Chapter Four

This Is Not My Beautiful House!

Class Anxiety, Hyperconsumerism, and Mockery of the Poor

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself, “Well . . . how did I get here?”

—TALKING HEADS, “Once in a Lifetime”

Don Mueller, the forty-eight-year-old father at the center of NBC’s Who Wants to Marry My Dad? seemed like a great catch. After all, he had good looks, three telegenic kids, and a sprawling Southern California mansion with a pool, a hot tub, and a six-car garage (the better to fit his red Ferrari convertible).

Welcoming a dozen potential stepmoms to the impressive estate they’d be sharing with his family for several weeks, twenty-two-year-old son Chris said, proudly, “This is our house.”

Except . . . it wasn’t.

Despite the entry sign that read THE MUELLERS and the family photos on the walls, the Muellers actually call Glendale, Cincinnati, home. Don does well for himself, running a map-printing business with more than one hundred employees, but while the dapper dad’s real house is very nice, it’s hardly palatial. There’s no pool, no six-car garage, and no $165,000 sports car.

Don does own a hot tub, though.¹ That puts him way ahead of most of the contestants of the show’s predecessor, Meet My Folks, where parents creepily selected their sons’ or daughters’ future sex partners from among a brood of opportunists who slept in their lavish homes, languished by their pools, and made out in their hot tubs. The catch? The ostentatious McMansions where the shows were filmed never belonged to “the folks.” The precious keepsakes and trophies on the mantels? The high-end sofas on which they sat in judgment of the young daters hoping to win a free vacation fling with their kids? The Jacuzzis that sparked inevitable scandals? All staged, Executive Producer Scott Satin explained to Television Week.

Each episode of Meet My Folks featured a different cast of characters and a new sign above the front door bearing their name (for example, THE BLAN-KENSHIPS, who starred in the series opener).² Both shows shared a similar blink-and-you’d-miss-it disclaimer whizzing by during the closing credits:

PARTICIPANT FAMILY DOES NOT RESIDE AT FILMING LOCATION.

Satin told the press that fake homes were used on Meet My Folks because “When a girl brings home a boy to meet her parents, it’s a lot more intimidating if you are in their own home.” On the other hand, he chalked up Dad’s extravagant new digs to logistics: the house needed to be big enough to accommodate the contestants and crew.³

That’s his story, but I don’t buy it. More likely, “the folks” on Satin’s shows, and on so many others, are relocated from their own modest homes (or—horrors!— apartments) to erase anything so banal as an average, middle-class existence.

For immediate branding purposes, integrated marketers prefer upscale homes as the “sets” where their products will be showcased. Like the opulent, fifty-two-room Manhattan penthouse Donald Trump gloated about to the “job applicants” on The Apprentice: “If you are really successful . . . you’ll all live just like this.”^br And taking a longer view, reality TV producers would rather we lust after the exorbitant lifestyles of pampered trophy wives and mistresses on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Orange County (and New York, Atlanta, and New Jersey), wealthy bachelors on The Millionaire Matchmaker, and a certain bad-toupee-wearing real estate mogul. The “rich bitch” duo of ditzy trust fund brats on The Simple Life weren’t presented to us simply as subjects for the kind of “dumb blond” mockery discussed in chapter 3; they were meant to be unconscious object lessons.^bs Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s self-indulgent lives of frivolity and excess stoke our fantasies of wealth, power, and privilege—the very outlook advertisers always attempt to foster. Watching the bad behavior of heiresses, Housewives, and captains of industry on such shows plays on Americans’ twin desires to hate the rich for having what most of us don’t—and, ultimately, to be them.⁴

Unfortunately, that American dream of prosperity and plenty is getting farther out of reach for the vast majority of us. By the end of 2009, unemployment rates had risen to a staggering 10 percent, with 15.3 million people jobless. And even before the banking and housing collapses of 2008 and 2009, the gap between the wealthiest and poorest individuals had grown greater than our country has seen since the Great Depression: The top 1 percent of the population control 42.7 percent of the nation’s wealth (and the bottom 80 percent of Americans control only 7 percent). That inequity is compounded by race and gender: People of color have 15 cents for every dollar of white wealth, according to United for a Fair Economy ⁵. And as Meizhu Lui, director of the Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative, writes, “Single women of working age between 18 and 64 have only 36 cents of wealth to the single man’s dollar” and by “2004, single white women had around $24,000 in wealth, while African-American women at the median had only $2000 dollars to fall back on. And for Latinas? Nada.” Women of color are also less likely than white women and men to have health insurance.⁶

In the face of these stark realities, the magnification and misrepresentation of affluence in reality television plays a dangerous game with our expectations, our desires, our spending patterns—and our country’s economic stability.

Mocking the Poor

We’ve seen the crucial role finance plays in reality romance, but it’s not only dating and lifestyle shows that are steeped in economic undercurrents. In reality TV, class issues run deeper than the transaction between commodified female body and privileged male provider, as seen on The Bachelor and The Millionaire Matchmaker. As middle-income mortgages are whitewashed away with mansions designed to make cast members appear admirably rich, producers play on the pathos of poverty for dramatic impact or, worse, for cheap laughs.

Such class anxiety is acute in competition shows, where financially strapped women are taunted with the dream of a better life. Broke but busty babes beg for a photo shoot payday on America’s Next Top Model, proclaiming that posing nearly (or, sometimes, completely) nude for Tyra Banks’s parade of integrated marketers is their only shot at economic security. Year after year, American Idol has gone even further, overtly making fun of low-income women’s desperation to get out of dead-end jobs at McDonald’s or Wal-Mart with paychecks that don’t allow them to properly feed, clothe, and house their kids. From the hundreds of hours of filmed tryouts in numerous cities season after season, producers cherry-pick for scenes of young, poor single moms, often African American and Latina, who—just before painfully off-key performances—say they just know that Idol will be their stepping-stone to a better life. Then, after their inevitable ear-splitting auditions and cutting commentary from the judges, cameras follow the pitch-poor rejectees out of the Idol studios and down the block as they head home, cursing and crying about their dashed dreams, dragging sad toddlers behind them. All the while, Idol host Ryan Seacrest takes snarky swipes at their pathetic pipes. Thought you could escape poverty through song? Hilarious!^bt

If you’re like most reality watchers, you’ve probably asked yourself why anyone would willingly volunteer to be humiliated on national television. Though some are actors (and others hope to be), for many participants fame is less of a motivator than the chimera of a more comfortable life without daily struggle to meet the most basic of human needs for themselves and their children. This is especially true of women of color, who, though marginalized in the reality TV population in general, seem to compose a major percentage of poor cast members. Nearly every season, both Idol and Top Model broadcast a familiar refrain from young women: “This is my only chance to . . . ” fill-in-the-blank: get out of the “inner city”; leave my Nowheresville, U.S.A., hometown behind; provide a better life for my child; or, for some contestants, all of the above.

When ethnicity is factored in, reality TV’s mockery of the poor becomes particularly ugly. VH1’s unholy trinity of race-, class-, and gender-biased programming—Flavor of Love, I Love New York, and Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School—epitomizes this theme. The first season of Charm School claimed to offer training in “manners,” “poise,” and “grace under pressure” for “nasty, vicious, and rough-around-the-edges” (mostly) Black women⁷. Instead, it provides a telling case study in broadcast bigotry.

Through comments from comedian and host Mo’Nique, video montages, and promo ads, viewers were explicitly encouraged to believe that women of color are “low-class” both figuratively and literally. In the opening episode, a barrage of clips aims to reintroduce the Flavor of Love competitors as violent, ignorant whores. Mo’Nique explains that her job is to help “unruly” girls who “looked like hookers” become “refined women” by serving as “a mentor to guide them on a path toward self-respect.” The first step on this lofty path? Dress adults in their late twenties and early thirties in naughty Catholic schoolgirl uniforms straight out of a fetish costume catalog.

The “students” are then informed that the last woman standing—supposedly the one who “grows” the most, though in actuality the one who creates the most drama for VH1—will win $50,000. Saaphyri, an unemployed black woman from “the hood,” reacts with wonder and guarded hope. “To me, $50,000 is a home.” That money, she muses, “would change my life tremendously. I’d be able to pay my rent, first of all, because right now my landlord is really waiting for that.” When the judges ask her, “What do you really hope to take away from this experience, really?” she offers a heartfelt reply: “Something more than what I have right now. Last year I was on 54th and Briarhurst. And we didn’t have floors because the pipes had broke. We couldn’t cook. I didn’t have anywhere to go. I was so depressed. I was like, ‘This is horrible.’”

It was a rare moment for reality television, which generally leaves this level of insight about poverty on the cutting room floor. But since these shows are not set up to react in a human way to such revelations, Charm School ’s smug, white, wealthy “dean,” Keith Lewis (director of the Miss California Teen USA pageant) offered only condescension. “To have $50,000,” he lectured, “is nothing compared to what you could get out of everything else.”^bu

When Saaphyri expresses her anger at Lewis’s remark, saying he “doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about” because “$50,000 to me is like saying $5 million right now,” producers freeze-frame the scene with the sound of a scratched-record, a TV-land indicator that something crazy has just occurred. This bit of audiovisual mockery was chosen to discount and even ridicule her honest expression of deep financial distress. For daring to admit that the prize money would offer her a far better chance at self-improvement than VH1’s insincere “schooling,” this formerly homeless woman was edited to appear money-hungry, crass, and “ghetto.”

Exploitation in the name of etiquette has become a thematic staple on the numerous pseudo-self-help imitators Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School has spawned, from Rock of Love: Charm School to The Girls of Hedsor Hall to versions for men, such as Tool Academy and From G’s to Gents.

The Ideology of Conspicuous Consumption

When reality producers aren’t painting low-income women of color as “ghetto hos,” a popular label on V H1’s of Love franchise^bv and a host of other shows, they’re dangling symbols of wealth just out of contestants’ (and the audience’s) reach. As viewers, we’re meant to grasp at the lifestyles held up before us like diamond-encrusted carrots dangling from platinum-plated sticks.

In the talent competition, fashion, and lifestyle subgenres, hypercommercialism isn’t subtext, it is the text. Interior designers compete to create upscale rooms for eight grand a pop and furnish lofts for $187,000 on Bravo’s Top Design. Fashion designers whip up red-carpet-caliber dresses on Bravo’s Project Runway, where “it looked expensive!” is the judges’ highest mark of praise.^bw Style luminaries Oscar de la Renta and Diane von Furstenberg themselves show up on Bravo’s The Rachel Zoe Project to plug their exclusive lines, from which any one item can cost more than most people spend on their entire wardrobes. On Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style (again, Bravo), luxe clothing and accessory brands like Gucci and Prada (as well as midrange department stores such as Macy’s) appear as catalysts for women to “achieve” major “life transformations”—synonymous for “getting new looks”—which are only complete once subjects are given an haute couture gown from a different designer’s showroom each episode. Bravo’s first major reality show, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, did the same thing to men in 2003, hawking a ludicrously long line of fashion, personal grooming, and home furnishing products to a previously untapped demographic. On each episode, after having gotten the once-over from the Queer Eye’s Fab 5, a formerly slovenly dude had the epiphany that all he needs to do to lure in the ladies is plunk down excessive amounts of cash for tubes of ritzy hair gel, bottles of lavender-scented misting spray for high-thread-count linens, and an apartment full of new furniture.

As culture scholar Shira Tarrant writes, “Change has a price tag” on makeover shows. “Because transformation is something you buy, not something you are,” wealth is the distinguishing factor between those who “can pay to discover our True Self,” and “the poor [who] can never become.”⁹

Bravo may have branded itself as the go-to network for shop-o-rama reality shows, but it has hardly cornered the market: TLC’s What Not to Wear (WNTW) was redoing women’s wardrobes inside Bloomingdale’s, Searle, and H&M stores for almost five years before the debut of Tim Gunn’s better-mannered, higher-end copycat. Nearly three years before Bravo’s Top Chef hopefuls competed to prepare the most impressive lobster, Kobe beef, and truffle delicacies, actors paid by NBC to pose as real-life customers, supped on the equivalent of a couple of months’ rent over dinner and drinks for two at The Restaurant (this isn’t “food,” this is “cuisine,” darling!). And Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (EM: HE) has been giving “deserving families” pricey appliances and decor from Sears since 2003, when the department store paid ABC more than $1 million for narrative integration into the series.¹⁰ Through it all, participants are shown using the goods and services of integrated marketers; for example, Glad, GE, Butterball, and Diet Dr. Pepper are served up on Top Chef, while L’Oréal, TRESemmé, Bluefly.com, and Saturn are integral to Project Runway. But while the brands may shift from show to show, one thing is consistent: Contestants are constantly ordered to “make it” (the furniture, frocks, or food) “seem expensive” or “luxurious.”

When compared with the heavy-handed chauvinism of Joe Millionaire, the vicious cruelty of The Swan, or the blatant racism of Flavor of Love, watching programs like Project Runway and Top Design can be a pleasure. In contrast to the typical format of preying on participants’ shaky mental health or liquoring them up to stoke petty dramas, Bravo’s competition shows prioritize something else: talent. We’re blown away when Project Runway’s gifted cast produces stunning garments armed only with vegetables, flowers, duct tape, and their own imaginations. We’re inspired to modify Top Design contestants’ inventive ideas to beautify our own homes. We make New Year’s resolutions to cook at home more often with recipes we saw on Top Chef (that is, when we’re not encouraged to drop a few hundred per plate at five-star restaurants where meals are garnished with avocado foam and truffles).

By now it’s no secret that I’m not a big fan of reality television. I’ve watched more than a thousand hours of “unscripted” programming since 2000 in my research for this book,^bx and I’ve found most of it painful (Dr. 90210), aggravating (The Bachelor), or mind-numbingly boring (The Hills). But I would watch a show like Project Runway even if I didn’t have to. Differences among participants’ identities, whether in sexual orientation, ethnicity, or gender, are not only “tolerated,” they’re actually respected and appreciated. Challenges celebrate contestants’ artistry rather than reveling in their weakness. Competitors create something fabulous under tight deadlines, using weird materials. It’s like MacGyver meets Milan (You’ve got ten hours to make a runway-ready outfit out of coffee filters from Gristedes, silver foil wrappers from Hershey’s, and as many Saturn seatbelts as you want. Make it work!).^by Sure, small dramas are stirred up to fill time, but Project Runway is innovative, engaging, and accessible. To a lesser degree, the same can be said for Bravo’s other lifestyle competition shows, where creativity is key even as infighting is encouraged. Top Chef may leave some viewers more hungry than entertained, but foodies really enjoy it. The editors at ApartmentTherapy.com, a popular interior design blog, regularly go gaga for Top Design.

By showcasing skill instead of shame, could it be that Bravo’s kinder, gentler competition and lifestyle series have no negative social consequences? Is there finally a segment of the reality TV landscape that isn’t bad for us?

I really wish the answer were yes. Unfortunately, though they may be less offensive and more enjoyable than so many of their “unscripted” peers, fashion and lifestyle series are crafted around the most fundamental tenets of advertising—the premise that conspicuous consumption is the ultimate key to contentment and success. The higher creative quality of Project Runway and similar fare doesn’t erase this underlying ideology; it just serves to make such messages more insidious.

This little corner of the reality TV universe is designed to maximize our desire for . . . stuff. Stuff of all kinds, the more expensive the better. These shows encourage us to lust after things we might have never thought we wanted or needed, even things we might have previously considered wasteful or distasteful. When EM: HE gave a six-bedroom, seven-bath, seven-television house to a family of four, ABC’s lead designer, Ty Pennington, acted as if it’s normal for folks of modest means to live in a home with three more TVs and bathrooms than people to use them.¹¹ During a Very Special Episode of WNTW, stylists Stacy London and Clinton Kelly surprised a record industry exec named Lisa with a “fashion intervention of a lifetime,” giving her fifty grand to spend on a “dream wardrobe” in Paris. As it turns out, $50,000 doesn’t go very far at Armani, Gucci, and Christian Lacroix: She returned home with only fifteen outfits, a few pairs of shoes, and a couple of handbags. “This is how the rich shop,” Clinton told her.

Who needs a house so large it dwarfs its residents? Or, for that matter, why would any middle-class working woman blow the equivalent of several years of college tuition or rent or mortgage payments on just two small suitcases worth of designer labels? Even if she was only allowed to spend that massive sum on clothing, wouldn’t she be better served with a whole closet full of stylish and well-made winter, spring, summer, and fall attire, from business to casual, formal gowns to nightgowns, shoes to accessories, all of which she could have easily bought for a tiny fraction of that amount?

Ah, but “need” really isn’t the issue. Improving people’s lives can be a happy side effect on some shows, as when EM: HE rebuilt flood-damaged homes of Hurricane Katrina survivors in New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama. The devastation that disaster caused to low-income people, especially residents of color, was so deep that this televised Band-Aid of corporate largesse was a blessing for a handful of flood victims. But make no mistake: Social compassion and material support are the feel-good by-product of this show, not its primary objective. When reality TV series present families or individuals with larger-than-life homes, lavish furnishings, and extravagant wardrobes, it’s not ultimately about helping the people on the receiving end of these gifts. It’s about showcasing the products themselves and cultivating the idea that such luxuries are the secret to happiness.

This normalization of the grandiose, this glorification of spending for spending’s sake, contributes to a dangerously shortsighted and superficial mindset that does not serve Americans well as individuals or as a nation. The more we internalize the idea that we need bigger homes, more-expensive clothes, indulgent cars, shoes, purses, couches, and more (always more) of everything, the less money we’re saving and the more unstable our futures are becoming.

Recession? What Recession?

Reality TV is certainly not the first form of media to encourage overconsumption—that’s what advertising has always done—but there’s something particularly invasive and perverse about doing so in the name of “realism.”

Today, some networks have made the stimulation of a socially irresponsible, spend-now-regret-later attitude in viewers their primary programming strategy. Bravo, with its stable of high-end lifestyle series, basically admitted as much in a 2007 ad campaign touting “The Bravo Affluencer Effect.” The spots depicted Bravo viewers as plasticized Barbie- and Ken-style dolls with multiple credit cards peeking from their pockets, along with gadgets and clothing they bought after watching reality TV. In an attempt to sell itself as the network of choice for marketers looking to influence viewers’ shopping habits via product placement, Bravo bragged that it had “TV’s Most Affluent + Most Influential + Most Engaged Viewers,” whom they depicted as shopaholic drones with “Intent to Purchase,” “High Recall” of integrated sponsors’ brands, and a willingness to spread “Word of Mouth” about these products to their peers. Each “Affluencer” doll was annotated with notes such as “Linen Blazer: Learned to ‘make it work’ by watching PROJECT RUNWAY” or, while standing in line at a store, “Remember? We saw it on Bravo.” Best of all, the ads gloated, those who watch Bravo come “with 85% extra disposable income!” making them “A Media Buyer’s Dream.”¹²

To be clear, if you are a fan of Top Chef or The Real Housewives, you are the product being sold to advertisers; this is how Bravo sees you.

An unthinking cadre of consumers lined up to take their purchasing orders from reality television? That may indeed be an advertiser’s dream, but the overconsumption it helps to motivate is proving to be a nightmare for our ability to thrive individually or nationally. In the mid-1980s, Americans saved more than 10 percent of their paychecks. Twenty years later not only were we not saving enough—we weren’t saving at all. “Americans’ personal savings rate dipped into negative territory in 2005, something that hasn’t happened since the Great Depression. Consumers depleted their savings to finance the purchases of cars and other big-ticket items,” the Associated Press found. “In other words, the typical American spent $100.60 for every $100 of take home pay,” CNN Money reported. We would have been wise to heed the warning in this 2006 headline: “Americans spend every cent—and more; Critics say America’s negative savings rate can’t be sustained and see a recession coming. Are they right?”¹³

Indeed, they were right. Just weeks before Barack Obama’s inauguration, New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for economics, couldn’t have been more blunt about the state of our economy: “Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.”¹⁴ Whatever we call the financial mess we were in at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century—“Depression II” or something else—one thing’s certain: The news was depressing. The United States was racing toward a deeper and more threatening recession than economists had seen since the 1930s, but you’d never know it from “reality” television, which persisted in overemphasizing the short-term pleasures of “having nice things” and hiding the long-term economic consequences of our nation’s overconsumption. By late 2008, Rachel Zoe was still looking earnestly into the cameras of her eponymous Bravo series and telling viewers, “I don’t understand saving for the rainy day. It’s like, live now! Live like it’s your last day, every day!”

While shows like The Rachel Zoe Project and WNTW have been instructing us to model ourselves after “how the rich shop,” Americans are drowning in credit card debt.^bz As the crippling cost of healthcare is forcing hundreds of thousands of Americans into bankruptcy every year because they can’t afford to pay their medical bills, Dr. 90210 (E!) follows “the pampered world of Beverly Hills’ most beautiful,” for whom no number of elective plastic surgeries is too expensive or extreme in their quest to stay that way. We’re working way into our twilight years because we’re too poor to retire, yet on series from the Real Housewives franchise to MTV’s Paris Hilton’s My New BFF, “real life” is all about leisure. And when thousands of news outlets were using the word “staycation” to put a positive-sounding gloss over the fact that more and more of us can’t afford to go on actual vacations, Bravo’s First Class All the Way took “viewers inside the world of high-end luxury travel” where “no mission [is] too great, no corner of the world too remote, and no experience too immense.”¹⁵

By the end of 2009 the economic crisis hadn’t let up—nor had reality producers’ diamond-tinted blinders. Just as 34 million Americans were receiving food stamps, Bravo rolled out the Gossip Girl-esque NYC Prep, about rich kids in “the top 1 percent” of the “elite.” More such series are in the works. “Do you live in an amazing home with maids, a chef, a personal assistant or a driver? Is your job an intense social calendar and your hobby shopping at Gucci?” asked a 2009 casting call for The Good Life,^ca described as a major network show with a potential gold-digger twist. “If you’re getting pampered on someone else’s dime,” Allison Grodner Productions announced, “you could just be the girl we’re looking for.” Searching for the rich—that’s what reality lifestyle producers do best.¹⁶

In the “greed is good” 1980s,^cb Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous allowed us to peek into the opulent lives of ultrarich actors, athletes, and moguls, always ending with host Robin Leach famously wishing his audience “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.” But the show’s production values, format, and even its host were tongue-in-cheek about these flashy, wasteful Lifestyles. It was intended as a lark, an escapist fantasy; Leach never insinuated that this was “normal.”

Today, dozens of reality shows aim to convince us that such lifestyles are not only desirable but reasonable—or worse, realistic. In direct contrast to our vanishing middle class, increasing poverty rates, and crumbling economy, such shows extol “a world where champagne wishes and caviar dreams are reality.”¹⁸ We’re no longer expected to laugh at gaudy excess; we’re supposed to cheer it on. Just as millions of Americans were facing foreclosure, Bravo was inviting us to root for massive profits for real estate speculators, as on Flipping Out, which started shooting its fourth season in 2010. From 2006 to 2009, viewers of Million Dollar Listing were encouraged to become personally invested in the triumphs and travails of “Three of Los Angeles’ hottest, young, and aggressive real estate magnates in the making as they seek a fortune selling multimillion-dollar properties in the most exclusive neighborhoods—Hollywood, Malibu, and Beverly Hills.” Exactly as the nation’s economy was collapsing in large part due to unscrupulous real estate practices, the network’s website lauded these agents’ willingness to “stop at nothing to close the deal.” Of course, there’s never any acknowledgment that these protagonists come from some of the same industries whose practices led to overinflated property values and contributed to the collapse of the housing market.^19cc

By no means am I saying that reality TV is responsible for the housing crisis or the larger economic instability that has us suffering from Wall Street to Main Street. What I am saying is that for many reasons—advertising and media imagery being major underlying factors—we’re becoming increasingly motivated by immediate gratification. Reality TV both encourages and exalts such skewed priorities, and gives us plenty of opportunities to practice them.

Video “Shopisodes” featured on Bravo’s website regularly excerpt segments from Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style and The Real Housewives, directing visitors to purchase the exact Diane von Furstenberg dresses and Calvin Klein coats around which their storylines are built. From the narrator of Say Yes to the Dress, TLC’s series-long advertisement for high-end bridal boutique Kleinfeld, we learn that concerns about financial strife should be left at the dressing room door: “When the economy is tough, the tough say let’s make a deal, even if the gown costs as much as a car.” And so the show highlights women purchasing $24,500 gowns by saying, “I think maybe it should be too much. It’s my wedding day!” Once conditioned to the idea that “there is technically no budget if it was the perfect dress,” viewers can then turn to TLC’s website, or click on the Say Yes to the Dress link on Kleinfeld’s website, to schedule an appointment to try on and buy any of the “Featured Gowns” advertised over the series’s many seasons.

Virtually every network is in on some version of this game, with ever-updated catalogs of goods available at www.SeenOn.com, a site that’s linked to many reality series’ home pages.^cd Girls, want to buy the Chanel watch Heidi Montag wears on MTV’s The Hills, or the Playboy Bunny-embossed Bebe stilettos worn by E!’s The Girls Next Door? Guys, hope Donald Trump’s wealth will rub off if you buy an Armani suit seen on The Apprentice, or that your luck will improve if you walk a mile in Deal or No Deal host Howie Mandel’s John Varvatos ankle boots? All you need is a high spending limit and an Internet connection.

If the fairytale romance narratives of dating shows infantilize women, commercialist lifestyle shows treat all viewers like children fixated on indulgences rather than necessities, regardless of what’s good for us. If a cacophony of “experts” constantly reiterate the “fact” that we won’t advance professionally or be accepted socially without an expensive designer wardrobe, some of us may start to think that maxing out our credit cards at the mall is actually an investment in our future success. And throughout a decade that repeatedly pushed a version of “reality” in which average American families all seem to live in sprawling mansions like those on Who Wants to Marry My Dad? and Meet My Folks, why should it come as a surprise that predatory lenders could so easily convince us to take out larger loans on bigger, more expensive houses than we need or can afford?

Commercial Reeducation: Learning “Fashion Math”

What about those of us who prefer to save so that one day we might actually be able to own our own homes, pay for college, have secure futures? We’re quickly taught the error of our ways.

Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style offers a case study in consumerist indoctrination. We meet Arianna, who “[grew] up with a single mom who was definitely struggling to make ends meet. I remember specifically picking multifunction outfits and wearing them as long as you could. I still . . . shop in that way.” During an economic downturn, Arianna’s prudence should be viewed as admirable—instead, her desire to conserve is portrayed as a psychological pathology that must be cured. In aghast tones, we’re told that she “looks like someone who’s just neglected themselves!” because she’s “barely been out of a $19 skirt!” Gunn, his supermodel cohost, and a cadre of “experts” from InStyle magazine and Banana Republic set about convincing Arianna (and those of us watching her) “that spending money [is] making an investment in yourself, in your image, and in your future.” Walking her through “shoe heaven,” InStyle’s Katrina Szish lays out this twisted algebra: “There’s a concept going on here called ‘fashion math,’” she explains, emphasizing the “value” of expensive, luxurious fabrics and high-quality designer attire. “You buy few items for more money, your money will go further.”

Meanwhile, an on-screen caption offers the exact opposite advice needed to survive a recession:

SPEND MORE. GET LESS.^ce

Of course, to survive financially, most working-class women (and, increasingly, most middle-class women and men) need to get really good at stretching every dime beyond its breaking point. To keep our families fed, to keep our rent paid, to avoid foreclosure, to stay on top of medical bills, most of us need to spend less and get more. Nevertheless, Arianna proves a quick study in “fashion math”: “It makes so much sense!” she nods, going on to choose new clothes regardless of what they cost. “I didn’t look . . . at [the] price point!” she proclaims proudly. Gunn, overjoyed at this feat, applauds “her achievements.” At the end of the episode, Gunn advises his audience, “If . . . you’re on a budget” it “makes sense” to shop for high-quality fashion and “spend more.”^cf

All of the food, dating, and real estate series discussed in this chapter attempt to reinforce just such a mentality. Never is this goal as blatant as in the fashion and makeover genre, where participants who reject the philosophy of consumer culture are aggressively scolded, shamed, and cajoled into “correcting” their wardrobes, makeup, hair-care rituals, homes, and most important, their economic priorities.

The process by which this happens reads like a Propaganda 101 manual. The longest-running practitioner of this sort of persuasion, What Not to Wear, debuted in 2003 and was in its seventh season in 2010. The show uses a stock template for the socioeconomic reeducation of women of all ages. Throughout the series, an ethnically and economically diverse string of women^cg are ridiculed for failing to conform to a single upper-middle-class, mainstream-to-conservative, traditionally feminine standard of fashion and beauty. Participants undergo an almost military-style breaking down of their individuality, after which their priorities are rebuilt in an advertiser’s ideal image. Through a three-stage formula, nonconformists learn to embrace the mainstream, bargain hunters are taught to ignore price tags, and thrift store aficionados become label queens.

STAGE 1: INSTRUCTION

Each episode begins with stylists Stacy London and Clinton Kelly surprising a designated fashion victim with a $5,000 Bank of America or Visa card, then informing her that she will get to purchase a whole new wardrobe in just two days. In exchange, she must agree to model her own outfits in a 360-degree mirror (nicknamed “The Chamber of Torture”) while they snarkily critique, then throw out, every item of clothing she owns. She’s shown three trendy mannequins dressed according to “The Rules,” a set of supposedly personalized guidelines to shop by. Though the show promises to help her “find her own individual style,” these rules are remarkably similar for every woman, regardless of her age, lifestyle, or cultural identification. Whether she’s a punk rock chick in her twenties or an animal trainer in her forties, a flat-chested white office worker or a curvy Latina dancer, she’s always told to seek out garments that will make her look “slimmer,” “more feminine,” and “professional.” As we saw in chapter 2, slimmer always equals better in reality TV, but why a zookeeper needs to look “professional” remains unclear.

The show’s rules are as much about finance as fashion. One of the first lessons is that saving money is for spoilsports. Regardless of her personal economic reality, each week a new woman is taught to stop “obsessing” over bargains and to “care about herself ” enough to “buy quality things.” Dumping a twenty-four-year-old’s modestly priced items in the trash, Stacy barked: “What do you spend your money on? You work for a living! Where does it go!?” The young woman had a simple reply: “I eat a lot.” But since being well-fed is not nearly as important as being well-dressed, fellow fashionista Clinton snapped: “Eat less, and buy clothing!” Stacy closed her tutorial with this prime directive: “It’s time to go shopping. You’re in your twenties. You don’t have kids yet. You’re not buying a house or furniture. Spend it on clothes instead of all this food!”

STAGE 2: REBELLION (TAMING OF)

Much of the show’s drama lies in the tension between the women’s penchant for thrift and comfort verses the stylists’ desire to shoehorn them into a strict uniform of empire-waist dresses, tailored suit jackets, and pointy-toed, painfully high heels. Even with a $5K windfall, these low- and middle-income women aren’t eager to embrace wanton spending—nor do they give up their favorite T-shirts, affordable jeans, and comfortable shoes without a fight. Angry at the insults hurled at her “before” wardrobe, photographer Kristen tells the camera, “That was horrific. Are they gonna see some resistance from me [while I’m shopping]? Yeah, there’s gonna be resistance!”

In the face of such resistance to conformity, WNTW’s promises to help women embrace their individuality begin to unravel. Jessica, a frustrated office worker who misses her days in a rock band, says, “I know what I don’t want: pointy shoes.” Too bad for her. “Listen,” she’s informed, “you’re gonna wear a pointy shoe.” Then there’s hipster Katherine, who describes her postpunk style as “really unique. It’s sort of an independent thing” that lets her “reveal [my] personality.” Her disapproving mother explains that “she doesn’t want to follow the mainstream,” but viewers are assured that her pesky “fashion rebellion needs to [and will] be tamed.” When another makeover subject rejects a suggested outfit because “I’m just not feeling it. I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s me. I don’t think it’s my style,” Stacy literally shrieks at her: “We don’t want you to feel like you! We don’t want you to have your style!”

Gendered proscriptions are acute during this stage: A mechanic who doesn’t feel comfortable in ruffles or frills is called “butch” and made to don “girlie” clothing and cosmetics. A professor on a casual campus who enjoys comfortable sandals because heels “hurt” is told she has no choice but “to start wearing actual footwear.” A lesbian biker is forced to trade her motorcycle jacket for a dress. Some of the stylists’ harshest insults are reserved for women who frequent thrift stores and clothing swaps, even though it’s possible to find well-made and fashionable things at consignment shops and on resale sites such as eBay.^ch Whether they’ve opted out of the retail rat race because of financial necessity, a vintage aesthetic, or an environmental ethic, they’re derided as looking “insane,” “homeless,” and “disgusting.” That’s because quality isn’t what WNT W wants viewers to embrace: consumption is. Carrie, who always wore the latest trends as a teenager, remembers that “it always costs a lot of money, and so it seemed like such a waste . . . when I buy a lot of clothes [I feel like] I’m kinda throwing the money away.” Part of the reason “why I jumped off the fashion train to begin with [is] ’cause it was too hard to keep up with the trends,” she told Clinton. “Oh no, that’s not it. It’s because you’re cheap!” he shot back.

As cash registers ring up astronomical receipts for small piles of clothes, we watch participants freak out. “That’s like my rent!” “What a scam!” and “Oh my god. There’s, like, gold lining inside of them, right?” are typical responses. Single moms, college students, and others struggling to get by explain that “it’s hard to spend money on one item that’s like two weeks of groceries [or] to disassociate a purse from a medical bill”—only to be lectured that “low self-esteem” is what’s really holding them back from investing in fashion. If they only “valued themselves” more they’d dress as if they “deserve respect” and “want to be taken seriously.” Mothers are also told that by spending wads of cash on clothes, they will be better role models for their daughters.

STAGE 3: ASSIMILATION

At the end of every episode, the stylists and the women’s families gush about how amazing they look, and the participants describe their “transformations” as “life-altering.” Once offered the tools to find clothes that fit and flatter, the money to afford them, and a heaping helping of external approval, they emerge feeling beautiful and (because female value is still so connected to appearance) finally worthwhile. “I never felt like a pretty girl,” thirty-six-year-old editor Amanda said, but after her makeover “I have more confidence in my little finger than I had in my entire body. . . . I’ll command a lot more respect. I feel sexy, I feel sure of myself, and I feel pretty. When I started this journey I felt hopeless. Now . . . I feel like a sex kitten.”

That’s an undeniably positive result, one that’s fun to watch and probably has some lasting emotional benefits for participants. But like EM: HE’s altruism, making women feel better about themselves is the tactic of WNTW, not its purpose. The big reveal at the conclusion is more ideological than visual. Protestations about frugality, comfort, and nontraditional gender presentation vanish. One stiletto-clad foot after another, these Stepford Shoppers now march to the same consumerist beat. Viewers are encouraged to emulate formerly “cheap” Carrie, who closes out her hour describing her newfound “shopping bug . . . I wanna go shopping more. Seriously, I really do.” They say they plan to ask for dates—and raises—now that they “look like I deserve it.” Rather than questioning why these women believe they only “deserve” romance or career advancement based on their appearances, WNTW codifies that idea. For example, a young woman named Jessica was nominated for the show by her boss, Dr. Lois Frankel, who offers her a postmakeover promotion. The takeaway? Don’t worry about doing your job well, ladies, just worry about what you wear while you’re working.^ci

Needless to say, these programs never discuss actual barriers to women’s success, such as lack of childcare, pay inequity, sexual harassment, gender or race discrimination in hiring and promotion, or domestic violence.²³

Charity, Not Change

On the other side of the reality TV spectrum are heartstrings-tugging shows that seem to glorify not capitalism, but the spirit of giving. Surely, nothing could be wrong with helping poor families or low-income students, right?

ABC’s The Scholar gave “economically disadvantaged” but academically stellar kids—high achievers from failing inner city schools, a home schooler with four jobs, brainy immigrants—the chance to compete against privileged prep-pies for a full-ride scholarship to the college of their choice from an educational foundation, and partial scholarships for runners-up furnished by Wal-Mart. Many explained in heartbreaking detail that winning the show could be their only chance to receive a quality education. Sure, many of their collegiate dreams remained out of reach at the show’s conclusion, but let’s not let that dull the warm fuzzies of the winner’s full ride, shall we?

On Oprah’s Big Give, the talk show queen promised viewers we’d be inspired by the power of fundraising to change America. Participants were instructed to raise large sums of money (from companies like Target and celebs like Jamie Foxx) and then give it away however they thought would do the most good. Contestants bought groceries for random shoppers, passed out $2,000 worth of flowers to passersby on the street, and donated instruments to a community center serving kids with Down syndrome. These were all very nice things to do, and it was lovely to watch contestants brighten people’s days, pay off medical and mortgage bills, and give poor kids Christmas gifts. But by defining philanthropy so narrowly, the show reinforced the notion that what America needs is charity, not social change. Individual recipients benefited from the experience, but as Linda Diebel wrote in the Toronto Star, “Nothing fundamentally changed. There was no revelation that decent education and health care are rights in a developed society, not privileges to be bestowed” by those of means. Oh, and the “twist” that so often accompanies reality shows? The “biggest giver” won a million bucks from Winfrey and ABC. Because giving isn’t the greatest reward after all—a big fat check is.²⁵

A similar problem plagued The Secret Millionaire, Fox’s even more manipulative take on wealth, poverty, and philanthropy. Each episode profiled the star’s exceptionally posh lifestyle before dropping them in “the hood,” where they had to “survive” on the equivalent of welfare wages for a week. Camera crews followed their “undercover” interactions with the poor at soup kitchens and battered women’s shelters. At the end of the week every Richie Rich would reveal their true net worth—and distribute $100,000—to their downtrodden acquaintances. Though poverty, homelessness, and drug abuse were more of a focus here than on Oprah’s Big Give, these national scourges were presented as individual misfortunes rather than institutional problems. In a typical encounter, Greg Ruzicka, a multimillionaire lawyer specializing in bankruptcy and foreclosures, meets a woman who lost her home due to healthcare debt. He feels sorry for her and learns that sometimes bad things happen to good people. Then he writes a few well-placed checks and feels better. You almost expected everyone to break into a chorus of “Kumbaya.” Producers emphasized Greg’s social awakening and (TV-show-generated) generosity, and his recipients’ gratitude; viewers were not meant to question (or desire accountability from or regulation of) the mercenary industry to which he owes his millions, the same industry partly responsible for plunging that uninsured woman into homelessness. Instead, The Secret Millionaire buttressed the notion that some people are faultlessly poor and deserve aid. By nature, this makes invisible the economic and political causes of wide-scale inequity.^cjcj

Which brings us back to EM: HE, whose recipients have included Iraq war veterans, orphans whose parents were killed by gang violence, and any manner of folks portrayed as having fallen victim to a hard-knock life. See, “discrimination” is akin to a four-letter word in reality TV, rarely discussed as a factor in low-income people’s lives. So when they built homes for Hurricane Katrina survivors, the show emphasized the bad luck and trauma of having lived in the flooded region rather than the poverty they experienced before the disaster. Likewise, “we do not see immigrant day-laborers struggling to meet the needs of life with cash paid under the table. . . . Nobody is a gang member underserved by the schools and living in substandard housing. We see the mother who’s been laid off after years on the job, but we do not see the unemployed who have a series of low-income jobs,” Shira Tarrant writes. “The unspoken message is that if these folks are not getting on the show then perhaps they are not worthy or deserving of our help.”²⁶

EM: HE presents itself as the ultimate in do-gooder TV, as friends, neighbors, celebrities, and advertising underwriters join in on the renovations. The Extreme Team flat-out promises “worthy” families that these new, swag-filled estates will give their lives new meaning. In response, the homeowners weep with the relieved joy of war widows whose MIA husbands have miraculously returned, as if nothing will ever go wrong again. Like all TV fiction, the cameras go dark after that happy ending, sparing us what is often a problematic follow-up. Exorbitant new property taxes, building code violations, and legal issues have plagued some EM: HE recipients, whose stories have trickled into headlines such as, “With ‘Extreme Makeover’ Homes, Some Get Foreclosure Instead of Happy Ending.”²⁸

Series that focus on charitable giving encourage some form of public service, and as such are far more positive than classically sensationalistic reality shows. However, there is danger in representing poverty, homelessness, and lack of access to education without any focus on infrastructure. Using malnutrition as an example, Joel Berg explains:

Most Americans hold tight to the myth that neighbor-to-neighbor generosity and compassion is the best support system for those in need. But trying to end hunger with food drives is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon. Because local charities cannot possibly feed 35.5 million people adequately, and because their efforts rarely enable people to become selfreliant, this belief that charity does it better than government only ensures hunger will persist in America.²⁹

Such problems can only be fixed through policy solutions.³⁰ But corporate underwriters like Wal-Mart, Target, and Waste Management, Inc. benefit from the economic status quo, so reality TV teaches us that the world will be a better place if only more of us would give flowers to strangers.

House of Cards

Reality TV’s mockery of the poor and calculated elevation of the (branded) superrich speaks to the wider dearth of opportunity in the United States at a time when education, housing, healthcare, childcare, and even adequate nutrition are becoming less and less accessible, especially for women and people of color. The trade-off for the humiliation we risk by appearing on these shows is the potential chance at financial security, in an era where the government-supported social safety net has been all but dismantled. In a culture in which young women and people of color often feel they have few options, these shows conflate self-worth with net worth. They present a starry-eyed dream of instant financial liberation via the prize package on shows like American Idol and America’s Next Top Model, or the paternalistic “Prince Charming will provide for you” model of dating shows. Yet these promises of security and success are rarely more than a house of cards.

Reality TV princes always leave as soon as they’re no longer contractually obligated to date their “chosen princess”; this much is clear by now. But did you know that the “million-dollar contracts” promised to winners of some of the top competition shows can be equally bogus? Adrianne Curry, winner of the first season of Top Model, has publicly lambasted both the show and its sponsors for stiffing her on promised pay. Four years after taking the ANTM crown, she still had “yet to see a dime from Revlon” for her modeling work for the cosmetics company. “We were told the winner would be an instant millionaire, that our faces would be plastered everywhere in Revlon ads. None of which turned out to be true. . . . I still haven’t got paid for the work I did for them!” Curry has charged.³¹ Tyra Banks often brags that all the anguish she puts the girls through is worth it because of the postseries fame and fortune that awaits her protégées. During cycle 2’s postfinale episode, Banks gushed, “America’s Next Top Model has created new lives for these women. I mean, Shandi [Sullivan] was a Walgreens clerk. And now she’s gonna be a fashion model!” It didn’t quite turn out that way. “Being on the show kind of hindered a lot of the jobs that I would go on. The casting directors would say to me, ‘Oh, you’re that girl from that model show. You should stick to TV.’ At that point, I kind of just had it, and I was like, ugh, alright, I’m done,” she told VH1’s Where Are They Now?: Reality Stars. Now, instead of working the cash register at a drugstore, she answers phones at a day spa. So much for the glam life.^ck

Unlike ANTM, which has never created a modeling industry superstar, American Idol has a rep for launching the careers of several top-selling pop singers, including winners Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood and runners-up such as Jennifer Hudson, Chris Daughtry, and Clay Aiken. But how many viewers understand that the “million-dollar recording contract” that comes with the Idol title doesn’t actually mean a seven-figure payday for the performers? That sum is just an estimate of the combined value of the deal’s promotion, production, and distribution elements, most of which the singers never see.³²

For that matter, how many fans know that Idol producers have also willfully crushed kids’ livelihoods? It’s bad enough that the Idol machine takes a larger-than-industry-standard cut of winners’ incomes and that winners and top-ten runners-up give producers near-complete control of their songs, images, professional engagements, and career choices. But the iron-clad Idol contract places similarly problematic constraints over even those contestants who never make it past the cringe-inducing audition phase.³³ Take third-season Idol hopeful Nicole “Scooter Girl” Tieri, an aspiring singer/actress who wheeled around the Idol studios on a scooter during her first tryout. Her quirky personality—and her canny use of props—earned her a ticket to the second audition stage in Hollywood. Though eliminated early, she seemed poised to turn her fifteen minutes into an actual career: Tieri was asked to endorse Razor Scooters and to play a major role in the hit Broadway musical Rent. But because she had signed over her professional rights to Idol ’s string-pullers before appearing on the show, they forced her to turn down both of these rare and lucrative opportunities, despite the fact that the show wasn’t paying her, or the fact that Idol ’s production company wasn’t interested in signing her for a recording deal.³⁴

From Queer Eye’s wrinkle crèmes to WNTW ’s pencil skirts to EM: HE’s furniture, reality TV tells us that advertisers’ products will not only change our lives—they’ll actually save our lives. A first-season Apprentice DVD includes a music video that repeats the phrase “You’re a slave to the master” over B-roll of Donald Trump firing people.^cl With numerous bankruptcies under his belt, Trump’s “master businessman” persona is as much a facade as Don Mueller’s rented McMansion on Who Wants to Marry My Dad? As media literate viewers, we must topple reality TV’s house of cards and recognize that hyperconsumerism is not society’s cure-all, but rather the root cause of many of our deepest challenges.