Think reality TV is all fake? This critic says reality stars deserve more sympathy

The Current23:53Why reality TV stars deserve our sympathy

What makes reality TV equal parts horrifying and captivating? The right mixture of candid emotion and often exploitative producing techniques, according to TV critic Emily Nussbaum.

TV executives behind Survivor cracked the formula in the early 2000s, kicking off a "reality TV revolution," Nussbaum says. The show, in which contestants on an island have to find their own food and shelter while going head-to-head in challenges, brought out contestants' raw emotion — like when participants choked down live, wriggling beetle larvae to avoid elimination.

Viewers were both delighted and disgusted by the new format, which has only grown in the decades since Survivor first premiered.

In her new book, Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV, Nussbaum lays out the history and impact — both cultural and personal — of the genre.

She spoke with The Current's Matt Galloway about why reality stars deserve sympathy, and what the format's enduring popularity says about its viewers. Here is part of their conversation.

There are people who are thinking … shows like Survivor, Big Brother, The Bachelor, Love Island, it's just trashy, exploitative TV. Are they wrong in thinking that?

They're not wrong. This book is not a defence of reality, and it's not a condemnation of reality.

I would never deny that there's a dark side to reality, and one of the complexities of writing the book was finding the right balance where you can acknowledge all of that ugly stuff, but also talk about the meaningful reasons why people have embraced it.

And part of that, really, is seeing people like themselves on television, and the power of seeing yourself mirrored in that way.

I guess the appeal is that it offers something authentic buried in something that's fake.

Exactly. The setting is contrived, but I think that even on spectacularly artificial shows, what audiences are looking for is that little glimmer of unshakable emotion. And when you trace the history of reality, this occurs over and over again.

Survivor was a really controversial show when it came out, and that bug eating scene just appalled people. Of course, it was a massive hit as well — that was an unforgettable reaction. 

Gervase [Peterson], who was the cast member on the show who ate the bug, told me that the producers actually knew that he was frightened of caterpillars. It's something he had told them during his session with them, when he had psychological testing before.

The result that you get [is] this thing on camera that's very riveting, which is somebody's terror and courage. Across the genre you get these glimmering moments of powerful authenticity that, frankly, you can't get on a scripted show.

There are amazing characters in this book. Who is the Ayatollah of Trasharolla?

That is Chuck Barris, who's the auteur of The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game [and] The Gong Show, and was this charismatic, sinister figure. He brought those shows to Hollywood.

In the '60s and '70s, it was this strata of television creation that people were appalled by and … everyone thought they were garbage. 

Sometimes they were garbage, but they were tremendously popular. And they were also very lucrative, which was the whole point. 

What about [the show] Candid Camera?

Candid Camera is a crucial show in this history. It's the first prank show. It actually started as Candid Microphone on the radio, created by a man named Allen Funt, who was the host of the show. 

And he was also the first reality producer in the sense that he was an instigator. He would get in there and he would create an uncomfortable situation that tricked somebody, and force them into a response while they were being secretly taped.

So he invented the secret sauce of a lot of reality, which is this notion of pranking somebody and intervening into their lives, creating a sort of construct they have to respond to.

You write that Allen Funt ... has a showman's impulse for turning people's taboo desires into theatre, and a flexible attitude toward consent. How do you think those values and qualities helped shape reality TV in the years that followed?

The issue about consent is, I think, pretty central to these shows. Of course, at a certain point, it's not as though people are being secretly taped the way they were on Candid Camera, but there are other ways that you can put people under duress and get certain kinds of responses from them.

This is what field producers do, they put pressure on the people that they're interviewing. Some [tactics] are pretty shady, and other ones are just, you know, artistic producing techniques.

You can ask a person a question over and over and over again until you make them cry. You can lie to them. You can trick them. And that stuff is invisible to the audience. We just see what happens to the cast member.

These are real people, right? When they go through something like this, when they are part of a machine like this, what stands out to you about that? 

I don't think there is any sort of support for these people. And I think that's true even on contemporary reality shows. It's changed a little bit, but not significantly.

I feel like people are often not very sympathetic to people who appear in reality shows. They say, "Well, they knew what they were getting into," and they talk about their need for attention. And I really think I've become deeply sympathetic with people becoming clowns to the world.

The second person who left the first season of Big Brother in the United States was a stripper who had gone on the show — and I know this sounds crazy — almost as a kind of public therapy. And when she left, she went online and found people all over the country, all over the world, just condemning and scorning her. It was the most traumatic, toxic experience for her.

And you can say, well, maybe she should have expected that. But she also felt like she was mentally ill. She understands in retrospect that that's part of why she was cast. So I think that there are all kinds of vulnerabilities that people go into these shows with.

Sometimes producers literally seek out people who have the kind of instability that makes good drama and good TV, but leaves a lot of lasting damage.

What do you think it says about us that these shows are so popular?

There [is] something so raw about watching regular people's behaviour. I wrote about the show from 1973 called An American Family. You watched a family go through a divorce. It was the first gay man [Lance Loud] on television. It was just stuff that you could not see elsewhere. 

There's nothing wrong with wanting to see intimate stories told publicly. It's more the other parts of it — the crueler or more exploitative or more deceptive parts of it — that do raise questions [for] me. Because there are other reasons people watch as well — they want to judge people and they want to be entertained by people's humiliation.

You can't string those things apart. They're all part of the genre and I think it's worth looking at closely, specifically because of that combination of factors.