The Devastating Experiment in Televised Reality
It all started in 1938. Spelling Bee was the first radio and television broadcast of a show that used ordinary people as the fodder for entertainment. Pitting regular people against one another in contests of mental skill to be shown to thousands of strangers who might then have their own chance to compete was a stroke of genius in a brand new medium.
By the mid-1950s, the game show format was one of the most watched and most heavily funded silos in American television. What’s My Line? To Tell the Truth. This Is Your Life. The Price is Right. Twenty-One. The $64,000 Question.
Of course, with the huge amounts of advertising money being made, there were bound to be fixes. The 1958 Twenty-One scandal involving producers Dan Enright and Albert Freedman as they manipulated the results by feeding WASP-y Charles Van Doran the answers so that the face of the show was not über-Jewish Herb Stempel was the first big case of network curation.
As told in the 1994 Robert Redford film Quiz Show the scandal was less about the money and more about the narrative the network wanted to tell. Enright and Freedman knew that a white, upper-class college professor winning a televised knowledge contest was a better story than the Bronx-born Jewish Post Office Clerk. Both men were fed answers but Van Doran brought in more ratings so they flipped Stempel out.
As the format continued to thrive more cases of cheating (both from the network and contestants) occurred. On top of the challenges of televised competitions came other bizarre moments that showed the cracks in televising real people. The Super Password winner who turned out to be a fugitive wanted in three states. The Bullseye contestant who was a serial killer. The Dating Game contestant who won a date with a convicted rapist.
While the game show format was lucrative, the use of regular people in televised settings gained steam in other areas. 1948’s Candid Camera used the reactions of bystanders pranked as entertainment. In 1958, interviewer Jack Wyatt questioned convicted criminals on Confession. 1964 was the year Paul Almond and Michael Apted began documenting the lives of fourteen British children spanning 63 years with the Up documentary series.
The 12-part 1973 PBS series An America Family showed a typical WASP family going through divorce and a complete televised breakdown of the family. In its own meta-moment, HBO and writer David Seltzer made a movie about the series starring Diane Lane, Tim Robbins, and James Gandolfini entitled Cinema Verite in 2011.
The Gong Show with it’s amateur hour format. COPS with its highly edited ride-alongside with actual working police. Producer George Schlatter capitalized on the advent of videotape to create Real People in 1979.
By the mid-eighties, the curation of real lives on TV took a cue from the highly popular talk show format of The Tonight Show to create daytime tabloid talk shows. Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue, Geraldo Rivera, Sally Jesse Raphael, and Jenny Jones ruled the airwaves with increasingly lurid narratives of actual people having sex with their sisters, marital cheating, secret cross-dressers, and Neo-Nazis. In 1984, with the case of an unwitting guest finding out his crush was his homosexual friend and subsequently gunning him down, the trial became the first televised court proceeding and helped Court TV begin to craft our legal system with advertising dollars behind it.
MTV, in 1992, introduced an expansion of the reality television idea with The Real World which had been inspired by both An American Family and the 1991 Dutch television show Nummer 28. American Idol. Survivor. Big Brother. The Biggest Loser. Wife Swap. Cheaters.
As more and more opportunities came to ordinary people to become famous for outrageous behavior and the technology allowed for better and more efficient editing to craft a network-desired narrative, the ordinary people learned to perform for the camera in ways that the surprised folks on Candid Camera could never have imagined.
Today, the circle is complete. The Skinner Boxes we live within are saturated with regular people who now have the unlimited capacity and technology to create their own versions of reality media via a smartphone, YouTube, and a narrative crafted out of their own design.
As Marshall McLuhan famously stated “The message is the medium.” The medium today is the internet and the unfettered access for a fully democratized series of messages supported by a distribution model bolstered entirely by appealing to the lowest common denominator.
Broadcast and cable news is just barely more substantive than reality media. YouTube has millions of people tuning in to watch videos of bad customer service moments, neighbors arguing about parking spaces, road rage incidents, racist tirades, and self declared citizen patrols designed to shame people into putting their shopping carts away properly.
For every Karen Calling the Manager video there is another type of Karen filming her to call the public opinion managers.
Videos of conspiracy theorists are embraced and shared across platforms about everything under the sun. Videos of police overreach and citizen activists defying the police in increasingly aggressive manner.
I recall a Northwestern DNA expert railing against television shows like CSI. The gist of his gripe was that the science behind these shows is mostly fiction but that the proliferation of the narrative that authorities have amazing technology at their disposal cements a fictional belief over time. Perception is simply not reality and it affects how we behave. It affects our choices based on false evidence and framing.
With reality media being manipulated by everyone from foreign governments to Critical Race Theorists to the president, the sum of its parts breeds a belief that nothing we see or read or hear is absent of spin. No media can be trusted. No one can be trusted.
Of course supporters of Bernie Sanders believe undyingly in the corruption of the DNC. Of course, a rabid 5% of the country believes that COVID is either a Chinese weapon or a Democrat takedown of the economy. Of course, progressives believe that all police officers are racists. They all saw it on YouTube so it must be true.
The crux of the result of this is simply that the only trusted source of information is one’s lived experience which is always tainted by emotional reaction, false assumptions, and a narcissistic tendency to see oneself at the center of all things.
The peril of reality media isn’t that there is no such thing as reality. It is that, over time, our perception of reality is completely distorted. No contest is trusted to be fair because there will always be a Charles Van Doran waiting for his answers. No potential partner can believed because there will always be that rapist and serial killer you might be dating. Everything is a prank foisted upon you by the multiple Alan Funts in waiting.
No wonder Americans can’t come together to weather a pandemic.
