It's interesting. The first reality TV shows were referred to as audience participation shows.

Great. Thank you and welcome to what we think would be a very colorful and a very special edition of Queen for a Day. By the way, these are real...

They featured everyday people put in vulnerable or emotionally revealing situations.

Why don't you tell us what you want and why? And it's a good thing?

I want a replacement for myself for two weeks.

Yeah...

This show, "Queen for a Day," was one of them. It started as a radio show, but by the late 50s and early 60s, it was a full fledged studio game show hosted by an ex vaudeville performer, Jack Bailey.

Number two is Mrs. Claudia Hall, who had to go to the hospital and be in bed for two weeks. She'd like a replacement for herself with seven children. Your applause for number two...

Women competed for the sympathy of a live audience, sharing their problems and asking for the help they needed to solve it. The, uhh, "winner" was determined by audience applause.

Number four, Mrs. Madison. Mrs. Roma Madison. Her husband and one son has asthma very badly, and she would like a dehumidifier for their home. Number four...

There was definitely a sense that this was garbage.

When it comes to reality TV, the criticism from back in the day sounds awfully familiar.

People were like, "these people are narcissists. Why are they spilling their dirty laundry in public? What does this say about the US population that this show would be popular?" And there was a whole bunch of these shows, and they produced exactly that same fervor and horror, and that drove the ratings as much as anything else.

These days, reality television is a sprawling industry of pimple poppers, amazing races, the broken hearted, docusoaps of worlds above and below deck, and so many housewives –?people willing to share the good and the bad of their lives with an audience that, by design, is meant to judge them for it. What's that about? I'll ask Pulitzer Prize winning New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum. She has a new book with some answers. I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment. First off, I like reality TV and so does Emily Nussbaum.

The reason these reality programs and formats were so titillating and fascinating is that they were designed to put people under pressure enough that they would say something that felt very real. They would show an emotion that felt real. So even a show like Queen for a Day, which had a lot of contrivance to it, there was something about the facial expressions of the women on the show that was really compelling and magnetic, and it was about seeing their own feelings of shame, pride, guardedness, that's stuff that even on a really great scripted show, you don't get to see. And I think that that is the part of the tradition of reality television that still draws people to it.

Her new book is called Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV. And we're both great fans of MTV's The Real World, which launched in 1992.

This is the true story. True story. Of seven strangers picked to live in a loft. And have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite – could you get the phone? – and start getting real. The Real World.

It was the blueprint for the genre as we know it.

'Well, the creators of The Real World are Jon Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim, and they were a team that had been working for several years to try to do shows that combined, documentary with storytelling. And Jon Murray came from a news background, and Mary-Ellis Bunim came from a soap opera background. Like she had for several decades been really skilled at producing soap operas, and she knew all about the rhythms and beats of those kinds of stories. And, you know, soap operas themselves are so fascinating because they are really the secret sauce of television. They're the origin of serialized storytelling, where it's not just one episode after another, but it changes. Anyway, they teamed up and combined forces. The other thing to know about Jon Murray is that he was obsessed with several key, early documentary slash reality shows, and one of the most important ones was the 1973 show An American Family.

Which was huge. Yeah.

Enormous.

This show was this kind of cinema verité, as you said. Was it on public television? I feel like and it it was just following this family, as they went through happy times. Not so great times. In fact, I think at one point the wife asked for a divorce, again, on television.

Yes, Pat. Pat asked Bill for a divorce on the air. It had a gay son, Lance Loud. There's a through line that goes directly from 1973's An American Family through The Real World. They're very different shows, but one was influenced, one was inspired by the other, and they both have in them that documentary plus soap opera quality.

I'm going to hop on the soap opera thing because I am a soap opera fan, and a lot of times I have argued with my friends where they're like, "soaps are dead, soaps are over." And I'm like, "just so we're clear, you're all watching soaps."

I completely agree.

That is what reality television is, which is especially the thing I think of when I think of soap operas as long running storylines, characters who like, move from season to season and then, of course, a kind of circular fighting, you know, triggering of irritations and affairs and all these things that people think are very silly about soaps are, in fact, very much part of just about every reality show that I've seen in the last 20 years.

Well, they're stories of intimacy and personal lives, they're stories of marriages and families and friendship communities. And historically, they were coded as female. And this is still something that sort of runs through these shows. The idea that something about domestic feelings, about marriages, about relationships, about sex and love is implicitly the sort of feminine form. But I have to say, of course, a lot of scripted shows are about the exact same things. Like, you know, people have talked about this, but Mad Men is also a show about a guy in a marriage, like all of like whether you call something a soap opera is absolutely a status thing, like whether something is considered prestige television, a soap opera, a reality show. I think you're absolutely right, though, that model of having a community of characters that you love and are fascinated by, you watch their lives change over time. You know all their secrets, which is key, and then you watch them change. It's funny because when Jon Murray first pitched The Real World, the way he pitched it was he just said, "we'll put all these kids who are from different backgrounds together. They will make mistakes. They'll they'll do things wrong. And then the characters themselves will change over the course of the show in response as they work out their problems." But of course, when they made The Real World, they found it really wasn't enough to just put cameras up.

There's all kinds of aspects of the way that show was done: the weekly confessional, quote unquote interview that gets then turned into narration. The the big house with all of the cameras. And the a couple things you brought up this packaging of people.

Yeah.

Finding a way to create character out of regular people who actually don't really much operate as static characters.

'Well, that's this phrase that Mary-Ellis Bunim used during the big conflict during the first season, because like several shows that I write about in this book, the entire project almost broke down because of a clash between the cast and the crew, which was to say what happened was they put a naked picture of one of the characters who was a model in the house. He was it was in a photographed photographic book, and the cast of people in the house objected to what they felt was manipulation. So there was a huge meeting. Was this a documentary? Was it a game show? Was it something where they were going to interfere? And in the midst of that meeting, Mary-Ellis Bunim from several people's accounts said, I'm an expert on this. I work in soap operas. I know how to package characters. And understandably, the people who were the characters were really offended by this. But that tension really runs through all of reality TV. Did you watch The Real World from the beginning?

I think inadvertently, because at a certain point MTV was kind of running them all, right? And so I definitely saw that first season. And I don't know where you were in your TV watching life?

No, I watched the first season eagerly. I loved it, like I was living in Atlanta at the time, and I watched it. It was in New York season, and I was so excited and it was great. In the book, I try – there was a sort of Pokemon collect them all quality to some of the shows. I wanted to talk to as many people as possible. I talked to lots of the crew on that, but I also talked to all the cast members and I will say that season, a lot of the seasons I write about in this book, there's a kind of innocence to the cast members, because there had never been a show like this before. So to them they were making a documentary for MTV and they were really working out the stuff during the production. By the third season, the season, a lot of people know with Pedro Zamora and Puck, the people going on the show had seen The Real World.

Right and this is Real World: San Francisco –

Yeah.

–?I think? And this was like an incredibly famous quote unquote storyline. The idea of this character being public about their HIV status.

'Right. And it wasn't, you know, that was a conscious decision on the part of Pedro Zamora in a way that wasn't true for some early reality cast members. He saw that this was a great platform in which he could use his personality to help people in the country know a person with HIV. It was a and I think the same was true to a certain extent of the villain of that season, Puck. So what I'm saying is that there's this there's this movement over time, in the course of the development of the genre, where people who go on these shows become more self-conscious. It doesn't necessarily give them control over how they're portrayed, but there's a change in their behavior because they're more aware "I am playing a character version of myself on TV, " and this only grows over time.

Not only does it grow over time, but there's so much lexicon from reality TV as people have come to understand it and be more familiar with it that people do use in TV criticism and writing. So, for instance, "the edit," the idea that everyone is aware that all the footage will be taken and manipulated as such, that you will either get a villain edit or a good guy, a hero edit. People joke about reality shows where everybody has, like a cup, an opaque cup so that you can't see how much anybody has had to drink.

You're talking about Love is Blind.

Well yeah, but other ones have used it, right? The idea that, like everyone knows, it will be edited, and I hear far less the conversation that I might have heard in the late 90s, early aughts of "is this real? Is this really real?" Like, nobody talks about reality television anymore, as though what we're watching is actual documentary in some way. It's all performance.

Well, I actually, I have to say. I disagree with that. That's not my experience. If anything, talking about the research for this book while I was writing it, I was really surprised by how many people who watch reality television, like people believe both things. They both believe it's real and that it's fake. I actually think that's that's what audiences –

That's like watching wrestling, right?

It's true. It's complicated. I think in order to watch, you have to believe that it's real. And in order to feel okay about the upsetting things on it, you have to believe that it's fake.

I think I think the latter.

So you think it's fake.

Like, the only way, the only way I can enjoy it is knowing that everyone kind of signed up for this and that, that in a way they are participating in how they have seen. And maybe because there have been so many memes, right? The joke of someone who comes on air and says, "I'm not here to make friends," right? The idea that there are people who are participating because they anticipate the development of a public facing career, because they just know it can be a kind of launching pad. That allows me to think of them as deserving of whatever terrible thing that befalls them in the course of the show. This is me admitting my my sort of gladiator impulse as I'm watching it.

I have enormous empathy for people who go on reality shows. Certainly the shows that I wrote about in this piece, where a lot of people were very traumatized by the experience of getting famous and having the experiences that they had on camera under pressure, edited in ways they never really expected. Just feeling exposed to having no money and people on modern shows as well. I understand that what you're talking about is an extremely common way to feel toward it, but it's to the advantage of the producers. They have all the power and control. And when people say somebody knows what they signed up for, I think that's, I think it's a simplistic way of talking about it, because the truth is, and this goes beyond the scope of the book. I wrote a piece about Love Is Blind a few weeks ago.

This is the Netflix show where people basically date without seeing each other, and then within ten days, get engaged. And when you watch the first season, it does feel like everyone is completely unhinged, because emotionally everything is very sort of operatic.

But but the thing is, they are they are because they're they're working extremely long hours with no sleep in a totally confined bubble. They're spending hours and hours a day talking with somebody through a wall who they've never met, and they fall in love. The show is designed to take off the barriers from people's emotional behavior. And there are people who got married on this show.

But this is not disconnected from the start of our conversation about The Real World. When I think about the late 90s, there was The Real World: Seattle. Irene McGee, who was one of the quote unquote characters on the show. She actually quit and left and in the process of leaving was physically assaulted, slapped by another character. She went on to become someone who talked very publicly about what she saw as fundamentally manipulative, that she thought that people, the producers, were goading everyone into kind of fighting with each other or planting these triggers and irritations. She also didn't feel protected in the end by the edit. There was no conversation about how to deal with your life after this big public thing happens to you, to the financial benefit of the production company. And I just bring that up to say that the very thing she talked about, those manipulations, it feels like they only escalated from that point on.

Also, reality cast members sign a contract that means that they're not allowed to complain publicly.

Exactly.

They have NDAs. And this is a contract that goes way back. So even if they are misrepresented or exploited, they're literally legally not allowed to talk about it. And if they're happened to be abused, they're forced into private arbitration. I really think these contracts should be illegal. And, the reason is to protect people who go on the show. But the secondary reason is I think it's important for people who watch these shows to understand how they're made. Not that they shouldn't watch them, but they shouldn't exist in the kind of naive cynicism that I think reality producers encourage where they do blame the people for whatever they see on the show and think, oh, they just wanted attention, so they deserve it. I don't believe that.

More from my conversation with TV critic and staff writer for The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum, in just a minute. This is The Assignment. I'm Audie Cornish. I'm here with Emily Nussbaum talking about her new book on the history of reality television. In an essay that Irene McGee actually wrote, she said "cast members today like they don't have to be goaded by producers to fight physically and emotionally. These wannabe stars go in knowing that regular screaming, feuding and hair pulling is expected of them and they want to deliver in order to get airtime." Can you talk about the push and pull of wanting to deliver for the people around you, wanting to participate? Meaning, if you're going to spend all this time you want to be on the show in the end, but then also like being able to speak up when you think things go wrong.

'The center of reality television making is the relationship between the cast and the crew. Later, obviously, the editors who can take things and put them in any order, and what people see when they watch the show is essentially the residue of that relationship, and it can be very intimate. So many people on reality shows talked about regarding the, the, their producers as something like therapists, as very much like close friends. And again, it depends on the show. Different shows have different approaches because the hair pulling and stuff you're talking about is definitely something that takes place a lot on Bravo-like shows that are sort of, you know, screaming, catfight, soap operas. Not all reality shows are like that.

No, not at all.

But all reality shows do base themselves on this relationship of these, you know, you hear what the person says, but you don't hear what they're being asked.

There is this kind of lack of sympathy for people in this business, which is really evident in the response to these kind of loud calls for maybe reality TV stars to unionize, maybe there to be more scrutiny of these contracts that, you know, where they sign these NDAs, or people are forced to go into arbitration. There's not a lot of transparency in how the process works. But now you do have people here and there speaking out. The most, I think, well known being Bethenny Frankel from The Real Housewives franchise.

Reality television exploits affairs, bankruptcy, falling off the wagon. Just because Hollywood and the entertainment industry can exploit this green talent, does that mean they should? People's names and likenesses are used and exploited forever. Clips of shows that cost nothing to post, that networks make money on. Merchandise, ancillary income that streamers and networks make money on. Talent never sees it. I do not have the idiot guide to starting a union in one day, but I will learn quickly.

Can you talk about like the the recipe for this moment?

'I do think this is a very significant period for this industry, but I will say that the origins of it again go all the way back. The basis for this genre is the ability to make it's a it's a budgetary tactic. It's a way to make a show without paying writers and without paying actors. It's a strike breaking mechanism. That's been true throughout the history of reality TV, and it's part of the reason that reality TV shows kept getting greenlighted is they were a way to put something on the air, non-unionized inexpensively. So that is something that's literally the reason

Built in.

Baked in.

Yeah.

But, several different things happened. One of them was the #MeToo movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement brought greater attention to just, yeah, conditions in general, abusive conditions, all sorts of conversations about Hollywood, about biases, about mistreatment of people. And also, there was this SAG strike and there was the, there was the WGA strike that also brought a lot of attention. There's a mass movement in terms of unionization. So this is not the first time people have talked about making things better for reality workers. But I think. to some degree, the stage has been set for people to take seriously the fact that the reality industry is many things, but one of the things is that it is a workplace.

And I think that's an interesting moment.

I agree, I think this is very new. During the period that I write about in the book, people were not talking about the labor rights of reality cast members. They were talking about the labor rights of reality crew members who are also not covered. And I think these things are tied together. You basically have a set on which people work just unnaturally insane hours with no stability, paid low rates, with no oversight for some of the ethical problems that we're talking about. The recent thing does have to do with people speaking up for the idea that people who go on reality shows deserve to have some sort of protections, and I agree with that. There are different kinds of people on reality shows. There are people who are like the housewives on Bravo, people who are essentially doing artificial performances of their own personalities in collaboration with producers that are not that different than being an actress. And they do it season after season. They're the star of the show, and they don't get the financial benefits of that. I think that their circumstances are very similar to the people in SAG, and that there should be a way of covering that, but there are other people, including the people on Love Is Blind and who go on many other shows who are much more like contestants on game shows or various kinds of things like that. They're one off people. I also think they are workers and they deserve some kind of protection.

There's one other show you talked about that I had a lot of interest in, which is The Apprentice. Can you talk about this genre of show is kind of, I don't know what they're what we would call them, but their shows that are sort of competition, meritocracy set in an office. Where do you think The Apprentice falls?

Well, I mean, I think The Apprentice comes out of two things. It was made by Mark Burnett, who didn't create Survivor, but certainly produced Survivor and turned it into a massive global hit. And it's a similar show to that. But The Apprentice is also an offshoot of another kind of show, which are shows like Project Runway and, you know, Dancing with the Stars and stuff that are talent contests. So it's so it's a combination of those two types of things. But I do think that Trump was elected because of The Apprentice. I don't think it's, you know, a side factor. And what the show did was take one of the things that's always been central to reality television, which is advertising, took a failed product, Donald Trump, a bankrupt con man, you know, made basically rebranded him and made him able to be elected president.

Meaning at the time when he starts the show, he's had these sort of business difficulties in Atlantic City. His reputation is not what he wants in New York itself. And they take him. And what's the term we use? Package him. Right?

'Yes, they yeah, they they they they shine him up and they turn him into a very impressive businessman, the guy that everybody would want to work for. I think that show, especially the first season of that show, is a very well-made season of reality television. It's actually very exciting to watch, and it's very clever. And honestly, during the first season, they had trouble getting advertisers to sign on. So a lot of it is about Trump products when you watch it. And the tricky thing for me in writing about it was it's hard to separate out the part that's about reality formats and reality making and Donald Trump, because the two are so woven together. So I tried to talk to as many people who worked on that show as possible, and I was really fascinated by their feelings about Trump and their feelings of guilt or collusion in doing this process, which is essentially

Oh, that's where they've that's where they are now with it? People really think the show had that, that kind of impact. Like, if I hadn't done this show, somehow he wouldn't be president?

'I just think I don't think that's even in question. I think if they hadn't done the show, Donald Trump would not be president. I do think that's true. It's not just the business things. Donald Trump was sort of I mean, there were people who loved him because of The Art of the Deal. But he was not only multiply bankrupt, but he was kind of a cultural joke. He appeared doing cameos on sitcoms during the 90s. Mark Burnett took Donald Trump, and he made him into this sort of god-figure on that show, flying through the air in his helicopter, being worshiped by people. One of the things that was interesting in talking to people about the show was not everybody, but most of the cast members for that show really did admire Donald Trump and want to work for him. And they were business people who were cast on the show.

Yeah.

They were not like reality wannabes or something, but the crew generally saw the show as a comedy and saw him as a bit of a clown. And so there was this weird tension on the two sides of the camera. But I don't know – did people not think that that show was? I think the problem was not the question of was, did that show elect Donald Trump president? I think the problem was a lot of people who write about politics, like most of the culture, don't treat reality TV as something worthy of, a thoughtful approach. It is something that's trivial. So the role of that show was easy to ignore in the run up to his run for president, because it was just seen as something funny.

In the end, it it does feel like we shouldn't be shocked that after all these years, we got a reality show president.

I mean, reality television is such an important and influential genre that yes, absolutely. It affects politics. It affects people's personal relationships. It shapes how people think about themselves as personalities, as public people. It's woven in with technology. It's so embedded in the culture that it is no surprise that we elected a reality television president. But, you know, we'd elected a movie star president earlier. I don't think it's surprising that, you know, public figures who people are used to seeing and feel like they know personally are likely to go into politics or be embraced as politicians.

It's funny, when you and I last spoke, we were talking about kind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and guilty pleasures, and you were talking about TV that's looked down on, and then you ended up writing this book, Cue The Sun!, which is also, in a way, about TV that people look down on a little bit. Do you feel like you're a little bit of a defender of the things that we don't take seriously?

You know, it's funny because I've seen this comparison drawn a lot between my last book I Like To Watch and this book. And yes, I am very interested in status dynamics within television and within culture and stuff that's written off as girly stuff or silly or trivial or all that stuff. Like, I'm interested in that theme. It's true, but I don't think of this book as the same in that way. I don't I'm not making an attempt to take reality television and saying like, this is the same as The Sopranos. People should think of it as a deep form of art. What I'm attempting to do is for people to shed some of their disgust and status contempt for reality for long enough to actually look at it thoughtfully and treat it as a meaningful part of the world that has a big impact on people. Because I think if you just write it off, you won't understand things like why Trump became president. So it's not the same as with Buffy, where I actually was like, "Buffy?!" Buffy, people looked down on and they thought it was just like a soap opera, a teen show, a junky show, junky looking show, all that kind of stuff. And I wanted to say "No. It's hugely ambitious. It has all this stuff to say. It's this grand feminist myth." That's not what I'm trying to say about reality TV. And I think what makes this book different is that it's a reported book. It's a it's an attempt to tell a story I think most people don't know. And to describe an industry, a craft, an art form that I think is broadly misunderstood. That's different, though, than saying, you know, all things are equal. It's just as good as anything else. All praise the Real Housewives. If somebody else wants to say that, they can say it. But that's not that's not the point of this particular project.

'Emily Nussbaum, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the new book Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV. We also want to credit YouTuber Saturday's World for the 1963 episode of the NBC show Queen for a Day. That's it for this episode of The Assignment. If you have an assignment for us, feedback on today's show, or ideas about people you want us to talk to, give us a call. Tell us what's on your mind. Our number is (202)?854-8802. You can call. You can text us a voicemail or a voice memo. Whatever you feel comfortable with, just know we might use some of it in a future episode of our show. The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Carla Javier. Matt Martinez is the senior producer of our show, and Dan Dzula is our technical director. Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. And we all got support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks, as always to Katie Hinman. I'm Audie Cornish. And thank you for listening.