It's avoid tissue damage. And there's a very rare condition in which people are born without pain sensors. And you might think, wow, what a great situation. Imagine you can go through life without suffering any of the slings and arrows of pain. But it turns out that people who are born without a pain sensation, they're typically dead by their mid-20s or so.

And you might think that the reason for that might be they can't feel a swollen appendix, for example, so they die from appendicitis. But actually, the main reason why they die is because of circulation problems that arise because they don't feel these little points of irritation with regard to posture. So when we're standing, every few minutes, we lean to the left or lean to the right or move our bodies in particular ways, or when we're sitting, we just change our posture every now and then. And those are important. If you don't do that, you end up pinching nerves and pinching blood vessels, and you end up with very complicated problems. And that's the main reason why people without pain sensors die. So negative emotions like loneliness, like pain, and the various forms of sadness all serve

a very useful function for people. In the right circumstances, sadness is simply part of good mental health. Yeah, well, what you just said about loneliness so rings true because people talk about the pain of loneliness that it's a motivator you don't want to feel that and the only way to not feel lonely is to not be lonely that's you got it that's right yeah negative emotions have a bad rap something that is often talked about as it relates to sadness is music and and I don't know if music can make you sad or if it just makes the sadness you have worse or what, but what makes sad music sad?

So we have to make a distinction between sad music that's sad because of the lyrics. And there are lyrics that are very sad that the musical setting is not especially sad. And then there's instrumental music that we can point to that's very sad that the musical setting is not especially sad. And then there's instrumental music that we can point to that's quite sad because it emulates the kinds of sounds that happen when a person is sad. And remember, there are two important sadness states, melancholy and grief. So in the case of melancholy, when you're in a melancholic state, you tend to speak with a lower pitched voice more quietly. You tend to mumble. There are a whole bunch of features acoustically that you can then see in music that people deem to be sad, like Samuel Barber's famous Adagio for Strings, which was played at Princess Diana's funeral.

Then the opposite of that is the grief component. And the grief component, when someone is crying, the acoustical features are very different. So then you have things that are high pitched and loud, and you hear this cracking voice and so on. And again, you can point to musical passages in which there's cracking voice or breaking voice, falsetto voice. There's a whole bunch of acoustical features that will tend to encourage listeners to hear the music as sad apart from the lyrics. So there are some objective criteria by which we can say people are likely to hear this as sad sounding, whether it's emulating grief or whether it's emulating melancholic sounds. And in many cases, the music that people judge as sad

will reveal both of those kinds of acoustical features. But not necessarily make you sad just because you're hearing it. Yeah, that's right. In the same way that when we encounter someone who is crying we don't necessarily feel grief ourselves after all the purpose of encountering somebody or being attentive to the weeping is to evoke feelings of compassion or commiseration towards that person we feel pity for them or we feel their pain. But then you could also hear a song that isn't sad at all, but you know, oh, that was our song and I miss her so much. And every time I hear it, it makes me sad, but it's not a sad song. Yeah. Now that at that point, we're talking

about nostalgia and nostalgia really has to do with linkages to feelings from past experience. And of course, it's true that you can feel that kind of sadness from any arbitrary association. It could be the happiest song in the world, but it happened at the time when you were breaking up and it has these negative associations. So that's also true. What does the research say about if you're sad and it's lasting longer than you think or you're sadder than you think you should be or you want to get out of it, what helps to alleviate sadness? Social contact. That's the most important thing. Aristotle coined this term catharsis. It's actually a pretty colorful term. It actually, in the ancient Greek, means

laxative. And he had this idea that somehow the emotions could be purged like a laxative. And that's an idea that's had legs for 2,000 years. Freud adopted it. It's an idea of the idea of purging emotions has become a key concept in psychoanalysis. And there's lots of research about that. There are some good things to say about crying. So just the crying itself, mutual crying in particular, you're never so socially connected with someone else as when you're both engaged at the same time and crying. But crying by yourself just makes people feel worse. That's what the research shows. And there's no long-term benefits from that. So the benefits of weeping really depend on the presence of other people, people who are

moved to help, even if that's nothing more than just a consoling hug. But it's really the social contact that is key to responding to these sadness states in a way that's helpful to the person who's experiencing it. That's really interesting. So a good cry isn't really any good unless somebody's with you. That's what the research shows, exactly. The research shows that crying by yourself just makes people feel worse. It's the presence of someone else.

And when you look at the reports, when people say, oh, it was so helpful for me to cry. When you look at those things, you find out that there's very likely someone else that was there. Well, this has been a unique look at an emotion that I think many of us think is one to get rid of. You know, if you're feeling sad, you want to do what you can to get through it and get over it. But there's a lot to it, and I appreciate you coming on to explain it. I've been speaking with David Huron. He is a professor at Ohio State University and author of the book The Science of Sadness, A New Understanding of Emotion. Now, you could go to Amazon and pay $50 for a copy of his book,

or you can have it for free. David is giving away PDF copies of his book to our listeners for free, and all you have to do is go to the show notes, and there is a link in the description, and you click on that link, and it'll take you to the page where you can get your free copy. Thanks for coming on and explaining all this, David. I appreciate you being here. It was my pleasure to be able to join you. Whether in the game or in life, the right coverage can make all the difference. It was my pleasure to focus on what truly matters. Find their products through banks, credit unions, and associations. Or visit SecurianCanada.ca.

Securian Canada. Insurance designed for life. This episode is brought to you by Melissa & Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving and arts and crafts for creative thinking, Melissa & Doug makes toys that help kids take on the world. Because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow. Melissa and Doug, the play is pretend, the skills are real. Look for Melissa and Doug wherever you shop for toys.

When you think about reality TV, it seems like, it feels like it's a modern invention, allowing cameras into people's lives and filming their everyday movements and conversations. And that concept has given us shows like The Kardashians and Survivor, The Biggest Loser, all the housewife shows. And now there are even TV shows about the reality shows. But despite what you might think, reality shows are not a recent invention. Reality shows go back, way back, back before television. And they have evolved into what we see today. But how we got here is fascinating. Here to explore that with me is Emily Nussbaum.

She is a staff writer and former television critic for The New Yorker, and in 2016 she won a Pulitzer Prize. She's author of a book called Cue the Sun, The Invention of Reality TV. Hi Emily, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you for having me. So I've always thought of, and I'm not a big reality TV watcher, but I've always thought of reality TV as a fairly recent invention, I think like most people, but you say no, it goes way back. It was something that went back to World War II, but it actually started with radio and it used to be called audience participation shows where they took regular people and put them onto the radio and then squeeze them to try to get confessions or surprising behavior. And these were shows like Candid Microphone, which came before Candid Camera, and also Queen for a Day, where there

were a bunch of regular women who competed for who had the worst life. And back when these things came out, your reaction, which is the reaction of like, these shows are horrible, was the reaction of critics. Definitely. They were like, these are disgusting, tawdry, dangerous, narcissistic shows. They're a fad. They're really ugly. But these shows were also enormously popular. People loved them. And I think that when we're talking about modern reality, the repercussions of those experiments are what we're talking about. They carried on for decade after decade and then exploded at the turn of the century with Survivor.

And why do you think, or maybe someone's looked into this, what's the appeal? Like you say, the critics bash them. People like me look at them and go, I don't get it. But obviously, they're so popular. Why? What is it about them? What is it about looking supposedly into the intimate details of somebody's life that makes this so addicting? First of all, I'm a person who's watched a fair amount of reality TV, so I'm not separating myself out from people who love them. I have very complicated mixed feelings about the genre, but I think the appeal is very straightforward. As you're saying, it's watching people behave in ways that are outrageous and shocking, but mostly it's about looking into a

mirror. I mean, before there were productions like this, everybody who was allowed out in public to be famous to perform was a professional, like a professional actor, professional performer. And these shows have people like the people watching. That's always been the appeal. But it depends who you're talking about the appeal for, because the appeal to network executives was fairly different. The appeal to them was very straightforward. These shows were cheap. You didn't have to pay writers. You didn't have to pay actors. This was true in the 40s. It was true every time the genre has been revived. It's essentially a strike-breaking mechanism. You can produce a lot of content without having to deal with unions,

without having to pay anyone. And this has consistently been part of the reason that these shows have been greenlighted. But I don't think that explains their broader appeal, which is something that's really powerful for people who watch them. And what I was interested when I started researching this was partially the appeal for people and partially the question of where did these come from and how are they made? Because I think that that's the part that's a real mystery, even for their biggest fans, is the question of like, who puts these shows together? What kind of art form is this? It would seem like, how do you come up with an idea and pitch that idea? So we're going to get a bunch of housewives that live in Orange County, and we're going to follow them around. And that's a show. And I said, how is that a show?

Well, okay. First of all, The Real Housewives is its own thing. The Real Housewives was come up with by a guy in Orange County who was the neighbor of a bunch of families that he was fascinated by. And he decided that he wanted to make this weird documentary. A lot of people do, I think, think of The Real Housewives and Bravo as the definition of reality television. But these shows originated a lot of the time in, you know, as with that guy who created Orange County, in one person's weird, somewhat entrepreneurial vision of a perverse documentary experiment. In the case of that guy, he was actually trying to do something like curb your enthusiasm a little bit.

That was his inspiration. But a lot of the people at the center of what I'm writing about are these kind of Barnum-like, Warhol-like hustlers, like entrepreneurial experimenters who were messing with something a little bit dangerous and a little bit morally edgy in the shows they created. So I'm talking about people like Alan Funt, who created Candid Camera, Craig Gilbert, who created the show An American Family in 1973, John Murray and Mary Ellis Bunim, who created The Real World, people at Fox like Mike Darnell and Mike Fleiss and Lisa Levinson, who helped create The Bachelor, and obviously Mark Burnett, who oversaw but did

not create Survivor and The Apprentice. So the mindset of those people when you're asking, why would somebody want to create something like this? I think it's pretty fascinating, because they were essentially pirates, and you could see them as slightly punkish outsiders, or you could see them as kind of manipulative puppeteers who were willing to use people to create stories from the material of their lives by any means necessary. So I'm trying to get a sense of, do these shows get created, is it deliberately like, hey, here's a cheap way to create a show that'll get ratings and will make money,

or is there some idea, because I remember the show Real People, which is kind of like, well, there's something appealing about seeing real people in America's Funniest Home Videos, and these are real people in America's funniest home videos. And, you know, these are real people doing things.

It's not quite so cynical, like, let's make a buck. Real People is fascinating because that was this very deliberately cornball, sweet, patriotic kind of show that came. I'm trying to remember what year it came out. Because when I write about the 80s, there was essentially a decline in direct reality stuff in the 80s, because I think people were a little traumatized by the Chuck Barrett shows of the 70s, which if anybody remembers them were like the Gong Show and the Newlywed Show and the Dating game. And people really denounced these shows as junk. So when they created, I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the name of the big TV creator who created Real People. The goal there was to create wholesome entertainment for what in a non-negative way, in a positive way, he talked about the flyover audience. So those were shows that celebrated

ordinary eccentrics in small towns. And America's Funniest Home Videos also presented itself as a heartwarming, despite all the slapstick and people falling off ladders, kind of show. And I think there's really a continuum of shows that were considered moral outrages and shows that were considered kind of beautiful, heartwarming presentations of ordinary people. But I think the 80s was this period when I think especially TV executives were eager to avoid controversy and a show like Real People really hit the spot. And that jumped right to the top of the ratings. And there were a million imitators of that show. They were all a little more controlled than the shows I'm writing about, because that was essentially

just a magazine show. You know, there wasn't anything particularly wild or pressured about just profiling people, but it definitely had an enormous appeal. Yeah. Well, there is something interesting about, contrived though it may be, of seeing real people. But I think people, well, I have a sense that the people in a lot of these reality shows, that it's very contrived modern shows. There absolutely are. It's called soft scripting. But the period that I was exploring here is the period from 1947 to 2009. And I'm not saying there wasn't fakeness in those shows. People are self-conscious. They're on camera. There's lots of different things happening.

But these shows weren't largely scripted. They might have been chopped up in editing, but they weren't actually faked. And when people talk about like, why do people go on a show like this? I mean, there were multiple different reasons. And people have always shamed people for sort of stepping out in public and doing this. But one of the things about these early shows is people genuinely didn't know what they were getting into. Like the Loud family, when they went on an American family were making a documentary, they didn't really understand what the repercussions would be. And one of the things that I found fascinating in telling this story is that there's an event that happens again and again

in the invention of early reality. And this is that the cast rebels against the producers, because the whole thing is about a sort of hidden collaboration between both sides. So in an American family in 1973, at a certain point, Pat Loud started evading the cameras when she was going through a divorce on camera. And the kids that were on the first season of The Real World literally stopped the showdown because they felt manipulated. Something similar happened in the first season of Survivor. Richard Hatch, who won Survivor, accused somebody of cheating and shut the show down. And in the first season of Big Brother in the United States, and I'm one of the few people who watched that entire season. It wasn't a popular season. But there was a crazy thing that happened

live on the live feeds where the people on the show decided the show was immoral and that the moral thing for them to do was to collaborate with one another and walk out. Now, the producers put down this rebellion, but it is a significant thing. Like it's sort of baked into the production of reality TV that there's this insoluble tension between the people behind the camera and the people on the camera. And I just want to tell one very quick story because this is a lesser known show, but there's this weird show called manhunt that it was the only example that I ever found of what seems to me to be a successful rebellion because they

made a huge mistake. This was like a bounty hunter show with John Cena in it. And they made the mistake of letting the cast stay together in a hotel for a week because of a delay. And they bonded with one another and they decided to essentially punk the show. So they became very close friends and they flirted. And then their prize money got cut in half. And so they conspired and they decided that they would just fake the show and whoever won would split the pot with the rest of the people. And they did that. So it's a very unique

situation in which the people who are in front of the cameras actually seize back the power that kind of lies with the people who create the show. I remember, and I knew people who were on the dating game, and it's not what people think it is at all in the sense that, first of all, it appears that a lot of times there was no date. The woman or the guy would say, no, I have no interest. It was just to get on television. And a lot of who got on, it was all because their agent. It wasn't the you walk in off the street and get a date with somebody. It was all contrived. Yeah, The Dating Game was a very phony show. I mean, look, different shows have different feelings. The Dating Game was created by Chuck Barris

as part of his empire in the 70s. The Dating Game was actually based on an early audience participation radio show that was called Blind Date that had the 70s. The Dating Game was actually based on an early audience participation radio show that was called Blind Date that had the same setup. It was like a wall between people. It was a World War II show where it had soldiers on one side and single women on the other, and they were called the Hunters and the Hunted. And he updated it for the late 60s and then put it in the 70s. That show, I talked to a bunch of producers for that show. I mean, they wrote the questions with the women. And a lot of the people on that show were hot Hollywood wannabes. There were a lot of sort of stars before their time. But I will say the

newlywed game, which was the offshoot that came. And again, I'm not saying that there wasn't contrivance, but the people on the Newlywed game were not actually like Hollywood celebrities like Farrah Fawcett, who were on the dating game. They were ordinary married couples. And it was a pretty shocking thing to see the show because people were kind of blurting out domestic secrets. That's part of what was creepy and shameful about the show. And it's part of what was somewhat authentic about the show. You know, the people who were on the first season of Survivor were not faking it. They were starving on a desert island and doing a bunch of competitions. So those are conditions in which it's actually pretty hard to script what you're saying to much of an extent.

So I just don't want to lump all shows together. The one thing I will add to this is that one thing I came to the conclusion of while working on this was that the faker a reality show is, the more ethical it is. I mean, it's just the weird contradiction that's baked in. If you have a bunch of people who are talking to the producer and the producer says, hey, could you guys go in the kitchen and have a big fight and then smash a glass and then walk out onto the porch and we'll film that and follow you. That's improvisation. It's a collaboration and the people who are doing it know what they're doing. If you take people and you put them into the Big Brother house and they're under enormous pressure

and then you shock them and surprise them with something, then they can't fake it. It's a different kind of thing. It's like they're being manipulated and puppeteered. So when you get authentic reactions to things, it's often under a more unethical situation. So people have to make up their own minds about what they're comfortable with, with watching a show. But this is true on even shows that seem fairly contrived, like The Bachelor say. The methods that producers use are, you know, producers work very hard to push people out of their comfort zone and have them act in ways that they would not act in if they could

control themselves. They burst into tears. They feel things they didn't expect to feel. That's just red meat for the show. I think probably the unsung heroes of a lot of these shows are the camera people, the sound people who have to follow these people around and but not become part of the show and be too obtrusive. I am obsessed with the camera operators. I'm sorry for interrupting you. I agree with you. I mean, they are the unsung heroes. Their jobs are also really hard. They're carrying around big cameras. They get shoulder injuries. And they have to develop this invisibility,

this relationship with the cast members. It's very different than filming scripted people. There's one guy I talked to, Randall Einhorn, who worked on the first season of Survivor. And he's very disgusted with reality TV. I talked to people who are very proud of their work and people who have a lot of disdain for it. And that first season was very authentic and he felt like it all got phonier later on. And he moved to scripted TV and he was one of the initial people who helped create The Office. He oversaw the development of the scripted show, The Office, which of course is sort of a satire and an imitation of a reality show. And so he trained camera operators to use the same skills. I think one show that really kind of created the mold for reality shows after that

was Candid Camera that Alan Funt created back in the, well, I don't know when he, the 60s or the 50s, and it's a long time ago, but that seemed to be, to me, like the first big reality TV show. Alan Funt was a very intense guy. He was a largely disliked workaholic person, but he was a visionary. And Candid Microphone, which was controversial on the radio, and Candid Camera, on those shows, he drove the people who worked for him and he developed all sorts of techniques to get the stunts he wanted. I had never heard of, including in, you know, there was a memoir written by a very disgruntled former producer of his. It was pretty clear in

the accounts, even the negative accounts that I heard and read these great interviews with people who worked for Funt. I don't remember them ever talking about anything being phony. Joan Rivers worked for the show for a brief time, and she really disliked Funt, and she thought the show was cruel, which was interesting because she, you know, had a high tolerance for mean humor. But she talked about something different, which is that sometimes there'd be stunts that came off really poorly, like women would cry. And those just wouldn't be cut into the final edit. The people who made that show worked hard to alleviate some of the discomfort for the viewer, not by faking things, but by incorporating new approaches. One of them, and the most important one on the TV show, was called The Reveal. And in the early TV show, they didn't have this, but they added a thing, that moment that everyone knows where Alan Funt would say, smile, you're on candid camera,

or in the middle of a stunt, he would say, no, don't worry. It's not real. There's a camera right over here. Look behind this wall, behind this tissue or whatever. And then on camera, you would see the mark for the stunt react to it. So that became the third act. And part of the reason he created that was that it was too uncomfortable for the viewer to see somebody authentically shamed or surprised. They got to see this other emotionally complicated moment where they were shocked, sometimes angry, sometimes excited. Sometimes they just laugh.

And that part of it was almost the most precious part of the stunt, was seeing them filled in. And I think people felt safer watching the show. Well, it is certainly an interesting genre of television. It's just taken off and become an industry in and of itself that clearly appeals to a lot of people. They just can't get enough of it. Emily Nussbaum has been my guest.

She is a staff writer and former television critic for The New Yorker. And she is author of the book, Cue the Sun, The Invention of Reality TV. There's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you for coming on today, Emily. Thanks, Mike. It's been great. Thank you for having me. You know, when you go to a restaurant, they'll sometimes bring bread out, and sometimes they bring butter with the bread, and sometimes they bring olive oil to dip the bread in. So is dipping bread in olive oil healthier than butter? Well, not necessarily.

While olive oil is healthier than butter, they are equally fattening per tablespoon. It's true that the fat in olive oil is considered healthier than butterfat because it has some redeeming qualities like antioxidants. But when you dip your bread in olive oil, you could likely be sopping up a lot more fat and calories than you would with a pat of butter. It seems that dippers in olive oil tend to consume twice as much oil as they would with butter ounce for ounce. And that is something you should know. Our audience continues to grow mainly because of people like you, or maybe it's you, who shares our podcast with people they know. If you would send them the link, use the share button on the app you listen to,

and just help spread the word about this podcast, it would be greatly appreciated. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love Top Ten lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for

rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed i had danielle and megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions i asked danielle what insect song is typically higher pitched and hotter temperatures and lower pitched and cooler temperatures you got this no i didn't don't believe that about a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a... Cicada. I'm crying. I'm so sorry. You win that one. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot.

Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.