When my television is turned on, which is often, I’m usually watching one of two things. As a standard-issue straight guy who played competitive sports as soon as I understood what they were, I consume a lot of professional sports broadcasts. The other half of my TV schedule is taken up by reality television, specifically the associated clusters of real housewives, alcoholic yacht stewards and “young” people with undiagnosed mood disorders who make up the Bravo universe. Vanderpump Rules. Southern Charm. Summer House. The jagged maps of Real Housewives and Below Deck franchises. Even the gone-in-a-flash vehicles like Gallery Girls and Ladies of London. I find all of them more engaging and interesting than even the most serious of prestige television.
There’s always a bit of surprise when I tell people about my reality TV habit. As not only a straight guy but also a writer, I don’t seem to fit into the usual picture people have of a reality TV enthusiast, and it is assumed that I must, for some reason, have enough sense to know that the entire genre is garbage. The premise behind this assumption is that the endless conga line of content coming out of Andy Cohen’s mirror-ball brain is either too cheap to take seriously or, worse, an active harm to society, amplifying our pathologies and rotting our minds. In a typically cynical dispatch for Bookforum last year, the critic A.S. Hamrah outlined what he sees as the central problem:
Reality TV is a curious genre because it has wrenched the willing suspension of disbelief into new forms. In order to enjoy it, you also have to pretend to enjoy it, and you have to celebrate your enjoyment, which may or may not be real, just as you have to acknowledge that what you’re watching (“watch what happens live”) isn’t quite real.
That I am pretending to enjoy something like Vanderpump Rules comes as news to me, but Hamrah’s disbelief that anyone can derive genuine pleasure from these shows isn’t surprising. There’s a long-running genre of moralizing writing about reality TV that amounts to stretching “I don’t know how you can watch that crap” into a two-thousand-word essay. For “serious” critics, moreover, the sophisticated thing to do is point out that, just as the viewer’s enjoyment isn’t “real,” so the show itself is not “real”—despite its packaging.
Hamrah’s commentary comes as part of his review of New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum’s book on the genesis of reality television, Cue the Sun! Near the end of his review, he points out the self-delusion of reality TV fans who believe that “liking something you know is bad becomes smart if you think you know how it works.” Hamrah is betraying his background in marketing by viewing audiences as psychographic groupings set to be converted into ad impressions. (I also work in marketing, so I get it.) But how these shows work has never been the most interesting thing about them, especially to their fans. And that’s why it’s so disappointing that Nussbaum herself spends several hundred pages logging the history of reality TV through the cold engineering of challenges, games and marathon editing sessions. The result is something like a series of flash cards or a collection of dull bits of trivia to pull out at a cocktail party. Did you know that The Gong Show was actually based on a radio variety show called Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour? Did you know that the film crew for the first season of Survivor ended up having having to sleep on the beach at first, just like the contestants? Did you know that producers on The Real World used to plant props to foment conflict between castmates? And so on.
I’m aware that many chronological histories read this way, but the timeline of, say, Tamerlane’s march through central Asia or the evolution of masonry is the bulk of the story and often why people pick up those kinds of books in the first place. In reality TV, the narrative heat is generated by friction between people on the shows themselves, not by the interplay between their producers. This is not to say that reality TV cannot serve as a compelling window into all kinds of social and cultural phenomena. But Nussbaum spends precious little time on this either. We hear a lot about what went into the production of the show Cops, but Nussbaum’s summary of how the show and policing evolved in tandem is limited to a single hand-waving paragraph. “Over the decades, Cops continued to reflect changes in law enforcement, as drug laws grew harsher in the 1990s, as departments militarized and the carceral state expanded—and, eventually, as prisons privatized, giving control to corporations whose goal was pure profit,” she writes, before jumping to 2013 and the effort to get the show taken off the air.
Even sticking strictly to the reality TV lens, those intervening years when Cops went from voyeuristic curiosity to cultural touchstone are worthy of exploration that goes beyond a few pages. Are people and their TVs not constantly in conversation with one another? Wasn’t TV, at least in those years, how most Americans built their moral understanding of the world brick by brick? Doesn’t watching a police officer arrest a poor drug addict or mentally ill minority on your television every night shape your perspective on those same people even if you never encounter them in real life?
It’s not just Cops. Nussbaum’s chapter on The Real World is an attempted meditation on authenticity. But every time we get close to some sort of critical kickoff, Nussbaum pulls the football. “During the final episode, the housemates break into the control room, seize the cameras, and point them at the crew—it was a meta-episode that doubled as a celebration of the production,” she writes about the first season’s wrap-up. The rest of that section lasts all of three paragraphs, with the only interesting observation coming in the form of a quote from showrunner George Verschoor. “‘Watching them watch themselves was just another groundbreaking moment for all of us, too… seeing them witness how their lives were compressed into a three-act structure—and how they were elevated to TV stars, really.’” That’s a startling admission from a primary source! But rather than interrogate that reality TV singularity and analyze the watershed moment of participants becoming aware of how they look to audiences, Nussbaum shuffles us quickly along to what the critics thought of the show.
This happens several times. Nussbaum will deliver an excellent provocation—e.g. “That was the catch-22 of the reality genre: The savvier its subjects became, the more self-aware about their roles, the less authentic the footage was—but, arguably, the more ethical”—before shrugging and moving on to talking about some picayune production decision or recapping storylines from the show’s first couple of seasons. There are moments when the refreshers give readers better historical coordinates for what sort of world The Real World was airing in, such as when they cast a gay housemate who MTV labeled as bisexual in order to thread a needle with audiences and advertisers. But they often read like extended Wikipedia entries or the trivia section of an IMDb page.
There is one exception: Nussbaum’s genuinely affecting chapter on the 1970s sensation An American Family, which braids together the history of the show with the humanity that made it such a seminal piece of storytelling. The show started filming in 1971, when the filmmakers Craig Gilbert and husband-and-wife duo Alan and Susan Raymond spent seven months documenting the Louds, an upper-middle-class family from Santa Barbara. Viewers watched the family slowly deteriorate over the course of twelve episodes, something that seems like routine viewing now but was totally groundbreaking when it first aired.
The section stands out because of its relatively small scope, allowing Nussbaum to drill a critical borehole into the show. She describes the brittle emotional state of Craig Gilbert, the show’s creator, and how it influenced his decision to investigate a “normal” American family unit. “He was depressed and had been drinking heavily,” Nussbaum writes about Gilbert. “His sixteen-year marriage was unraveling, as were many other marriages in his social set; marriage itself, Gilbert had begun to feel, might be obsolete.” That a series created by a man whose life was coming undone eventually became a national elegy for the nuclear family is exactly the sort of critical synthesis missing in much of the rest of the book.
Somewhat surprisingly, Cue the Sun! ends before what I’ll call the modern era of reality TV. The final chapter focuses on The Apprentice and how it facilitated Trump’s second (or third?) rise to national notoriety and eventual promotion to The Boss of America. Nussbaum’s assessment is about in line with the hungover liberal perspective that emerged in think pieces after Trump’s first election. Media outlets from CNN to NBC to Fox to the New York Times “ignored the danger Trump posed to the country, because he was too good for business.” That’s the note the book ends on, unfortunately. Nussbaum’s timeline cuts right before the genre gets really interesting, and lets us see what it is that keeps us watching.
●
In the summer of 2010, a reality show called The Hills aired its series finale. The show was itself a spin-off of another reality show called Laguna Beach, which was inspired by a fictional show called The O.C. The early-aughts obsession with tanned teenagers and southern California created a cottage industry in the region, and The Hills was one of its most successful products. In the show’s final moments, two of the protagonists, Brody Jenner and Kristin Cavallari, go their separate ways. It’s a maudlin little scene: the two hug, Cavallari delivers the classic romcom line “I can’t believe this is really goodbye,” and a montage of famous scenes from the show roll while Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” plays. (It was the show’s theme song.) The camera returns to Jenner, watching wistfully as the limo pulls away. It was all too on the nose for a show that was constantly under fire for being overproduced and “fake”—and this time that was the point. The camera zoomed out to reveal that Jenner was standing on a Hollywood lot, surrounded by a team of grips, gaffers, directors and sound engineers. Cavallari’s limo had moved all of three feet. They hug again, this time as colleagues on a production.
It is probably the most famous finale in television history, on par with the blackout in the diner in The Sopranos or the empty apartment in Friends. The Hills did really suffer from overproduction: storylines were contrived, relationships were artificial, conclusions were predetermined. It was more “reality-based” than reality. That’s why the postmodern self-awareness of the finale was such a shock. Until then, it was understood that reality television didn’t deal in irony. Its momentum was so dependent on manufactured sincerity that to wink at the audience risked the entire thing exploding. But the producers of The Hills recognized an opportunity to end-run their critics: yes, the show was produced. So what?
“To the extent that TV can refer exclusively to itself and debunk conventional standards as hollow, it is invulnerable to critics’ charges that what’s on is shallow or crass or bad, since any such judgments appeal to conventional, extra-televisual standards about depth, taste, quality,” David Foster Wallace wrote in the early 1990s. Wallace was writing about sitcoms and advertisements, in the days before reality TV. But the argument can be extended. As the genre matured, the ironic self-criticism that could increasingly be found on shows like The Hills was more interesting and worthy of analysis than Hamrah’s incurious dismissals or Nussbaum’s methodical reportage.
Consider Vanderpump Rules, one of Bravo’s crown-jewel franchises. For the past decade, the show has followed a group of young people who all at some point worked together at one of several restaurants in West Hollywood. (The show’s name comes from the restaurant group’s owner, Lisa Vanderpump, who made a name for herself as a prim British socialite with a shark smile on another Bravo franchise, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.) They fight, fuck and sabotage each other, much like real friends do.
The series is one of Bravo’s most successful, but faced a ratings lull as the cast got older, more stable and increasingly aware of their malformed fame to the point that they started talking about publicity obligations that only emerged because of the show they were currently on. Like they do every season, last year the Vanderpump cast sat down for a series of reunion episodes, moderated by Andy Cohen, that hinged on questions of what happens when cameras are rolling and when they’re not—that is, considerations of “authenticity” and performance on reality TV. But something odd happened this time. One of Vanderpump’s younger characters, Lala Kent, chided her castmate Ariana Madix for bringing up an argument that happened during the season but never made it to air, leaving an empty zone between reality and TV. Madix seemed genuinely confused by Kent’s attempt to keep their conversation strictly to what the audience would have seen, as if she’s talking to a method actor stuck in her character. “It didn’t air, but you want to act like it didn’t happen?” Madix said.
Kent and Madix are two of the show’s most recognizable characters, and represent two slightly divergent reality TV archetypes. Kent, who joined the show after its first few seasons, treats the entire thing as a tactical exercise, throwing narrative grenades that she’s convinced will give her more airtime and thus make her indispensable to the network. (Castmates on Vanderpump Rules make around $35,000 per episode.) This is her job and she is dead set on keeping it, even if it means manipulating the audience. Yet it is exactly from this perspective that Kent’s gambit in naming the show’s structure and treating it as something separate from “real” life was so risky. The danger is that she will become just another character on TV, having forfeited her appeal as an “authentic” person.
Madix is less cynical. Part of the original cast, she began filming Vanderpump before reality TV tilted fully into its postmodern phase. To use that word that so often haunts the genre, her persona on the show is “authentic,” which paradoxically only makes her more marketable. (Madix has been on the cover of Glamour, hosted Love Island USA and opened up a Nancy Meyers-inspired sandwich shop called Something About Her.) Today, a lot of newer characters in the “Bravo universe” of shows are themselves dedicated fans, so that by the time they’re cast they are already trying too hard to conjure drama or squeeze blood from lifeless conflict. It’s an unwelcome evolution, and part of the reason several classic franchises have attempted, like Vanderpump, to “reboot” their casts in search of organic—or at least less synthetic—chemistry.
That wasn’t always the case. When I first started getting enamored with these casts of emotional terrorists stalking Charleston or West Hollywood or the Hamptons, there was a rawness that was immediately sympathetic. Sure, they were all annoyingly photogenic and chiseled and seem to have social lives that will make you question the whole “loneliness epidemic” thing. But beneath the superficial gloss there was a highly identifiable ordinariness. I have been broke and brutally hungover. I have lived in a shitty apartment. I had done something cripplingly embarrassing or wanted to beat the shit out of a friend over some minor or major squabble. Almost a decade after it happened, I can still feel the backbreaking tension created by Jax Taylor, the deeply insecure bartender and former model who haunts Vanderpump Rules, sitting across from his friend Tom Sandoval at a house party and growling through a cocaine and tequila-induced scowl that he’s “the number one guy in this group.” In my own insecure moments, I’ve crunched the numbers on my social standings, wondering where I fall in my own group’s pecking order. I don’t think I’m alone in that. If you watch these shows, you will inevitably stumble into moments where you see your own warped image appear on-screen, an experience that can be both disorienting and magnetizing. Even as many of these shows have descended into self-referential, overproduced messes, I can still the time of year by which franchises are on in a given week. Call it a parasocial sunk cost. My sympathies were forged when these people were sleeping on futons or throwing glasses of cheap pinot grigio at each other, and I have a hard time walking away from those celluloid bonds.
●
Jean Baudrillard wrote about reality TV in 2001, just five years before the first season of The Real Housewives of Orange County aired and the bunting got raised on Bravo’s simulacrum circus. The French philosopher focused mostly on game shows and the voyeurism experiment “Big Brother,” which he called a “synthetic banality manufactured in closed circuit on the control screen.” It’s a shame he only lived to see the pupal period of the format; I would have loved to see what he thought about Vanderpump Rules or Southern Hospitality, shows that are horny but sexless, about youth but not about young people, which make them perfect reflections of modern American life. Baudrillard thought this emerging format revealed the preferences of audiences who had become overwhelmed by the huge amount of information they were now given access to by the new media, including information about the seemingly endless amount of suffering in the world. Finding the experience “unbearable,” many responded by seeking media that provided a permanent cocoon. “People are fascinated, fascinated and terrified by the indifference of the Nothing-to-say, Nothing-to-do, by the indifference of their very existence,” Baudrillard wrote. “What they deeply want is the spectacle of banality, which is the true pornography, the real obscenity: nullity, insignificance and platitude.”
The appeal of that “banal” humanity, transformed into “spectacle” by advanced methods of production, editing and narrative construction, is something that Hamrah and Nussbaum miss; Hamrah because of his condescension to both the genre and its fans, and Nussbaum because of her focus on the mechanics of the shows and their behind-the-scenes controversies. Both are uninterested in what actually happens on screen and how it speaks back to its millions of highly engaged viewers, reaching out not from the future or the past but from the brutal right now. Half of what happens on-screen is the tedium of modern existence: driving to work, ordering coffee, cooking dinner. (One of the peculiar conventions of Bravo universe shows is that they never cut away when the characters are ordering off a menu.) Even in Baudrillard’s withering, prescient criticism of then-nascent reality TV, he found room to be curious about why people found these shows so appealing, why these housewives and gameshow contestants emerged in this moment in our cultural timeline and found a willing audience. Sure, it’s voyeuristic (or pornographic if you like), and that’s part of the fun. But it’s the vulnerability beneath the voyeurism that keeps us coming back. Like many of the people on these shows, we have had to accept less than what we came for. We have had to play the role of ourselves at some point in our lives. We have desired something deeply only to be given a grotesque version of it and asked to be at peace with it. Such is life, televised or not.
When my television is turned on, which is often, I’m usually watching one of two things. As a standard-issue straight guy who played competitive sports as soon as I understood what they were, I consume a lot of professional sports broadcasts. The other half of my TV schedule is taken up by reality television, specifically the associated clusters of real housewives, alcoholic yacht stewards and “young” people with undiagnosed mood disorders who make up the Bravo universe. Vanderpump Rules. Southern Charm. Summer House. The jagged maps of Real Housewives and Below Deck franchises. Even the gone-in-a-flash vehicles like Gallery Girls and Ladies of London. I find all of them more engaging and interesting than even the most serious of prestige television.
There’s always a bit of surprise when I tell people about my reality TV habit. As not only a straight guy but also a writer, I don’t seem to fit into the usual picture people have of a reality TV enthusiast, and it is assumed that I must, for some reason, have enough sense to know that the entire genre is garbage. The premise behind this assumption is that the endless conga line of content coming out of Andy Cohen’s mirror-ball brain is either too cheap to take seriously or, worse, an active harm to society, amplifying our pathologies and rotting our minds. In a typically cynical dispatch for Bookforum last year, the critic A.S. Hamrah outlined what he sees as the central problem:
That I am pretending to enjoy something like Vanderpump Rules comes as news to me, but Hamrah’s disbelief that anyone can derive genuine pleasure from these shows isn’t surprising. There’s a long-running genre of moralizing writing about reality TV that amounts to stretching “I don’t know how you can watch that crap” into a two-thousand-word essay. For “serious” critics, moreover, the sophisticated thing to do is point out that, just as the viewer’s enjoyment isn’t “real,” so the show itself is not “real”—despite its packaging.
Hamrah’s commentary comes as part of his review of New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum’s book on the genesis of reality television, Cue the Sun! Near the end of his review, he points out the self-delusion of reality TV fans who believe that “liking something you know is bad becomes smart if you think you know how it works.” Hamrah is betraying his background in marketing by viewing audiences as psychographic groupings set to be converted into ad impressions. (I also work in marketing, so I get it.) But how these shows work has never been the most interesting thing about them, especially to their fans. And that’s why it’s so disappointing that Nussbaum herself spends several hundred pages logging the history of reality TV through the cold engineering of challenges, games and marathon editing sessions. The result is something like a series of flash cards or a collection of dull bits of trivia to pull out at a cocktail party. Did you know that The Gong Show was actually based on a radio variety show called Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour? Did you know that the film crew for the first season of Survivor ended up having having to sleep on the beach at first, just like the contestants? Did you know that producers on The Real World used to plant props to foment conflict between castmates? And so on.
I’m aware that many chronological histories read this way, but the timeline of, say, Tamerlane’s march through central Asia or the evolution of masonry is the bulk of the story and often why people pick up those kinds of books in the first place. In reality TV, the narrative heat is generated by friction between people on the shows themselves, not by the interplay between their producers. This is not to say that reality TV cannot serve as a compelling window into all kinds of social and cultural phenomena. But Nussbaum spends precious little time on this either. We hear a lot about what went into the production of the show Cops, but Nussbaum’s summary of how the show and policing evolved in tandem is limited to a single hand-waving paragraph. “Over the decades, Cops continued to reflect changes in law enforcement, as drug laws grew harsher in the 1990s, as departments militarized and the carceral state expanded—and, eventually, as prisons privatized, giving control to corporations whose goal was pure profit,” she writes, before jumping to 2013 and the effort to get the show taken off the air.
Even sticking strictly to the reality TV lens, those intervening years when Cops went from voyeuristic curiosity to cultural touchstone are worthy of exploration that goes beyond a few pages. Are people and their TVs not constantly in conversation with one another? Wasn’t TV, at least in those years, how most Americans built their moral understanding of the world brick by brick? Doesn’t watching a police officer arrest a poor drug addict or mentally ill minority on your television every night shape your perspective on those same people even if you never encounter them in real life?
It’s not just Cops. Nussbaum’s chapter on The Real World is an attempted meditation on authenticity. But every time we get close to some sort of critical kickoff, Nussbaum pulls the football. “During the final episode, the housemates break into the control room, seize the cameras, and point them at the crew—it was a meta-episode that doubled as a celebration of the production,” she writes about the first season’s wrap-up. The rest of that section lasts all of three paragraphs, with the only interesting observation coming in the form of a quote from showrunner George Verschoor. “‘Watching them watch themselves was just another groundbreaking moment for all of us, too… seeing them witness how their lives were compressed into a three-act structure—and how they were elevated to TV stars, really.’” That’s a startling admission from a primary source! But rather than interrogate that reality TV singularity and analyze the watershed moment of participants becoming aware of how they look to audiences, Nussbaum shuffles us quickly along to what the critics thought of the show.
This happens several times. Nussbaum will deliver an excellent provocation—e.g. “That was the catch-22 of the reality genre: The savvier its subjects became, the more self-aware about their roles, the less authentic the footage was—but, arguably, the more ethical”—before shrugging and moving on to talking about some picayune production decision or recapping storylines from the show’s first couple of seasons. There are moments when the refreshers give readers better historical coordinates for what sort of world The Real World was airing in, such as when they cast a gay housemate who MTV labeled as bisexual in order to thread a needle with audiences and advertisers. But they often read like extended Wikipedia entries or the trivia section of an IMDb page.
There is one exception: Nussbaum’s genuinely affecting chapter on the 1970s sensation An American Family, which braids together the history of the show with the humanity that made it such a seminal piece of storytelling. The show started filming in 1971, when the filmmakers Craig Gilbert and husband-and-wife duo Alan and Susan Raymond spent seven months documenting the Louds, an upper-middle-class family from Santa Barbara. Viewers watched the family slowly deteriorate over the course of twelve episodes, something that seems like routine viewing now but was totally groundbreaking when it first aired.
The section stands out because of its relatively small scope, allowing Nussbaum to drill a critical borehole into the show. She describes the brittle emotional state of Craig Gilbert, the show’s creator, and how it influenced his decision to investigate a “normal” American family unit. “He was depressed and had been drinking heavily,” Nussbaum writes about Gilbert. “His sixteen-year marriage was unraveling, as were many other marriages in his social set; marriage itself, Gilbert had begun to feel, might be obsolete.” That a series created by a man whose life was coming undone eventually became a national elegy for the nuclear family is exactly the sort of critical synthesis missing in much of the rest of the book.
Somewhat surprisingly, Cue the Sun! ends before what I’ll call the modern era of reality TV. The final chapter focuses on The Apprentice and how it facilitated Trump’s second (or third?) rise to national notoriety and eventual promotion to The Boss of America. Nussbaum’s assessment is about in line with the hungover liberal perspective that emerged in think pieces after Trump’s first election. Media outlets from CNN to NBC to Fox to the New York Times “ignored the danger Trump posed to the country, because he was too good for business.” That’s the note the book ends on, unfortunately. Nussbaum’s timeline cuts right before the genre gets really interesting, and lets us see what it is that keeps us watching.
●
In the summer of 2010, a reality show called The Hills aired its series finale. The show was itself a spin-off of another reality show called Laguna Beach, which was inspired by a fictional show called The O.C. The early-aughts obsession with tanned teenagers and southern California created a cottage industry in the region, and The Hills was one of its most successful products. In the show’s final moments, two of the protagonists, Brody Jenner and Kristin Cavallari, go their separate ways. It’s a maudlin little scene: the two hug, Cavallari delivers the classic romcom line “I can’t believe this is really goodbye,” and a montage of famous scenes from the show roll while Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” plays. (It was the show’s theme song.) The camera returns to Jenner, watching wistfully as the limo pulls away. It was all too on the nose for a show that was constantly under fire for being overproduced and “fake”—and this time that was the point. The camera zoomed out to reveal that Jenner was standing on a Hollywood lot, surrounded by a team of grips, gaffers, directors and sound engineers. Cavallari’s limo had moved all of three feet. They hug again, this time as colleagues on a production.
It is probably the most famous finale in television history, on par with the blackout in the diner in The Sopranos or the empty apartment in Friends. The Hills did really suffer from overproduction: storylines were contrived, relationships were artificial, conclusions were predetermined. It was more “reality-based” than reality. That’s why the postmodern self-awareness of the finale was such a shock. Until then, it was understood that reality television didn’t deal in irony. Its momentum was so dependent on manufactured sincerity that to wink at the audience risked the entire thing exploding. But the producers of The Hills recognized an opportunity to end-run their critics: yes, the show was produced. So what?
“To the extent that TV can refer exclusively to itself and debunk conventional standards as hollow, it is invulnerable to critics’ charges that what’s on is shallow or crass or bad, since any such judgments appeal to conventional, extra-televisual standards about depth, taste, quality,” David Foster Wallace wrote in the early 1990s. Wallace was writing about sitcoms and advertisements, in the days before reality TV. But the argument can be extended. As the genre matured, the ironic self-criticism that could increasingly be found on shows like The Hills was more interesting and worthy of analysis than Hamrah’s incurious dismissals or Nussbaum’s methodical reportage.
Consider Vanderpump Rules, one of Bravo’s crown-jewel franchises. For the past decade, the show has followed a group of young people who all at some point worked together at one of several restaurants in West Hollywood. (The show’s name comes from the restaurant group’s owner, Lisa Vanderpump, who made a name for herself as a prim British socialite with a shark smile on another Bravo franchise, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.) They fight, fuck and sabotage each other, much like real friends do.
The series is one of Bravo’s most successful, but faced a ratings lull as the cast got older, more stable and increasingly aware of their malformed fame to the point that they started talking about publicity obligations that only emerged because of the show they were currently on. Like they do every season, last year the Vanderpump cast sat down for a series of reunion episodes, moderated by Andy Cohen, that hinged on questions of what happens when cameras are rolling and when they’re not—that is, considerations of “authenticity” and performance on reality TV. But something odd happened this time. One of Vanderpump’s younger characters, Lala Kent, chided her castmate Ariana Madix for bringing up an argument that happened during the season but never made it to air, leaving an empty zone between reality and TV. Madix seemed genuinely confused by Kent’s attempt to keep their conversation strictly to what the audience would have seen, as if she’s talking to a method actor stuck in her character. “It didn’t air, but you want to act like it didn’t happen?” Madix said.
Kent and Madix are two of the show’s most recognizable characters, and represent two slightly divergent reality TV archetypes. Kent, who joined the show after its first few seasons, treats the entire thing as a tactical exercise, throwing narrative grenades that she’s convinced will give her more airtime and thus make her indispensable to the network. (Castmates on Vanderpump Rules make around $35,000 per episode.) This is her job and she is dead set on keeping it, even if it means manipulating the audience. Yet it is exactly from this perspective that Kent’s gambit in naming the show’s structure and treating it as something separate from “real” life was so risky. The danger is that she will become just another character on TV, having forfeited her appeal as an “authentic” person.
Madix is less cynical. Part of the original cast, she began filming Vanderpump before reality TV tilted fully into its postmodern phase. To use that word that so often haunts the genre, her persona on the show is “authentic,” which paradoxically only makes her more marketable. (Madix has been on the cover of Glamour, hosted Love Island USA and opened up a Nancy Meyers-inspired sandwich shop called Something About Her.) Today, a lot of newer characters in the “Bravo universe” of shows are themselves dedicated fans, so that by the time they’re cast they are already trying too hard to conjure drama or squeeze blood from lifeless conflict. It’s an unwelcome evolution, and part of the reason several classic franchises have attempted, like Vanderpump, to “reboot” their casts in search of organic—or at least less synthetic—chemistry.
That wasn’t always the case. When I first started getting enamored with these casts of emotional terrorists stalking Charleston or West Hollywood or the Hamptons, there was a rawness that was immediately sympathetic. Sure, they were all annoyingly photogenic and chiseled and seem to have social lives that will make you question the whole “loneliness epidemic” thing. But beneath the superficial gloss there was a highly identifiable ordinariness. I have been broke and brutally hungover. I have lived in a shitty apartment. I had done something cripplingly embarrassing or wanted to beat the shit out of a friend over some minor or major squabble. Almost a decade after it happened, I can still feel the backbreaking tension created by Jax Taylor, the deeply insecure bartender and former model who haunts Vanderpump Rules, sitting across from his friend Tom Sandoval at a house party and growling through a cocaine and tequila-induced scowl that he’s “the number one guy in this group.” In my own insecure moments, I’ve crunched the numbers on my social standings, wondering where I fall in my own group’s pecking order. I don’t think I’m alone in that. If you watch these shows, you will inevitably stumble into moments where you see your own warped image appear on-screen, an experience that can be both disorienting and magnetizing. Even as many of these shows have descended into self-referential, overproduced messes, I can still the time of year by which franchises are on in a given week. Call it a parasocial sunk cost. My sympathies were forged when these people were sleeping on futons or throwing glasses of cheap pinot grigio at each other, and I have a hard time walking away from those celluloid bonds.
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Jean Baudrillard wrote about reality TV in 2001, just five years before the first season of The Real Housewives of Orange County aired and the bunting got raised on Bravo’s simulacrum circus. The French philosopher focused mostly on game shows and the voyeurism experiment “Big Brother,” which he called a “synthetic banality manufactured in closed circuit on the control screen.” It’s a shame he only lived to see the pupal period of the format; I would have loved to see what he thought about Vanderpump Rules or Southern Hospitality, shows that are horny but sexless, about youth but not about young people, which make them perfect reflections of modern American life. Baudrillard thought this emerging format revealed the preferences of audiences who had become overwhelmed by the huge amount of information they were now given access to by the new media, including information about the seemingly endless amount of suffering in the world. Finding the experience “unbearable,” many responded by seeking media that provided a permanent cocoon. “People are fascinated, fascinated and terrified by the indifference of the Nothing-to-say, Nothing-to-do, by the indifference of their very existence,” Baudrillard wrote. “What they deeply want is the spectacle of banality, which is the true pornography, the real obscenity: nullity, insignificance and platitude.”
The appeal of that “banal” humanity, transformed into “spectacle” by advanced methods of production, editing and narrative construction, is something that Hamrah and Nussbaum miss; Hamrah because of his condescension to both the genre and its fans, and Nussbaum because of her focus on the mechanics of the shows and their behind-the-scenes controversies. Both are uninterested in what actually happens on screen and how it speaks back to its millions of highly engaged viewers, reaching out not from the future or the past but from the brutal right now. Half of what happens on-screen is the tedium of modern existence: driving to work, ordering coffee, cooking dinner. (One of the peculiar conventions of Bravo universe shows is that they never cut away when the characters are ordering off a menu.) Even in Baudrillard’s withering, prescient criticism of then-nascent reality TV, he found room to be curious about why people found these shows so appealing, why these housewives and gameshow contestants emerged in this moment in our cultural timeline and found a willing audience. Sure, it’s voyeuristic (or pornographic if you like), and that’s part of the fun. But it’s the vulnerability beneath the voyeurism that keeps us coming back. Like many of the people on these shows, we have had to accept less than what we came for. We have had to play the role of ourselves at some point in our lives. We have desired something deeply only to be given a grotesque version of it and asked to be at peace with it. Such is life, televised or not.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.