by Tim Wu
In 2009, with ratings in decline, Winfrey announced that her show would end after its twenty-fifth season, in 2011. In the first of the last episodes, she abruptly flew three hundred audience members to Australia on a plane piloted by John Travolta. The last season brought back some of her largest audiences, and might have been thought of as a fitting retirement; but in fact the ever-ambitious Winfrey was simultaneously launching her own cable network, OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network.
But even Winfrey was not immune to larger industry trends, and launching into an era of cable’s decline would not prove easy. Many could either not find the network amidst the hundreds of channels on offering, or did not care to bother; in its first year, the network lost as much as $330 million. Winfrey used various means to try to recapture the lightning she once held in a bottle—most successfully, an interview of Lance Armstrong, the cyclist, who confessed to using performance-enhancing drugs. But these were one-off events and the audiences did not stay. She also made a go of her old show’s religious aspiration with an ecumenical series named Belief, a program that would have qualified as public interest programming by the old metrics. While never quite losing her celebrity or strong reputation, she could no longer quite be considered the nation’s Attention Merchant-in-Chief.
By 2015, OWN had reverted to the basic logic of cable programming, which has always demanded catering to a niche audience. It repositioned itself primarily as a competitor to BET, Black Entertainment Television, finding success with soap operas like The Haves and Have Nots and If Loving You Is Wrong.29 But in any event, Winfrey’s own fade as a celebrity attention merchant might be taken as irrelevant given the spiritual survival of the model she created. For her one-woman show gave rise to successors like Ellen DeGeneres, Dr. Phil, Rachael Ray, and other celebrity-attention-product-endorsers faithfully following the Winfrey path.
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* Consider Matthew 16:9: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.”
CHAPTER 19
THE PANOPTICON
Since the day Tom Freston took over as CEO of MTV in 1987, he was determined to broaden what the network did. “What if MTV wasn’t just about music?” he liked to ask. It was a somewhat surprising question from the former advertising man and music lover who had been present at the creation and thus understood better than anyone the hidden genius of MTV’s founding business model. To outsiders, MTV’s concept was captured by the first video it had run, the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star”; this was rock music for television, a network targeting teenagers and twenty-somethings. That it was, but there was more going on; for it was also one of those businesses—the best kind—with a secret that makes it much more lucrative than anyone would imagine.1
Bob Pittman had been MTV’s first CEO, and he drove its unorthodox business model. Unlike nearly any other channel, MTV got nearly all of its content for free, nominal amounts, or even better than free. Pittman understood that the music labels wanted MTV to play their videos for a simple reason: it had become clear that a great video—say, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, or anything by Duran Duran—could create an indelible association for that artist and ultimately drive record sales through the roof. But the deal was even better than that. Not only was MTV getting its content for free, but the labels gave MTV exclusive rights to the most important videos, protecting the network from competition.*1 MTV was thus relieved even of the burden of devising its own programming.
In short, over the 1980s MTV was in the enviable position of selling advertisements off the attention captured from what were, essentially, advertisements in another form. Its costs were therefore limited to things like rent, paying its executives, and the young people, the “VJs,” who introduced the videos. The latter were cheap, too—salary was less than $30,000 a year, but there were perks like doing cocaine with rock stars during the MTV New Year’s special and other experiences beyond price.2 The combined effect of these favorable conditions meant that MTV defied the usual laws of gravity operative in most media businesses. By the mid-1980s, it was easily the most profitable of all the new cable networks.3
But Freston, when he took over from Pittman, was concerned that the network had an Achilles’ heel, the ultimate doom of all media businesses, really: it was what we have called the disenchantment effect. Flush though it was, MTV was utterly dependent on the popularity of music videos, which in the early 1980s had seemed so exciting and novel, as the decade wore on were starting to show their age. By 1987, there were troubling signs that the era defined by Thriller was coming to an end. “Problem was,” Freston said, “people started to feel they’d seen it all with regard to music videos.”4 It was also true that the labels, worried about piracy, were tightening their controls over new music arriving by video. All this implied that the music labels, from which so much revenue derived, might themselves be on borrowed time (as indeed they were). Like any prudent businessman, he wanted a hedge—something else, some other format, to prop up the business. But what else could MTV do?
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MTV’s executive programmers thought hard into the 1990s about what they could try without incurring the sort of brutal content overhead that had made life so precarious for other media and which stockholders would not abide anyway. They tried scheduling reruns of the 1960s hit The Monkees, with mixed results. One enterprising programmer was fixated on the idea of MTV running NFL games, wisely foreseeing that the real money would eventually be in sports; but it was not the best fit for the brand. Another idea was to rerun Saturday Night Live cut into pieces with music videos sprinkled in. Eventually the network began running a low-budget game show named Remote Control; with questions based on MTV trivia, it was “an excuse to do jokes.”5
One day, looking at their audience data, a young executive named Van Toffler had a different idea. He had noticed something striking: an overlap between MTV’s core audiences and viewers of daytime soap operas. Maybe MTV should start running soap operas. Serial dramas, if not traditionally the hippest kind of show, had since the 1930s been solid bets; and they tended to build long-term audience loyalties. It so happened that a new, teen-oriented prime-time soap called Beverly Hills 90210 was just then pulling viewers to the new Fox Network. And so MTV “decided to do a teen soap opera, with a rock n’ roll attitude.”6
Freston consulted Fred Silverman (whose programming had revived CBS in the early 1970s), and he suggested hiring Mary-Ellis Bunim. Over the previous decade, she had run one of the great legacy soaps, As the World Turns, a never-ending story of family drama and romance that had been running for some thirty years. Since its 1956 debut on CBS, it had been sponsored by the same soap company, Procter & Gamble, for which it had been created by Irna Phillips herself, the inventor of the genre.7
When MTV called, Bunim teamed up with another producer, Jonathan Murray, and began to work up a teen soap opera tentatively entitled St. Mark’s Place. It was planned as a serial drama about young people living in the East Village, hoping to make it as performers or artists or whatever—a kind of forerunner to the musical Rent. But when Bunim and Murray presented their budget, MTV’s executives balked. As Murray recalled, they said, “We get our music videos for free, and now we’re going to spend $300,000 for half an hour of television?”8 Apparently Freston and MTV had not completely thought through the idea of new formats; virtually any of them would require actually spending money on content.
Undaunted, Bunim and Murray regrouped. Looking for new inspiration, they got their heads out of the 1930s and found what they were looking for in perhaps an even unlikelier place: early 1970s public television, and more specifically, the documentary format. They starting thinking hard about a PBS show from the period called An American Family.
An American Family, filmed in 1971, was an innovative, twelve-part documentary created when PBS was at the height of its countercultural ambitions. For seven months, the producers followed the fairly typical upper-midd
le-class family of Pat and Bill Loud, who lived in Santa Barbara, California, with their five children. Intending to capture the intergenerational friction of the time, the creator Craig Gilbert opened the show with these words: “The Louds are neither average nor typical, no family is. They are not the American Family, they are simply an American Family.”9
Over those seven months, the Louds saw considerable turmoil. There were, for instance, the continuing tensions between Pat, the mother, and her eldest son, Lance, a long-haired twenty-year-old obsessed with the Velvet Underground. During the course of filming, Lance moved to New York, took up residence at the Chelsea Hotel, and made it clear to the audience that he was gay—making him perhaps the first openly gay person to appear on nonscripted television, certainly the first to out himself. Later in the season, deciding that she was dissatisfied with her life, Pat asked Bill for a divorce; by the end of the program, Bill had moved out of the house. The end was decidedly melancholy—yes, it was still an American Family, but now a broken one.
When it ran in 1973, An American Family had attracted large audiences—gigantic by public television standards—and also provoked a national discussion. Gilbert’s frame was essentially critical; he portrayed the Louds, particularly the father, Bill, as being obsessed with material success at the cost of family itself. They became “a symbol of disintegration and purposelessness in American life.” As such, the show was generally regarded as a serious documentary achievement, with one critic allowing that “never was there greater realism on television except in the murders of Oswald and Robert Kennedy.” It is difficult to describe the extent of its resonance; as Esquire contended, “I doubt if in the history of the tube there has been so much talk about anything.”10 Many wondered about what social scientists call the Hawthorne effect, the extent the very act of observation and filming had influenced what happened; and thus, there were those who thought the show exploitative and misleading—including, eventually, the family themselves. Among the documentary’s most prominent defenders was the anthropologist Margaret Mead. “It may be as important for our time,” she said on public television, “as were the invention of drama and the novel for earlier generations: a new way to help people understand themselves.”11
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By the 1990s, the Louds and An American Family were but a distant memory for most, and unknown to the young. Bunim and Murray seized on the idea of adapting the documentary format and its use of ordinary people to the dramatic purposes of soap opera; the aim was to produce a new kind of program, a “documentary soap.” Unlike the original, which had relied on an actual family, their show would feature a less traditional kind of group—a “new nuclear family.” Still evidently musing about their pricey idea for a proto-Rent, Murray and Bunim decided to assemble a group of twenty-year-old aspiring artists to live together in a group house. They would film all that transpired there.12
For MTV the price was right. Each of the cast members was paid a mere $1,400 for living several months of their lives on camera and creating enough raw footage for thirteen episodes.13 While it was never expressed this way, it became clear, over time, that the “talent” was actually being paid in attention, as opposed to cash; and so in this way a new format, not yet known as reality television, managed to preserve MTV’s existing business model.
Bunim and Murray interviewed some five hundred applicants, finally narrowing the pool down to seven “ordinary people” ranging in age from nineteen to twenty-five. They wanted a diverse mix and they got one: there was a Southern girl, Julie, who would be the “fish out of water”; a male model from the Midwest, named Eric; Heather, a hip-hop performer; Kevin the poet; and so on. The next step was finding the show’s “stage.” After an exhaustive search, the producers found a four-thousand-square-foot loft in New York’s SoHo, which in the early 1990s was still considered an artistic neighborhood. The place was converted into a four-bedroom residence and outfitted with hidden cameras, microphones, and spaces from which the producers could watch the residents. With that setup in place, Bunim and Murray let the cameras roll (albeit with plenty of close-ups, a soap opera standby) and waited for the hoped-for soap opera to play out.14
In May 1992, the show debuted with this voice-over:
This is the 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 and start getting real—The Real World.
The new show gained immediate attention for its courageous and unusual format, but also met with some fairly rough initial reviews. “Watching The Real World, which fails as documentary (too phony) and as entertainment (too dull), it’s hard to tell who’s using who more,” wrote a critic for USA Today.15 By the end of the first season, however, the critical tide had begun to turn. John J. O’Connor of The New York Times: “Billed as a reality-based soap opera, MTV’s ‘Real World’ is real largely by accident, and its seven principal players are far too independent to be stuffed into a tidy little soap opera. Yet this force-fed documentary series…has been steadily evolving into the year’s most riveting television, a compelling portrait of twentysomethings grappling with the 90’s.”16
O’Connor argued that it would probably be best if The Real World were to end after one season. But Freston had other ideas. As the ratings came in, he began to realize that he might have found his dreamed-of hedge against a coming video crash; and so MTV commissioned a second season, set in Los Angeles. It attracted much larger audiences than its predecessor, and so there naturally followed a third season and a fourth. Over time the show and its format became the cornerstone of the new MTV, freeing it from its parlous dependence on music videos.
As early as season two, there were subtle changes made to the format of The Real World, carrying it further in spirit from An American Family. The first season had put more faith in the concept of simply filming young people struggling for a break; the characters, if callow, are likable and thoughtful. At times the show plays like an edited college seminar, albeit with some romance thrown in. But by contemporary standards it is very talky and somewhat short on action. As a retrospective written in 2011 by The A.V. Club put it, the show seemed “incredibly, achingly earnest, bracingly raw, and sweetly idealistic.”17
Fairly early on, Bunim and Murray learned how hard it was to conjure up drama among reasonable, thoughtful people, even those in their twenties. So as the show went on, it came to depend on casting more inherently ridiculous or difficult people who could be guaranteed to stir up trouble in the house. In the second season, for example, David Edwards, a twenty-one-year-old aspiring comedian, is led by his comic instincts to pull the blanket off a female housemate clad in only her underwear, and in the aftermath, to expose himself to his housemates. After a lengthy debate, David was eventually expelled from the house—creating the “kicked off the island” narrative that would soon drive many shows.18
The success of The Real World drew forth imitators, including several from within MTV itself, hoping to re-create the same formula of low costs and good ratings. Bunim and Murray, having discovered the potential of naturally ridiculous people, would go on to produce The Simple Life, centered on a dim-witted heiress named Paris Hilton making her way on a farm, a revival of the “rural” motif that Fred Silverman had thrown overboard in the 1970s.
But each iteration of the formula faced that same question: What could create enough friction and drama to make the show interesting, but still supposedly real, without the power of the pen? The Real World’s unpredictability was good enough for a comparatively low-rent MTV slot, but if the new format was to be grafted on the more expensive evening schedule of network television, consistent dramatic effect was a prime imperative. Answering the problem would once again mean drawing inspiration from the past, in this case the 1950s.
While many people were probably drawn to the same idea, in 1994 a British producer named Charlie Parsons pitched the idea of mixing The Real World’s documentary format with a 1950s game show structur
e and dramatic competition. The idea was called, fittingly, a “documentary game show.” As part of a production team, including Bob Geldof, onetime lead singer of the Boomtown Rats and later the founder of Live Aid, Parsons pitched the new format to Swedish public television. Originally named Castaway and later Expedition Robinson, the show, set on a remote desert island, staged an ongoing physical competition under constant surveillance. The sixteen contestants were divided into two “tribes,” who would live on the island for about a month; at the end of each episode, one player would be voted off the island by the others.19
The show was a hit in Sweden, and when Parsons sold it elsewhere it was renamed Survivor. In the United States, its viewership grew and grew, just as the hit game shows of the 1950s had. When the first season’s final episode in 2000 managed to attract 50 million viewers, matching some of the larger audiences in television history, it was clear that the new mode of content—by this time widely described as “reality television”—was literally ready for prime time.
What was the draw? In some ways the appeal of the new reality shows was no mystery. Like soap operas and other serial dramas, they had had story lines and plots that only seemed spontaneous. These largely involved interpersonal relationships and conflict, as well as memorable (if broadly drawn) characters, like “Snooki” and “The Situation” from Jersey Shore or any of the “housewives” from The Real Housewives. All those elements were arguably as old as Amos ’n’ Andy. At the same time, game-show-inspired reality programs like Survivor depended on the classic drama of a sports match: the game had rules, the outcome was uncertain, there would be winners and losers, and meanwhile there was plenty of suspense and elbows thrown. There isn’t much mystery to that formula at all.