by Mark Greif
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Until, that is, one began to see what the capital-rich networks would make of it. For they got into the act, like dinosaurs in an inland sea, and they made the waters heave. They developed the grandiose second ideal type of filmed reality, courtesy of bigger budgets and serial episodes: the show of the group microcosm.
The microcosms were large-scale endeavors, financed by Fox, MTV, NBC, ABC, CBS, and the WB. (The other shows had been cheaply made and served up to UHF and low-budget cable stations by syndication, or, like Cops, run in the early bare-bones years of Fox and retained.) MTV’s The Real World, which put young adults in a group house with cameras, was the earliest and most incomplete example. The pun in its “real world” title meant both that you would see how nonactors interacted (initially fascinating) and that this was, for many of the children on the show, their first foray away from home (pretty boring, after the umpteenth homesick phone call). MTV’s goal was to make up a “generation,” not a society, as MTV is the most aggressive promoter of one version of youth as a wholesale replacement of adult life.
Subsequently the broadcast networks converted the dating “event” show into sagas of thirty suitors, peeling them away one by one until only the chosen bride or groom remained. Big Brother turned the house show, too, into a competition. An even more triumphant microcosm was Survivor—followed, in time, by The Amazing Race. The newer shows that defined the microcosmic reality and blended it with competition adopted the same basic forms of social discovery that had animated the birth of the English novel: the desert-island Robinsonade of Survivor; the at-the-ends-of-the-earth-be-dragons imperialist travelogue and quest romance of The Amazing Race; even, perhaps, the sentimental seductions of The Bachelor, where so many willing Clarissas rode squealing in limousines to a manor house to hand their hearts to Lovelace.
Yet Survivor never took up the society-from-nothing isolation of the desert island, which had motivated the original Robinson Crusoe. The Amazing Race didn’t care about the Englishman-in-Lilliput foreignness of Swift or the chance meetings of picaresque or even the travelers’ tall tales in Hakluyt. The shows had no interest in starting civilization from scratch. Nor for that matter were they much interested in travel—on The Amazing Race, you glimpse the blurred locals out the windows of speeding cars. These shows were about the spectacularization of a microcosmic America—about the reduction of society to a cross-section of our countrymen, still so very American, never “going native.”
The shows put together sociable Americans, so they would have nothing left but their group interactions, their social negotiations, to keep them going. Nobody let them starve, nothing endangered them. Nominally structured as a contest of skill, skill mattered little and “alliances” much on Survivor. The sniping and soothing in couples and trios—forming and reforming, betraying and sticking together—were the main things of interest on that show and on The Amazing Race, where it was hard to tell if we were supposed to care, really, that one pair ran faster than another. How do Americans talk and how do they arrange things, in a completely minimal setting, a little like the office and a little like the home but not totally unlike a sequestered jury? So many of the contestants brought the workplace with them, and they were meant to, since they were identified at every subtitle of their names with their stateside jobs: Actor/Model, Computer Programmer, Fireman. This was our festival. Let’s see if the alliance can hold between the Stock Trader, the Carpenter, and the Actress. Who will emerge as the “Survivor”? Let’s race the Midget and her Cousin, so lovable, against the Bad Couple Who Should Not Marry. Let’s see who our true representatives are.
The structure of each of the shows that “voted people off the island,” requiring the microcosm to draw itself down each week, echoed, with static, the old idea of a republic of political equals, who despite unequal skills and endowments one by one would recuse themselves from activity to leave a single best representative behind to speak in public for their interests. If we truly all are equals in America, this would be a picture, in ideal form, of how we choose aldermen and selectmen and congressmen: using our sovereignty to withdraw our sovereignty—that is to say, to focus it in the hands, for two or four years, of individuals who act for us. By this means the microcosm programs resembled political allegories.
And yet many of the reality shows of the microcosmic community were quite deliberately, self-consciously implanted—sometimes by the rules, sometimes by the informal instructions given to players—with an original sin. That sin was the will to power by trickery, the will to deception, which puts the power-mad ahead of the natural leader. And the players did not rebel—they accepted this, knowing it too well from home, from what they would call their “real life.” “That’s how you play the game,” each aspiring survivor explained, with the resignation of a trapped bear chewing off its leg, “you have to fool people, you can only be loyal to yourself.” They had the republican ideal in their hands, and didn’t use it. It got confused with the economic or Darwinian model of competition, in which antirepresentative stratagems are justified because one wins in the defeat and eradication of all others to gain a single jackpot. This, too, was an aspect of the realness of “reality” for Americans: we knew we were witnessing republics of voting or shared excellence competing, or perhaps blending, with another force in our lives.
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As deception and power hunger are the sins built into the microcosm, so the fixed norm is the flaw introduced into shows of pure judgment. It produces the third ideal type of reality TV: the show of the industry standard.
It was latent in the grand-scale dating shows, these contests that brought in the single judge and red roses and arbitrary rules and an image of romantic love from somewhere in the minds of Hallmark: but who knows, maybe this was close enough to the values of dreamy romance to form some people’s preexisting reality. In American Idol, though, you see the strong beginning of the reality show of the third type. American Idol was the best, and the most insinuating, of the industry shows because it took one of the basic categories of common endeavor that Rousseau loved well—a singing contest, the commonplace sibling of a beauty or dancing or athletic contest. Everyone sings, if only in the shower—and the footage of the worst contestants made clear that the contest did include all of us, that the equivalent of singing in the shower was being considered, too, on the way to the final idol. The show had “America” judge, by casting the final votes, en masse. Yet it used professional judges in the meantime, a panel of allegorical experts: Simon Cowell (rhymes with “scowl”—the Stern Judge; George III), Paula Abdul (the Universal Sexy Mommy; Betsy Ross), and Randy Jackson (the Spirit of Diversity). Allegorically, America would free itself from the tyranny of the English king, having learned his wisdom, pay due homage to its own diversity, and enjoy the independence to make its own choice—which the hands-tied Englishman’s production company would have to live with, and distribute to record stores. Poor George III! What one really learned was that, unlike a singing contest in the high-school gym, the concern of the recording industry was not just, or no longer, whether someone could sing. It was whether a contestant was fitted to the industry, malleable enough to meet the norms of music marketing. The curtain was pulled away from the Great Oz, and the public invited to examine his cockpit and vote which lever or switch to pull next. As it turns out, it is really no less pleasant to choose a winner to suit the norms of music marketing than to choose on individual talent. One was still choosing, and the idol would still be ours. An idol of the marketplace, to be sure, but still our representative American idol.
The major new successes of the past few years have taught (or pretended to teach) the norms of other industries. The Apprentice, a show in which one tries to learn skill in business, teaches the arbitrariness of contemporary success in relation to skill. The winners are conditioned to meet a certain kind of norm, not really familiar from anywhere else in life, which corresponds to “the values of business” as interpreted by Donald Trump.
America’s Next Top Model shows how a beauty contest ceases to be about beauty. The real fascination of the show is learning, first, how the norms of the fashion industry don’t correspond to ordinary ideas of beauty (you knew it abstractly, here’s proof!), but to requirements of the display of clothes and shilling for cosmetics; second, how the show will, in the name of these norms, seek something quite different in its contestants—a psychological adhesiveness, a willingness to be remade and obey. The Starlet suggests the distance between the norms of TV acting and the craft of acting—and yet again, in the name of “how it’s done in the industry,” which provides one kind of interest, the contestants are recast psychologically, which provides the other. And on it goes, with “how to become a chef” (Hell’s Kitchen) and “how to be a clothing designer’s minion” (The Cut), et cetera.*
All this is interesting and revealing in its way. But the final stage is all too familiar: that is, the flow back of norms justified by industry into norms for inner spaces—first the mind, which accepts insane instructions and modifications, then the spaces that have nothing to do with either public life or work, and should offer safety from their demands. I am thinking of the home and the integral body, underneath the skin.
For a final, baroque range of reality shows has emerged in the last two years: The Swan, Extreme Makeover, and, when these turned out to be slightly more than viewers could bear, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and its copycat shows. The Swan and Extreme Makeover also drew on the most basic of all spectacles of excellence: the beauty contest, or “pageant,” which once formed a way of seeing or understanding the country, as in the Miss America contests (when you would root for your state while admiring the flowers of the other forty-nine). And the new shows advanced a new kind of norm by re-creating it surgically, by literally rebuilding people’s faces and bodies to suit, not beauty, but a kind of televisual glamour. Ordinary unattractive people, given nose jobs, boob jobs, liposuction, lip collagen, tummy tucks, and chin pulls—plus fifty minutes of therapy—looked like wax mannequins when, alone and imprisoned in a Gothic mansion, the naturally lovely host pulled the velvet drapes back from the mirror, and the rebuilt women, inevitably, began to weep, shocked. Then the host spoke: “You’re crying because you’ve never seen yourself so beautiful. You’re crying because you’ve been transformed,” intoning these words until the weeping, speechless victim nodded. If this looked like brainwashing, you hardly knew the horror of it until the camera cut to a boardroom of the delighted surgical experts who had done the work—each one of them equally off-kilter and monstrous because of surgical modifications made to his own face or teeth or eyes or hair. (Flashback to one of the famous Rod Serling–written Twilight Zone episodes, this one from 1960: an ordinary woman is called “ugly” and pressured into damaging facial surgery that we can’t understand—until the camera pulls back to show us that everyone in her world is hideously disfigured! Yee-ikes!)
The point of these shows was not just how people would be altered, but that they could be altered. As the Six Million Dollar Man introduction used to say, “We have the technology…”; but what was needed was the rationale. When this transdermal insertion of the norm into average people came to seem suspect, the networks increasingly devoted episodes to already hideously ugly and disfigured people, so that the norm could be disguised as charity or medical necessity. But the greater success proved to be the subtle turn, with charitable aspect intact, to demolishing and rebuilding people’s homes rather than their faces, in the adjunct called Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, which supersized existing home-decorating reality shows like Trading Spaces (on which two neighbors agree to redecorate one room in each other’s homes). Extreme Makeover would get at privacy in one way or another; if not through the body then through the private space that shelters it. A team of experts came in to wreck your shabby domicile and rebuild it. The dwellings that resulted were no longer homes, but theme houses; instead of luxuries, the designers filled rooms with stage sets keyed to their ten-minute assessments of the residents’ personalities: “Little Timmy wants to be a fireman, so we made his room look like it’s on fire!” As long as the homeowners were poor or handicapped enough, anything was a step up. The show has been an enormous hit.
Whatever can be done in the name of charity or medicine or health will allow the reinsertion of the norm into further spheres of privacy. Fox is said to be planning Who Wants to Live Forever?, a “program that predicts when participants will die and then helps them extend their lifespan through dieting, exercise, [and] breaking bad habits.” The circle is closed, and “reality” here no longer lets us observe our real life, but its modifications in the name of a statistical life to come. The private matters we can’t, or shouldn’t, see flow in to replace our public witnessing of each other. And the festival is no longer of ourselves, but of phantasms projected by industries of health, beauty, home, all industries requiring our obedience: worse than the monsters of drama, because they don’t admit their degree of fiction.
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The reality of reality television is that it is the one place that, first, shows our fellow citizens to us and, then, shows that they have been changed by television. This reality is the unacknowledged truth that drama cannot, and will not, show you.
A problem of dramatic television, separate from what the corrupt characters say and do, is that it shows people who live as if they were not being shaped by television. On this point it profoundly fails to capture our reality. (The novel, in contrast, was always obsessed with the way consciousness was shaped and ruined by reading novels.) And this is consistent with the way in which television, more than other media, has a willingness to do the work of shaping life, and a subservience to advertising and industry, even when its creators do not understand what they’re up to.
Drama says: this is harmless, fictional. In fact it pushes certain ways of life. But wherever industrial norms repenetrate the televised rendition of reality, they can directly push certain ways of life, no longer even needing to use the mediation of “harmless” fiction and drama.
One can sometimes fight corruption with corruption: Blind Date to counter Friends. So what in our television experience, against Extreme Makeover, will show the ways in which homes and faces cannot be remade? Who will make the reality to counter “reality”?
[2005]
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Ten years later, almost all the shows I wrote about have been forgotten. Others replaced them. Formats have ebbed and flowed. Some have added novelties, yet old premises return—revived, I sometimes think, in the expression of something like a “second generation” of the form.
Cheap dating shows and isolated survival shows both had seemed to decline. Last year they finally returned in the new form of naked shows. Naked and Afraid staged the survival of a lone man and woman, marooned, nude, within a jungle or on an island desert, needing to live for twenty-one days unaided before they could paddle upriver (perhaps through piranhas, or those silverfish rumored to swim up the urethra), and scrape themselves scrambling into a truck, helicopter, or seaplane. Dating Naked revived the most bare-bones round-robin dating show imaginable, except that each couple strips to their spray-on tans before undertaking appropriate ice-breaker challenges: Twister, body painting, trampolines.
You could imagine that nudity would represent a final liquidation of the reality format—spending out the principal or selling off the machinery, so to speak, on which titillation had been minted. Instead, the naked shows seem to express a confidence in the persistence of reality TV as the dominant form of broadcast and cable television, as it has faced and fended off challenges from serial drama (The Sopranos on) and Internet clips. The nakedness is really a joke, I think, on the still-reigning accusation that the appeal of reality is literal voyeurism. “You watch these people, pretending to care, but you’d really be happier if you could see them naked.” Truthfully, to see them naked, at least when they’re dating, is to wish them clothed. The real fascinations of reality TV are thing
s more like appearing, or performing. You find, watching a bare contestant, that you want him to possess every tool in his arsenal, clothes included. As on nude beaches and in doctors’ consulting rooms, skin becomes ordinary and unseductive. Nudity is less annoying on the survival show only because it introduces interpersonal dramas connected with sunburns and hat weaving. Otherwise it is extraneous.
The sense of new confidence extends even to the revival of cosmetic-surgery shows, those seemingly compulsive but socially taboo attempts of the early days. The current version is Botched, a show clever in its fake moralism. The premise is not to do cosmetic surgery, but to redo it, as the show’s surgeons start cutting and suctioning and breaking bone only after a previous nose or boob job has gone wrong offscreen. It’s like the hunter who hangs back with a lovingly polished gun waiting to put the wounded animals out of their misery.
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I’ve learned something else since I first took stock of reality TV. Illumination need not come to longtime viewers only by the means I described before—witnessed negotiation, microcosmic allegory, competition toward the industry standard—but, longitudinally, by changes of formats over the years. Because reality shows come and go in such fast-moving clusters, of common format or subject matter, and cost so little to produce, they dramatize underlying demographic and economic facts not acknowledged elsewhere on television or in the official outlook of the media. Before the financial crisis of 2008–09, I had watched several years of “house flipping” shows (Flip This House, and its rival, Flip That House) on which people without much means, or capital, were buying residential properties, sprucing them up slightly, and reselling them after a matter of months for a supposedly significant gain. Whether the properties were bought by other house flippers or by anyone who actually planned to live in them was not revealed. But it seemed clear that “value” for the long haul was not at stake, and the ability to do this flipping, for the protagonists of the shows, escaped all ordinary laws of lending, collateral, commitment to homes or neighborhoods, stability or ordinary variation in housing prices—prices only went up, untethered to real improvements or a need to live where the houses were. What the shows revealed, of course, was the existence of a nationwide housing bubble, inflated by loose rules and massive capital being pushed upon the dreamy and feckless, capital from elsewhere (from foreign manufacturing economies, as it turned out)—an unacknowledged bubble that, when it popped, took down the credit markets and “the economy” with it. When it popped, the shows moved on.
