by Lucas Mann
Leave the drama for fiction, Will says. Make the real resolved.
* * *
—
Other producers fill in the specifics of the bubble burst that Will is struggling with. It’s not so much a problem with the concept of reality, it’s that viewers are tired of the overt construction and overstyling, the obviously sensationalized emotion. A few producers talked about a backlash against shows that wear their contrivance proudly, whose stars are clearly saying things that they didn’t think of to say, at least not in the moment that they’re captured saying them.
I’ve heard that natural is back in.
The call is out for authenticity, is another slogan.
Industry people are worried that the thrill of the spectacular formula has been beaten dead by its own success—eventually the saturated audience starts getting annoyed at being such an easy mark. People who will say anything stop providing a rush, once you understand that saying anything is their whole bit.
Apparently, at a recent RealScreen conference, a veteran bigwig from the old days excoriated the room, focusing on a show about people from Jersey that wasn’t The Jersey Shore but sought to place that bankable vibe within a slightly altered conceit. It was just one example of a trend. He talked about how absurdly predictable each line was, how nothing remotely authentic remained. They were just yelling what they were supposed to yell because it sounded like a good formula.
A producer relayed that story to me, laughing about how diluted reality had become since those early days when it was just a few trailblazers conceiving shows through a documentarian’s lens, venerated legends like Bunim/Murray, the brains behind The Real World. But a lot of Bunim/Murray’s success came long after The Real World, when they got in early on the Kardashian franchise, which was and still is seen as its own perversion of whatever authentic mode of expression The Real World had established.
I ask if that isn’t also sort of scripted.
The producer tells me that the distinction is subtle. I mean, yeah, they have beats to hit and shit to cover; those scenarios are planned. But they’re saying what they would say, you know? The personality is authentic; that’s why it works. It’s closer to the old days—just capturing people as they are.
Yet another producer, one who does his own casting, puts it like this: The networks have been saying for a few years that they want authentic again, but that’s not what they want. Authentic means you have to wait around for someone to be interesting. There’s a lot of dead tape in authentic lives. And there isn’t time for dead tape. In the old days, a week or two of footage would make for an episode. Now there’s no patience. Now it’s a day or two, turn it around, onto the next. It’s asking a lot to make human beings interesting every day. Human beings don’t do that.
“Look,” he says, “you gotta make do with what you have. You gotta find a way to be compelling. Bro, what they’re asking for is better people, people who can be interesting and authentic whenever you need them to be.”
* * *
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You turned thirty the other day. I wrote you a card. That’s a full decade’s worth of cards now—birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s Days, a period of just-because cards that fell by the wayside fast. They are important because they are us trying to tell the story to each other, the story of the other one, the story we both know so well that it’s rote, it’s air, but we try to tell it like it’s new, like no other story has ever been similar.
I woke up early on your birthday to write the card. It was more pressure than usual because this wasn’t just a special-occasion card, it was a monumental-occasion card. When I tried to write it, the story felt like the story I’d told on previous cards, and I knew that I’d felt the same worry when writing each of those cards, that I was parroting myself and in doing so parroting so many things that I’d seen or heard or even just sort of absorbed about the ways to quantify love, the appropriate adjectives with which to say beauty, the register to adopt to give a sense that nobody has ever been like you. And nobody has. But how to say it? Or how to say it better, like I really meant it, even though I did mean it, but how to make it sound that way? So many moments spent together, alone, in the same little space that is ours, seeing the same images flicker, seeing each other, too.
You said you liked the card. You emoted like you liked the card, and that was all I needed to emote back. I’m not trying to say this was all bullshit because it wasn’t bullshit at all; it was just emoting. I made us smoothies and put a candle in a vegan cupcake I’d bought the night before and hidden in the back of the fridge. You were dressed for work, eating your cupcake, your smoothie next to you, and I took a picture of it and put it on Instagram with a caption marking the occasion and the hashtag “late capitalism,” which I thought was hilarious. The likes trickled in. We tracked them together. You had a little time before work. We went to the couch, sat, watched for a moment, held each other.
* * *
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I speak to Bruce David Klein, twenty-five years in the business, creator of the oddly popular Restaurant Impossible series, a week before he gives a highly anticipated conference speech titled “The Death of Reality TV.”
“Buddy, you’re late,” is the first thing he says to me. Then he laughs.
He tells me it’s only natural that all the stuff that was once exciting—the breathless tone, the drama of it all, even the precious on-the-fly-interviews—is getting a little long in the tooth. When novelty becomes formula, audiences become restless but also don’t really know what else it is that they want. The past fifteen years have been about making people desire access and then subsequent manipulation to make that accessed material interesting—the screaming mess of manufactured real lives. But hear enough screaming and even that’s a bore.
Now people can target their cable packages to just a few channels. Or they can avoid cable and seek out what they want online. Klein puts it like this: How many of these reality shows would you actually look for, as opposed to stumble upon, let wash over you until all of a sudden three hours have passed?
It’s the perfect catch-22: audiences are showing signs of rejecting the heavily produced formula, too cynical now for all that, yet still demanding a loud bang. Nothing is real enough. Nothing is entertaining enough. We’re pushing reality to the very edge of both its believability and its intrigue, until all that’s left is a crater of disappointment.
“I mean, what about you?” Klein asks me. “When does this thing run its course?”
* * *
—
Yesterday was the first time in a while that we watched something and I felt like we shouldn’t be watching it. The last time was the whole Intervention thing, years ago—my need to say something out loud about addiction not being a spectacle. Of course, that half-protest faded quickly, and soon I was doing impressions of a former piano prodigy smoking dust and talking to pigeons.
But yesterday. It was the season finale of Sister Wives, and Meri started stammering at dinner. The story had leaked on the blogs months before, but now the show had caught up with its gossip: Meri had to find a way to acknowledge that she’d been catfished into an online affair by a woman posing as a dreamy man, who’d saved all her voice mails and photos. I remember being so angry at the rumors, like how dare this asshole ruin everything?
I get it; that’s a ridiculous reaction. But it had become important to believe that we’d been watching contented love, love in the way that we’d conditioned ourselves to want to see it—the little affects of affection that we recognized ourselves in. And I know that an Internet affair doesn’t mean that there was never love, or still isn’t. And I know that watching a show about a family was never going to give me any access into the quiet reality of that family’s problems. Doesn’t matter; it felt nice to watch them. That’s such a tepid word, nice, but it did.
The episode was edited so that Mer
i’s confession to the audience was interspersed with the dinner scene in which she could not find the words or nerve to fully confess to her family.
Kody and the wives were at a packed restaurant in a resort town in Alaska. The restaurant was startlingly loud, the lack of quiet staging a clear choice. We could hear dozens of other conversations, as the camera focused on Meri trying to push her voice beyond a quiver, then a sister wife to her left making a confused face. We could hear laughter from beyond the borders of the shot, glasses cheerfully clinking. The effect of this was near-profane. Meri was barely audible in the din. She fell silent again, looked down. She couldn’t say it.
Then her voice began to intone over the silence, and then the image followed her into a small confessional room, alone, the camera maybe two feet away from her face. Her eyes were a stark, wet greenish blue. Her hair was newly feathered. The feel was of a cross between an audition and a deposition.
She stared at the camera and said, I’m just in this place where I feel alone. Isolated. Lonely.
In the restaurant again, she told her family that she…she just didn’t know what to do. She trailed off. Another person laughed offscreen.
Then, back with us: I wake up in the mornings…and, I turn the music on in my house just so I can have some noise. It’s just. Quiet.
She turned her eyes up, like when she heard herself say it, she realized how pitiful it might sound.
A pause, then: It’s just lonely. I’m just lonely. I’m just alone.
She stopped talking and the camera lingered on her crying, actually alone, then went back to her at the dinner table, surrounded by the enormous apparatus of her family and the fame and the camera crew, eyes frozen, still alone. And I didn’t want to be watching then. Well, I did and I didn’t. I loved her confessional face, what I assume to be the conscious decision to add the makeup so that it could be cried through. And I loved the words, the depth of her emotion, the perfectly vulnerable way she looked up after describing the ritual of filling an empty home with music. And I loved the intimacy of being welcomed into this experience, along with you and 2.9 million others, the show’s highest rating since its premiere.
But I couldn’t shake the fact that part of the appeal was that Meri could vocalize this shame out to us millions more easily than she could to the ones we’ve watched her love and watched love her. And that the vividness of her loneliness, her breakdown, the thrill of being the ones to hear her explain it, was so seductive. As we watched, I had the thought that this was Meri at her best, that she had achieved peak connectivity, her performance never more articulate or more beautiful, and I didn’t like that I thought that.
By the end of the episode, Meri was asking for forgiveness, her family’s and ours. She told us she was sorry. She told us she could never fully explain. It felt like we didn’t know her at all, and also like we knew her very well. She looked tired.
On one of the blogs I read the next day, the headline was The truth is out!
At the end of the article there was a poll: What do we think, guys: Did Meri have a good reason for her betrayal?
And then another: Do you think she’ll be back for more next season?
19
I own buildings all over the place, model agencies, the Miss Universe pageant, jetliners, golf courses, casinos….But it wasn’t always so easy. About thirteen years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back and I won—big league. I used my brain, I used my negotiating skills, and I worked it all out. Now my company’s bigger than it ever was and stronger than it ever was, and I’m having more fun than I ever had.
—The Apprentice, Season 1, Episode 1
It’s a year or so later now than when I finished the first draft of most of these scenes and conducted most of these interviews, and many years since I watched some of these episodes, and since then Donald Trump has been elected president. Everything is more anxious now; every question of motivation is more shrill, more probing; every spectacle contains menace.
My editor has e-mailed asking for a postscript. (For the republic? I asked. Ha-ha!) In the e-mail he wrote: Though I have never been an avid viewer of reality television shows, I now find that its latest incarnation is personally overwhelming and all-consuming. I have, as it were, a far greater appreciation of the genre. We are all prisoners now.
I looked at the e-mail for a long time and tried to will myself to passionately disagree, but I couldn’t. It does feel so dramatic—We are all prisoners—but then every feeling feels that way now; hyperbole seems impossible to achieve. In all that feeling my editor’s point stands—if every word is a yell, every revelation a bombshell, every risk extreme, then it’s easy to see the prison of a certain kind of manic, manufactured type of existence being built around us.
At a party last night, a guy told me he listens to political podcasts on 1.5x speed because normal pauses make him feel like he’s not doing enough, or he’s missing the thing he needs, like what could be changing in the world in the seconds that some wonk stops to say Umm?
I have begun leaving my phone plugged in downstairs before going up to bed, so that the only image I might see before sleep is blank ceiling, your face, each a smudgy suggestion in the dark. But so often you are still engaged, and the screen glow traces a little box (yes, fine, the obvious prison metaphor) on the white ceiling.
“Did you see what the fucking president did this time?” you say.
I did. And then in the morning, I get down to my phone, find something that makes me feel terror or righteousness or that kind of numb sadness that doesn’t even bring the satisfaction of regular sadness, and I hold it out to you over coffee—Did you see?
* * *
—
Kristin Dombek’s wonderful book The Selfishness of Others is about how we’ve fretted over the destructiveness of narcissism since Narcissus himself. She makes the point that people have always been terrified of a swelling narcissism epidemic, and have looked backward with desperate wistfulness for a better time. She ends up here, in this modern moment, and of course she points to the way we discuss reality TV, how what we see there is a performance of a type of humanity that must have not existed before the shows encouraged it.
Reality TV presents the worst of who we think we have the capacity to be, she writes. And so when we watch we have to wonder, if we were coerced or empowered to defend or define ourselves out to a broadcast audience, would we sound the way that worst person sounds there on our screen? We don’t want to be that person there; part of the role of that person there is to remind us that we don’t want to be them. We want to be better than them. But the more we’re drawn to watch them, the more complicit we are in the type of humanity they advertise.
Dombek published her book in early 2016, probably started working on it years before, so the sentiment was pre-Trumpian, but (like everything, I suppose) it feels even more vivid now, doesn’t it? What does Trump display other than the empowered vocalization of unrelenting self-obsession? Which is something we’ve always loved to watch, and then wallow in—that stabbing, titillating anxiety of what the watching might say about us. But now every aspect of American discourse is dominated by a loud and unrepentant narcissist, the prick from The Apprentice, a ridiculed reality-TV buffoon. Now the object of scorn and fascination is causing constant, inarguable harm as we watch him. The anxiety of spectatorship keeps amplifying.
The call is out to rebel against reality TV. The call is out to move from guilty pleasure to just guilt—see the fevered piety of Jennifer Weiner in her New York Times op-ed, vowing to never again watch The Bachelor after the Trump presidency. The pressure feels greater now to be a decent person, a better person than the ever-displayed alternative, a person less concerned with his own petty pleasures, less concerned with petty pleasure in general. And I do want to be that person, but we still haven’t stopped watching.
Now we watch Vanderpump, and it feels extrameaningless, but there’s also the nagging fear that it’s meaningful, which doesn’t dull the pleasure. Mondays at ten, Jax is still there behaving in the awful way that we’ve always loved to watch him behave (All I’m saying is I pay for everything, I paid for those tits, and it would be nice to get a sandwich when I want a sandwich) and it feels more important to say to each other that he is awful, that we wish for his new girlfriend/costar to get away from that awfulness. Still, we watch. And when we do, we are at least slightly more inclined than ever before to reach toward the opposite consumptive desire in response to Jax, as though our interest in truth and empathy and connectivity might somehow absolve our interest in him: a crass, self-loving reality star who suddenly resembles the president.
I renewed my New York Times account, and we read what feels somber or urgent and talk about what we’ve read with somberness, with urgency. We click the monthly donation button (Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, all the hits) and commend each other for doing so and then say, No, to donate is not enough, we know that, we just read that. We join marches and then look at the pictures that we took of those marching around us and let the instant myth of that warm mutual empathy bathe us until we’re momentarily soothed. When we fail to march, we hate ourselves for it, and then hate ourselves for getting wrapped up in our own feelings, so we scroll through others’ march photos, liking, thanking them.
I’m not trying to mock these actions; I’m not trying to mock action at all, and I certainly don’t buy any argument about protest not counting if you take a selfie in the middle of it. To engage in anything that approximates solidarity and action feels so absolutely necessary, at least in part because apathy and self-regard feel so much more disgusting. But apathy and self-regard have always felt disgusting; that’s always been part of the equation: to hate it as you embody it. It’s the sense of being trapped in yourself even when you want not to be, and how the wanting tightens the trap. Where to look? What to feel? How to be?