TRUE STORY
What Reality TV Says About Us
By Danielle J. Lindemann
“Never in the history of showbiz has the gap between amateur and professional been so small. And never in the history of the world has there been such a rage for exhibitionism,” the pop culture critic Albert Goldman declared in 1978. “The question is, therefore, what are we going to do with all these beautiful show-offs?” For Goldman, the answer was disco, the dance club as Dionysian mother ship, but a year later disco died of derision and white male hetero backlash. Thereafter, the surplus production of narcissists writhing for attention continued to mount, until reality TV arrived to sop up all this human capital and put its antsy energy to use. No talent, no training, no inhibitions? No problem!
PBS’s “An American Family” (1973) is usually given the nod as the pioneer reality TV series, though in technique and tact it hewed to the more traditional, unobtrusive humanism of cinéma vérité. It was MTV’s “The Real World” (1992), “Laguna Beach” (2004) and “The Hills” (2006), and CBS’s “Survivor” (2000), that established the genre as soap opera, eye-candy revue and behavioral laboratory where every genuine or manufactured slight and misunderstanding could be stoked for maximum friction and eventual psychodrama. Cheap to produce, fast to shoot, exhausting to perform, edited into a sharded crossfire of reaction shots, reality TV proved itself an expedient, maneuverable vehicle optimized for speed, sensation and easy replication. With its rotating clusters of housewives, Kardashians, deck crews, dance moms, teen moms, top chefs, top models, 90-day fiancés, bachelors, bachelorettes, apprentices, house hunters and drag racers, reality TV — once prime time’s tacky, tag-along cousin — has mutated into a real-fake pro-am multiverse.
While lacking the prestige and starlight of scripted series, the prospect of Nicole Kidman gracing us with her luminous shimmer, reality TV has exhibited enough influence and durability to earn Serious Treatment on top of the customary snickers and patronizing sneers, and here it is: Danielle J. Lindemann’s “True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us.” A professor of sociology at Lehigh whose previous books have studied commuter marriages and the professional dominatrix — excellent preparation for parsing the adventures of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” — Lindemann contends that, by holding up a mirror to society, reality TV has much to impart once we get past the histrionics. “It may seem counterintuitive that a genre focused on zany personalities and extreme cases has so much to teach us about our own ordinary lives,” she writes, yet stare hard enough and you’ll perceive your own warped features goggling back: “We’re voyeurs, but part of what tantalizes us about these freak shows is that the freaks are ourselves.” (I prefer Goldman’s designation of “beautiful show-offs,” better anticipating the buffed hedonism of “Vanderpump Rules,” “Love Island” and “Too Hot to Handle,” but let’s not get hung up on nomenclature.) The point is that for Lindemann, reality TV viewing isn’t passive ingestion but a subtle preening process, a phantom codependency. It’s a phenomenon worth studying, she writes, “because of what it does to us. The experience of watching these shows, like looking in any mirror, is interactive. We see ourselves, and then we groom ourselves accordingly.”
Here, grooming time at the zoo is broken down into exhaustively researched chapters exploring how the medium depicts, distorts or dodges altogether intricacies of race and gender (the stereotyping of Black women as incipient volcanoes), class, sexuality, childhood, family and so on: the intersectional combo platter. No matter how swingy-dingy the shows appear, there is a conservative underlay that keeps familiar norms in place. Lindemann is instructive on the power differential between men and women in reality TV, how differently they’re regarded and rewarded for their antics and facial calisthenics. “With his braggadocio and his penchant for gold décor, Donald Trump might have made an excellent Real Housewife,” she observes. “Yet these women are still throwing wineglasses at one another on Bravo, and he’s been president.” Diverse and inclusive as reality TV has become, male prerogative still occupies the top bunk.
Although Lindemann succumbs to jargony platitudes (bisexuality “messes with our idea of a stark heterosexual/homosexual binary”) and leans heavily on lead-footed heavyweights of discourse (Weber, Foucault), she has a wry eye and ear for the key role that status plays in these confabulations, the contrast between Lisa Vanderpump’s “sprawling mansion with miniature horses and a swan moat” and the couches where Honey Boo Boo and kinfolk drop anchor to share cheeseballs from a jar. In its cheerful plunder of the rackety edges of American life, reality TV takes up where Tom Wolfe left off, scouring the scene for signifiers and peppering us with them.
It is impertinent for a reviewer to play editor, but I believe “True Story” might have benefited from a chapter devoted to loyalty. It is the binding theme of so many of these programs (even the competitors on “Project Runway” and “Top Chef” express comradeship), the ethical precept whose violation animates the jaw-dropping, double-take sense of betrayal that gives the cast’s infighting its rooting interest. Loyalties can shift over the course of a season or story arc: friends finking on friends, allies turning traitor, nemeses offering a helping hand, reversals of fortune. Veteran cast members develop jungle instincts as to who has their back and who doesn’t, their air kisses becoming chillier in the presence of possible treachery, each posh dinner party or gala store opening the stage for a potential snub, insult, ambush or cross-examination, akin to an Edith Wharton drawing room plushly prepared for human sacrifice.
Schisms within a group are treated to intensive, nitpicky scrutiny. “I am sick of being on the hot seat,” Sutton Stracke complained in a recent episode of “R.H.O.B.H.,” the “hot seat” being not merely a figure of speech but reality TV’s reupholstered hand-me-down from Esalen-style group therapy and improvisational theater. Getting grilled over one’s deeds and motives is another mechanism to generate conflict and confessional outbursts. Instead of the Gestalt guru Fritz Perls poking and prodding, it’s the slickly affable Andy Cohen, the executive producer of the “Real Housewives” franchise, applying the pressure at those marauding grievance sessions known as the reunion shows, jimmying the cracks to release another jet or two of bad blood from his battle-weary cast. (Almost invariably, somebody huffs off the set, tailed by a galumphing camera crew.) This is why reality TV viewers put up with all that mundane filler and meaningless palaver, for the climactic character reveals. The relationship of reality TV to its audience and how it reflects societal change make for a worthy investigation, but it’s the heightened interdynamics of the casts themselves that deliver the dopamine bursts that keep us engaged, even as we know we’re being snookered by smartly crafted, blatantly contrived, alcohol-sluiced make-believe. Pedagogical pretenses aside, we respond to reality TV at the level of feeling, Lindemann acknowledges, not intellection: “Despite its serious and teaching moments, it’s primarily about pleasure after all.”
Which raises the question of how much social relevance reality TV is actually hauling. In the book’s conclusion Lindemann nimbly attempts to play both sides of the net, arguing that reality TV is “both a guilty goody and a nutritional bite,” an “occasional educational nugget” smuggled inside the chewy nougat. Lest we become too complacent feeding our faces, she chastens us with the “sobering truths” exposed onscreen: “By watching these seemingly trivial programs about partyers, overeaters and vaginal rejuvenators, we can see how those in power benefit from our validation of the status quo.” You could dislocate a shoulder with such overreach, but hyperbole is a byproduct of Lindemann’s crusading zeal, as befits a fan who gave shout-outs to “Project Runway” and “Bad Girls Club” in her wedding vows. Her enthusiasm tends to inflate her extrapolations but a drier accounting would have been dull sledding. Reality TV is at its strongest when it stays inside the frame, sticks to the evidence, and doesn’t try to de Tocqueville the audience.
