The New Yorker Radio Hour - Emily Nussbaum on the Beginnings of Reality TV

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

Reality television has generally got a bad rap, but Emily Nussbaum—who received a Pulitzer Prize, in 2016, for her work as The New Yorker’s TV critic—sees that the genre has its own history and craft. Nussbaum’s new book “Cue the Sun!” is a history of reality TV, and roughly half the book covers the era before “Survivor,” which is often considered the starting point of the genre. She picks three formative examples from the Before Time to discuss with David Remnick: “Candid Camera,” “An American Family,” and “Cops.” She’s not trying to get you to like reality TV, but rather, she says, “I'm trying to get you to understand it.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, reality television has often gotten a bad rap. Well, it's funny because when I originally thought about writing this book in 2003, at that time, I had watched the show The Real World on MTV. And at the time, I was caught up in watching this weird show, Big Brother, that had just started in the United States. And I suggested writing a book about this to a friend of mine, and he said, well, you better write that fast because it just seemed like a tacky trend. That's Emily Nostamp, a staff writer at The New Yorker, formerly our television critic. 20 years later, reality television is definitely here to stay, and Emily has published a new book, a history of reality TV called Q the Sun.

If you assume that reality TV was born with Survivor or the real world, she's going to surprise you. I asked Emily to share three key reality shows, and she started at the birth of television, or even before that, on radio. I mean, I think most people know the show Candid Camera. It lasted quite a while. People are very nostalgic about it. But the original version of that was Alan Fund's Candid Microphone,

which was an audience participation show, the first stunt show, incredibly important and influential, and kind of an edgy, dark, indie version of the audience participation shows. The American Broadcasting Company presents the Candid Microphone, the program that brings you the secretly recorded reactions of ordinary people to all kinds of situations.

No one ever knows when he's talking into the Candid Microphone. I feel like Candid Microphone, even before Candid Camera, is in many ways the origin of the whole genre, because nothing would exist without the innovations, some of them dark innovations, that Alan Funt came up with. Give me an example, since this is the UR reality show on television, give me an example of what Alan Fund did on candid camera that was considered entertaining. I mean, honestly, it was a very, very wide continuum of kinds of things they'd do as pranks.

With his crew who would hook up things like there were very sweet things. Like they took a mailbox and put a speaker inside it. So it seemed like the mailbox was talking to people. So people would walk down the street and the mailbox would. suddenly say something to them when they tried to put a letter in. And there was like a child who had a whole conversation with it. So there were very endearing things like that. And there were also stunts that were weirder and slightly more humiliating. Now this young fellow has already had four hamburgers without any meat. And now, you know, we want you to see a lady who

takes the record for an exciting response. Listen to this. Yes, but I won't pay a minute. I mean, me. You're handsome? No, I'm on meat in it, that's all. Look, I tell you, but don't pick me up some meat and just put it on here. Just bring the meat. You don't make me any bread. Okay.

You know what this is called? This is our special for today. You know what it's called? I give. It's called the Candid Camera Special. The Candid Camera Special. We only give it to people who are on television. A strange element of the show on television is that seeing people's faces when they were fooled

or when they were put in an awkward position was more uncomfortable than listening to them on the radio. So eventually, on candid camera, what they did was they added this thing that Funt called the reveal. And then you get sort of the third part of the prank, which is seeing the person respond to that.

You write a new book that this provides a moral escape hatch for the viewer. What do you mean? Yeah. I mean, it actually did two things I feel. One of them is that, you know, if you're watching someone be humiliated or fooled, you feel titillated, you feel guilty, you feel like a voyeur. And so when they filled the person in on the fact that they were on the stunt,

it basically was a little cathartic moment that released the viewer of that feeling of, I'm tricking somebody. To what extent did the candid camera legacy carry over to what we're seeing on TikTok and YouTube? I think it's a direct analog. Actually, I mean, there are a lot of shows that are very much like Candid Camera. Now everybody can be Alan Funt on their own phone. People are constantly recording things. And pranks are very much part of the landscape.

There's also a whole tradition of shows that came after Candid Camera like Jackass and Punkton, things like that. So he essentially created the prank show and people carried it on. But, yeah, on the Internet, like anything goes. Emily, another show that you write about, and I remember from my childhood very, very distinctly. This is in the 70s, is an American family. And it was an explosive and divisive show. Maybe explain what that show was and why it had the reaction it did. And it's even a predecessor to something like even the Kardashians.

Well, I mean, I think of it as a direct predecessor to the real world. I mean, to the whole idea of a reality soap opera. But when it was made, it was made as a documentary for PBS. It came out in 1973. It was filmed for seven months in Santa Barbara, California, and it documented the intimate life of the Loud family. Pat and Bill were the parents, and they had five kids. And they went through a divorce during the filming.

Pat asked Bill for a divorce. And their oldest son, Lance Loud, who was 19, was a gay, artistic guy who was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Why don't you get out and do something exciting and interesting? Because, number one, I really can't understand how people are successful, how people work, how people drive at something, how people get ideas, I just, I don't know. You know, I don't care.

I'm not, I, I, sometimes I think of myself as the perfect combination of non-existence, because I really can't see how other people exist other than my way of life, just living on people. It's, that is, that is a cop-out when you talk like that. And both of those things, the divorce and the openly, visibly gay child were such shocking things to have on television that the subject matter turned it into the first blockbuster reality soap opera. Everyone had an opinion about the louds. There was

tons of coverage, all sorts of articles, many of them very finger wagging, denouncing these narcissists who'd gone on television, and it turned the louds themselves into the first reality stars. There had been shows that had regular people on TV, but they'd never had this kind of startling, unnerving celebrity. Well, let's listen to you interviewing Pat Loud, who is the family matriarch, just before she died. And I want to listen to a little bit of that. Here she is talking about Craig Gilbert,

who's the creator of the series. That's at the center of the show, is the relationship between reality television, directors, producers, and the ordinary people they put on the air. All of reality television, and I would count an American TV. and family in this, is about that relationship, which is, as Pat describes, a relationship of

incredible intimacy and the potential for enormous betrayal. Well, one of the most intimate scenes, it's maybe the most famous scene, is Pat asks for a divorce on camera. This is 1973. And Pat told you that this is something that she never wanted to really do on camera. Let's hear you talking with her about that. told that I could just... What did you try to change? I said, you know, but they do.

So, Craigney. God, you know, the show only lasted one season, but how did being on the show affect the Loud family members in the years to come? The Louds themselves were very proud of the fact that despite all that had happened,

they stayed close and they were able to go on with their lives. There's a certain amount of tragedy that happened for them, but what they did in the immediate aftermath of the show was to do a lot of publicity. They were determined to take back their voice. So the main thing that happened is they became huge celebrities for a while.

And the biggest celebrity of all was Lance Loud, who is not only one of the first reality stars, but he was really the first openly gay man on television. And I spoke to many people who made later reality shows who were very influenced by an American family. One of them being John Murray, who was a young 17-year-old gay man at the time this show came out, saw Lance Loud on the air and was like, oh, my God, this visibly gay guy who is proud and confident. And, you know, John became obsessed with remaking an American family. And what he ultimately did, collaborating with Mary Alice Bunum, was make a different show, which is called The Real World, which really marked the beginning of modern reality.

This is the true story. True story. Seven strangers. pick to live in a loft and have their lives taped to find out what happens what when people stop being polite could you get the phone

and start getting real the real world but that central idea on that show that was marked by a person as just iconoclastic and unlook-awayable as Lance Loud

was the beginning of a new idea about a way a person could be a public figure and a star that they would be famous for being themselves. I'm talking with the New Yorkers, Emily No Spam, and we'll continue in a moment. Let's talk about a very different kind of reality show, something that's been running for the last 30 years, and that's Cops.

The creator, John Langley, when you spoke to him, described the show as a weird phrase, an existential variety show. Yes. What is Cops, and what did he mean by that? This is definitely Langley's perspective on his own show. I realize many listeners will disagree with him. this description. But when he created cops, it was, when he got it on the air, it was 1989. And he wanted to make what he argued was really a cinema veraite show about police work.

So the main critique of cops is obvious. The critique is that it shows mainly white cops, busting black perpetrators. That was the reaction to cops in the first season by a lot of critics and it's accurate. But I will say in the long run, of cops, that's not entirely true. They got that racial critique in season one, and then they deliberately sought out cities and neighborhoods where there would be white poor people, white drug crime, so that they could balance those numbers out. And they persisted in doing that. That doesn't mean the show can't be criticized on racial terms. There's all sorts of ways in which it can. But I don't think that that actual statistical thing is true. The bigger critique of cops

is much more about consent and about power dynamics and about the fact that the police are accompanied by camera people and inevitably that puts the people they film in an extremely vulnerable position. In the book, I actually read a memoir by one of the cops' camera people and he talks about how one of the key parts of his job was very simple. It's the same one Ellen funded, getting people to sign a release.

You have to pressure them and you have to do it in a chill way, so it feels like the right thing to do. Once you have that, you can do anything you want with the footage. All kinds of art has sociological and economic impetus for it. You know, Dickens and Dostoevsky are 900 pages long because, you know, they were serialized novels, and that was a kind of middle-class entertainment. And hence the length and certain kinds of plot devices came out of that. It seems to me that your book is telling you. Your book is me that there's an impetus for reality television, too, that's economic and comes out of circumstances that aren't purely imaginative or artistic.

This is overtly true, and it was true on radio in the audience participation shows. These shows were a budgetary tactic and a strike breaker. They were a way not to pay writers and not to pay actors, but still to be able to produce a lot of content. And that underlying motive, at least for executives, has run through the history of reality television. And it's part of the reason that every time there was a thread and strike, a bunch of unscripted shows were greenlighted.

That's what happened with cops. And part of the goal in this book is to actually humanize the industry, not by glorifying it or by overlooking the dark sides of it, but by actually treating it as a meaningful craft with a real history of its own. And so I hope people learn from this a little bit more about where your favorite shows came from. Or the shows you hate, as in your case. No, I mean, I'm dead serious.

Like, if you hate reality television, I'm trying to talk to you. Like, I'm not trying to get you to like it. I'm trying to get you to understand it. Emily Nesbaum, thanks so much. Thank you so much, David. That's New Yorker staff writer, Emily Nesbaum. And her new book is called Q The Sun. You can read her on all kinds of subjects at New Yorker.com.

And that's The New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I'm David Remnick. See you next time. The Joker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Calla Leah, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman.

With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Dekid. And we had additional help from Ursula Summer. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.