More than once I have stood in the middle of the produce department struggling to open one of those infuriating plastic bags, intending to stuff it with the lovely broccoli that I found lurking behind the sad-looking bunches, and wondered if someone would pop up next to the piles of potatoes and say “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!” For those too young to remember, Allen Funt’s Candid Camera was perhaps the first reality television show, exposing normal people to unusual situations and filming their reactions. Broadcast on Sunday evenings during the 1960s, it was a popular family show that was based on Funt’s earlier radio program, Candid Microphone.
It seemed like harmless fun in a simpler time. The show had Woody Allen as an early writer and featured stars like Betty White, who would set up the gags. It was also where Donald Trump got his first taste of reality television stardom when he participated in a gag that enlisted matchmakers to find him the perfect woman. Really.
In 1973, PBS broadcasted the first voyeur-lite reality show, An American Family. The single series covered seven months in the life of the Loud family, hailed by anthropologist Margaret Mead as:
“a new kind of art form”—an innovation “as significant as the invention of drama or the novel.”
Mead passed away in 1978, and so missed the arrival, in 1992, of MTV’s The Real World and the 2000 debut of Big Brother. Both of these shows followed the lives of a group of strangers thrown together in a single house. And then there was Survivor, which always reminded me of a Lord of the Flies meets An American Family mashup.
The reality TV genre was popular among programmers for its low price, and among viewers for its novelty. It has grown into a ubiquitous genre that has multiple sub-genres. There are competitive/athletic shows, such as The Amazing Race, Biggest Loser, Project Runway, and Top Chef. In this sub-genre, skills are developed and applied in competitive races.
And then there are the competitive entertainment shows like American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance. These have an intrinsic entertainment value that occasionally transcends the competitive nature of the elimination.
But there are some shows that appear to exist solely to humiliate and demean the contestants/cast members, without providing any entertainment value other than pleasure to be gained from the pain of others. The appeal of The Bachelor has always escaped me: a group of women compete for the affections of a man. It’s hard to think of few things in life less appealing than a woman groveling for a man’s attention, but I do have friends who are devoted to this series, discussing the cast members as if they were real-life friends. I put shows like The Apprentice into this category as well, and not least because the prize—being an apprentice to Donald Trump—hardly seemed worth the competition. This is a show that built its audience on trailers that seem to consist of Trump firing people.
Shows like Undercover Boss also occupy the lowest rung. Reminiscent of the long-running Queen for a Day, this show puts the boss of a company in disguise and sends him out to spend time among the lower orders of his employees. Inevitably, the boss learns that hard work is hard and that some of his employees have tough lives. A $5,000 prize seems to be pretty standard reward for the employee with the most appealing hard luck story. (The few times I have watched this show I have wound up yelling at the screen that if the “boss” paid his employees a living wage they would not need his feel-good payoff.) When I was a little girl, I loved Queen for a Day and dreamt of someday earning the title, more for the robe and scepter than for the prizes, which tended to be things like washing machines for which I had little use. The debasement of the contestants as they competed on the basis of who had the most pathetic tale to tell sailed over my head.
Writing for Vanity Fair in 2009, James Wolcott succinctly expressed the emotional price we pay for reality TV:
Reality TV encourages and rewards vulgar, selfish, antisocial, pissy-pants behavior.
There is a more current study from 2016 that appears to back him up. Bryan Gibson, a psychologist at Central Michigan University, has found that:
watching reality shows with lots of what's called relational aggression — bullying, exclusion and manipulation — can make people more aggressive in their real lives.
It was a small study, consisting of 127 students at Central Michigan University who were divided into three groups. One watched shows like Jersey Shore or Real Housewives while another group viewed supposedly more benign reality shows like Little People, Big World. A third group watched scripted crime dramas like CSI. Those participants who watched the more aggressive shows like Jersey Shore tended to display greater aggression than those who watched the more benign shows, and even the crime dramas. The least aggression was shown by those who watched the benign shows. According to the study’s author:
"Many reality TV programs contain aggressive acts, mainly verbal or relational forms, and our goal, with this study, was to evaluate whether or not exposure to this type of program increases aggression," Gibson says.
"This research shows that these programs are not simply harmless entertainment. Exposure to this verbal and relational aggression increases physical aggression among their fans."
But more than spreading physical aggression among its fans, reality TV normalizes boorish behavior. Bullying, rumor-mongering, rudeness, selfishness, and spite are just a few of the behaviors this genre enshrines and encourages. In spite of the fact that these are emotions and actions that are basically scripted into the shows, viewers appear to accept them at face value. Few who watched The Apprentice ever knew about the racism and misogyny of its host.
It has been argued that The Apprentice led to Trump’s successful presidential run. But the roots go much deeper than that single show. Although The Apprentice did increase his name recognition, the genre as a whole has led to a society that now accepts boorish behavior as normal. We have become inured to the spiteful, nasty, and vulgar characteristics that make Donald Trump Donald Trump. As a society, we have seen them so often, from so many reality stars, that they no longer carries much impact.
So when journalists and pundits demand that we not normalize Donald Trump’s behavior as president, it’s hard not to bemoan just how long ago that ship sailed.