Introduction

The whole process of watching television [has] social significance. Television provides us with pictures of the world, of our world, and the knowledge that most of these pictures are fictional does not immunize us from believing in them. The beliefs we form become part of the context within which we understand who we are. To understand prime-time television, then, is to understand an important part of the way we view the world and ourselves.

—SUT JHALLY AND JUSTIN M. LEWIS, Enlightened Racism ¹

Nearly every night on every major network, “unscripted” (but carefully crafted) dating, makeover, lifestyle, and competition shows glorify stereotypes that most people assume died forty years ago. Follow me into the rabbit hole of reality TV, and let’s take a look at how television’s Svengalis want us to see ourselves.^a

On ABC’s The Bachelor and NBC’s Who Wants to Marry My Dad? fifteen to twenty-five interchangeable hotties compete for the chance to marry a hunky lunkhead they don’t know from Adam. Weepy waifs line up to be objectified for a living (or simply for a moment) on the CW’s America’s Next Top Model. Branded “ugly ducklings,” appearance-obsessed sad sacks risk their health to be surgically altered on Fox’s The Swan and E!’s Dr. 90210. Starved women get naked for Oreos and men gloat about “dumb-ass girl alliances” on CBS’s Survivor. Women of color are ostracized as deceitful divas on NBC’s The Apprentice, lazy or “difficult” on ABC’s Wife Swap, and “ghetto” train wrecks on VH1’s Flavor of Love and I Love New York. And through it all, slurs like “bitch,” “beaver,” and “whore” are tossed around as if they’re any other nouns.

Who do we have to thank for this?

Meet Fox exec Mike Darnell, who The Washington Post suggests “may be the most influential man working in television.”² The phrase “shit-eating grin” could have been coined for this once-disgraced, now-embraced king of bottom-feeder reality TV schlock. Back before we all succumbed to American idolatry, reality television wasn’t a prime-time-dominating genre with its own Emmy category—it was simply one low-rated, unscripted MTV soap opera called The Real World. In just two hours on February 15, 2000, Darnell changed all that, with Who Wants to Marry a MultiMillionaire? The special, which predated the game-changing Survivor, was a hybrid of Miss America and a mail-order bride parade. With executive producer Mike Fleiss of Next Entertainment, Darnell brought fifty brides-to-be to Las Vegas to be auctioned off to a complete stranger. They sashayed in swimsuits, tittered nervously, and answered pageant-style questions to assess their moral fortitude and sexual prowess in thirty seconds or less. Groom Rick Rockwell was hidden as he and the audience determined who deserved “the biggest prize of all . . . a brand-new multimillionaire husband.” Nurse (and future Playboy centerfold) Darva Conger, Rockwell’s eventual choice, got her first glimpse of her “fiancé” moments before they were legally wed on-air. Nearly 23 million viewers tuned in.

“Best show ever,” Darnell gushed when it snagged a whopping 28 share rating.^b They’d exceeded their own expectations, Fleiss raved:

Mike and I . . . knew that the National Organization for Women would hate us. That this would be the most controversial show ever! We thought it was all good, but it got so hot, so crazy red-hot. They said it was the most talked-about show since Roots! It was the lead sketch on Saturday Night Live.³

Alas, it was a short honeymoon—for the Rockwells, and for Fox.

Conger annulled their never-consummated nuptials after The Smoking Gun website reported that Rockwell^c had a history of abusing women. A former girlfriend filed a restraining order against Fox’s “Prince Charming” after he vandalized her car, broke into her home, and “threw me around and slapped me and hit me in the face . . . he said he would find me and kill me.”⁵

At the time, Darnell was just Fox’s “specials guy,” responsible for such classy celluloid concoctions as When Animals Attack! and World ’s Scariest Police Chases. When Rockwell’s sordid past came to light, Darnell was bashed as a chauvinistic, manipulative ratings-whore who betrothed an unsuspecting woman to a potential wife beater. When Rockwell’s violent past was uncovered, Darnell was full of fake contrition, saying, “This is the worst day of my life.”⁶ The entertainment press called him the P. T. Barnum of television, and many speculated that he would—or, at least, should—lose his job over the sensationalistic spectacle. Fox was widely criticized by newspapers, magazines, broadcast, and online media as sinking to an abysmal new low. In the wake of the damaging PR hit, the network canceled a planned rebroadcast, declined to take Multi-Millionaire to series, and promised to back away from such exploitative fare in the future.^d

Yet the damage had been done. UPN bid to make Multi-Millionaire into a series, but executive producer Fleiss turned them down. Instead, he took his and Darnell’s desperate-to-be-housewives premise to ABC, masked its misogyny in the trappings of “fairytale romance,” and launched the landscape-altering dating franchise The Bachelor in March 2002.^e The entertainment press heralded the series as “a reality revolution, ushering a soap-opera concept into prime-time.” It became ABC’s highest-rated show among eighteen- to forty-nine-year-olds, every network’s target demographic.⁷ What was once considered inappropriate and culturally corruptive became a staple as every network scrambled to duplicate The Bachelor’s ratings success—with Fox taking the lead at lowering the bar.

By February 2003, Fox was devoting a whopping 41 percent and ABC 33 percent of their sweeps offerings to reality shows. These percentages increased over the years,^f limiting the number of quality comedies and dramas available to viewers and reducing opportunities for union-represented actors, writers, and crew.⁹ Instead of firing their previously shamed reality guru, Fox promoted Darnell to executive vice president of alternative programming,^g and he wasted no time generating such lurid gems as:

• Temptation Island (2001): Real-life couples were separated and set up with scores of scantily clad “tempters” hired to coax them into adulterous sex—with every soft-porn-for-prime-time caress captured for our prying eyes.

• Joe Millionaire (2003): Women are shallow, greedy gold diggers who deserve to be lied to, ridiculed, and humiliated for our collective amusement.

• Married by America (2003): Women got engaged to strangers by slipping their ring fingers through a matrimonial glory hole in a wall on a TV soundstage. Then: bedroom cams!

• Bridezillas (2003): “Out-of-control brides,” Darnell promised, “become insane” on this Fox special. Segments were separated by such charming screen titles as “Life’s a Bitch and Then You Marry One.” Later became a WE series.

• The Swan (2004): makeover-cum-beauty pageant series gave plain-looking women with low self-esteem a battery of medically risky plastic surgery procedures, mocked their physical pain during recovery and emotional wounds during faux “therapy,” and pitted them against one another in a beauty pageant.

With these—but especially with his original Millionaire stunt, which laid the groundwork for Fleiss’s The Bachelor—Darnell established the standard for how a decade of reality programming would represent women and men and marginalize people of color. While some of his shows flopped (for example, the Monica Lewinsky-hosted Mr. Personality, where a woman dated men in creepy masks), many have scored landscape-altering ratings and big bank from advertisers. With 40 million viewers, the finale of Joe Millionaire was the third-most-watched television episode of the entire decade.¹¹ Rival networks plumbed their inner frat boys to replicate his formulas.

The Real World ’s devolution clearly illustrates the spill-over effect on content across the TV dial. First broadcast in 1992, the show originally featured diverse casts and explored issues such as racism, homosexuality, HIV/AIDS, and abortion with something resembling care. Discussions addressing these identities and issues often illuminated rather than reinforced prejudice. During the 2000s, the series used sensationalized sexism, racial prejudice, homophobia, sloppy hookups, and drug and alcohol addiction as the main viewership draws. As cultural critic Latoya Peterson writes, “Growth. Development. An actual exchange of ideas” used to be major components of The Real World, which now seems to “specifically cast for racists, assholes, and agitators . . . it’s like a formula. Every season has some huge racial altercation. Every season has some kind of woman trying to sleep her way into self-esteem. Every season has a guy coping with a breakup angrily.”¹²

Why the shift? For one thing, TV execs believe that the more they bait advocacy groups like NOW, the NAACP, and GLAAD, the more controversy a show will generate. Offensiveness = hype = increased eyeballs for advertisers and cash for networks, making outrageous bigotry less a by-product of reality TV than its blueprint. Let Fleiss explain: The first thing he and Darnell thought when they heard about Rockwell’s violent past was, “Great! More publicity! Mike said, ‘We gotta get out in front of this!’ I’m like, ‘Absolutely! Fuck! It’s a restraining order! Let’s get an interview with the girl! We’ll put it on as part of the special!’ We had a whole plan, because that’s the way we like it!” Hindsight makes most people wiser. Fleiss . . . not so much. Three years after the fact, he told a reporter that “In retrospect, I don’t feel like we did anything wrong on that Multi-Millionaire show, when you see that, hey, on Married by America they had somebody who was already married . . . we were just there first.” The next time you see The Bachelor passing out the long-stems, consider that the producer of reality TV’s longest-running “fairytale romance” franchise sees no difference between wedding a woman to a violent stranger and the fact that “one of the final girls had like done fetish films” [sic] on Joe Millionaire.¹³

What do Darnell’s Hollywood peers think of his corrosive influence on the television landscape? As early as 2000, The New York Times predicted that “he would be avidly sought out if Fox ever let him go,” especially “where his touch with male viewers would be appreciated.” After Joe Millionaire and American Idol, competitors overlooked his gutter-grazing rep and declared their admiration. “He’s a genius,” WB Chairman and CEO Jamie Kellner pronounced. UPN tried to steal Darnell away from Fox, offering to appoint him as their head of programming. CBS President and CEO Les Moonves stated, “Any network would like to have Mike Darnell on their team.”¹⁴

Why? Because nothing—not creative quality, not social impact, and certainly not accountability to the public—matters to corporate media companies other than the financial bottom line.

Therein lies the secret to Darnell’s perpetual shit-eating smirk. No matter how crass or asinine his concepts, no matter what twisted new fantasies he dreams up in pursuit of a 40 percent ratings share, he’ll have free rein as long as he remains a cash cow for Fox, which has explicitly encouraged him to “push the limits with impunity.”¹⁵ Meanwhile, the rest of the networks continue to race to meet him in the gutter.

When Hollywood “pushes the limits,” it’s usually bad news for women. That has been increasingly true with reality TV, our most vivid example of a pop cultural backlash against women’s rights and social progress. If at first this sounds extreme, that is precisely because “A backlash against women’s rights succeeds to the degree that it appears not to be political, that it appears not to be a struggle at all,” as Susan Faludi explained in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.¹⁶

The Myth of “Giving People What They Want”

Even as I write this, I can hear predictable responses: It’s the public’s fault! I’ve heard that song before. Whenever they’re criticized for airing emotionally exploitative or politically incendiary reality shows, networks parrot Mike Darnell’s claim that “We’re giving people what they want, pushing the envelope to match tastes.”

Michael Hirschorn, the brain trust behind VH1’s Charm School and A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, blames female consumers. “If women didn’t want these shows, they wouldn’t get made,” he told Jezebel.com.¹⁷

I call bullshit.

One of the entertainment industry’s biggest myths is that media companies bombard us with ad-rich, quality-poor unscripted programming simply because we demand it. Not so. These shows exist for only one reason: They’re dirt cheap. It can cost an average of 50 to 75 percent less to make a reality TV show than a scripted program. Sometimes even less: In 2001, NBC paid $9 million per hour for The West Wing, while The Weakest Link clocked in at $500K per episode. This is why witty, inventive shows beloved by loyal audiences in the modest/low millions get yanked off the air lickety-split before they get to develop and retain a major following (for example, Fox’s quirky space Western Firefly, or ABC’s Commander in Chief, about the first woman president), while low-rated unscripted series often get to languish on the dial.^h

For example, The Pickup Artist (which taught awkward guys how to erode women’s self-esteem to manipulate them into sex) premiered to a measly 673,000 viewers and never reached higher than a 1.3 rating among eighteen- to forty-nineyear-olds. Those are sad numbers even for cable—yet it still got picked up for a second season. TV by the Numbers, a website that analyzes Nielsen data relative to program renewals and cancelations, concluded that some unscripted shows survive “with very low numbers” because they’re “so cheap that they are expected to do little more than fill air time and produce little in the way of viewership.”¹⁹

Add an immense funding stream from embedded advertising, and it’s party time. Unscripted programs aren’t just cheap to make: They can be major moneymakers before they ever appear on-screen. “The economics of it are incredible—it can sustain a lower rating,” crowed NBC’s programming exec (and later chairman) Jeff Gaspin in 2001. It was a prescient explanation of NBC’s decisions regarding The Apprentice, every episode of which is built around brands such as Burger King, Dove, Sony, Verizon, and Visa. Season 1 of The Apprentice was a hit in 2004 with 20.7 million viewers, but plummeted as people lost interest each year. Half its audience vanished by season 4, but since sponsors were paying “upwards of $2 million per episode to have their products incorporated into plot lines,” NBC kept it in their lineup for two more seasons. When it dropped to 7.1 million viewers (great for a cable outlet like VH1, dismal for a former network smash hit), the peacock network finally dropped the show from the fall 2007 lineup. That didn’t sit well with Ben Silverman, the new co-chairman of NBC’s entertainment division.ⁱ A former reality producer and product placement emissary, he sprinkled D-list fairy dust on the poorly performing shill-fest and revived it as The Celebrity Apprentice in 2008. Season 9 aired in 2010.²⁰

“Steeped in Some Social Belief”

Enamored of reality TV’s high ratings, low production costs, and product placement revenue, media owners and producers typically reject the notion that there’s any social relevance to these shows. Darnell is adamant about this. “I get asked, ‘What do you think the social responsibility of your shows is?’” but “The truth is, I’m in entertainment, not in news. I don’t know what the social responsibility of Seinfeld is.” As long as “the buzz gets going” and it’s “big TV,” he says, “I will do almost anything for a good number.”²¹

Occasionally, though, reality producers reveal a truth they’d prefer to hide. Noting that Temptation Island and Joe Millionaire were Fox’s highest-rated programs in 2001 and 2003, Entertainment Weekly asked him the secret to his success: “The reality business is a delicate science,” he insists, “you need a premise that’s easy to understand, that’s steeped in some social belief,” and that earns the reaction of, to quote Darnell: “‘Oh, my god!’ or ‘What’s wrong with you?’” (emphasis mine). He reiterated this to Variety: “The biggest reality shows we’ve done, other than ‘Idol,’ have been social ideas.”²²

This is key. It’s true that millions of people have become reality TV junkies, initially drawn in by a sort of cinematic schadenfreude.^j That “What’s wrong with you?” reaction is the viewer’s equivalent of rubbernecking at an accident. Sometimes it makes us laugh, sometimes it shocks us, but we’re unable to turn away from the cathartic display of other people’s humiliation. Often it makes us feel superior: No matter how bad our problems may be, at least we aren’t as fill-in-the-blank (pathetic, desperate, ugly, stupid) as those misguided enough to sign up for such indignities on national TV. It’s easy to feel like we haven’t hit bottom compared to the dregs of humanity on Rock of Love Bus. We revel in the bizarre antics, pitiful tears, wild hookups, and self-loathing insecurities. We vicariously savor all the delicious melodrama of high school cliques and office gossip, with none of the guilt. These are normal, human emotions, masterfully manipulated by folks like Darnell, Fleiss, and Hirschorn.

After a long, stressful day, it can be comforting to zone out with mindless entertainment . . . even the kind produced by Mindless Entertainment, makers of The Surreal Life. Some reality shows can even be edifying, offering insights into diverse communities and customs through travel and cultural exchange (The Amazing Race, Meet the Natives: USA), or focusing on talent and ingenuity (Project Runway, Top Chef). But even the most salacious reality shows can be compelling. With their larger-than-life premises, they provide the same platform for fantasy and escapism as romance novels and comic books. If we’re unlucky in love, we can pretend we’re the dating show princess being whisked away to happily ever after, or the one lucky dude in a hot tub with twenty horny chicks. If we have body image issues, we can imagine ourselves as a glamorous Top Model. If we’re broke, how appealing to dream of winning a million-dollar record deal on American Idol or dropping insane amounts of cash on clothes, cars, or mansions on What Not to Wear, The Real Housewives, or Million Dollar Listing.

But while the schadenfreude and escapism factors may get us to tune in, that’s not what hooks us. On a more subconscious level, we continue to watch because these shows frame their narratives in ways that both play to and reinforce deeply ingrained societal biases about women and men, love and beauty, race and class, consumption and happiness in America. Which raises the question: What are these “social beliefs” that Mike Darnell and his counterparts are exploiting for the profit of networks, product placers, and media owners? What are the implications of a nation of viewers gulping down the influential genre’s gendered myths as readily as we do the Cokes hawked on every episode of American Idol—and what can we do about it?

This book is my answer to those questions.

People love to ask why we watch these shows by the millions, and why thousands audition to participate—areas ripe for sociological study. But as a journalist and media critic, what I find most relevant is what we’ve learned from a decade of unscripted programming. Too often what passes for discussion about reality TV is limited to “Wow, that bitch was crazy!” or “Should this dater/singer/ model be eliminated?” We need a deeper debate in this country about the meaning and implications of reality TV’s backlash against women’s rights and social progress. Reality Bites Back aims a critical, analytical lens at how women are portrayed throughout a form of entertainment often dismissed as harmless fluff. I demonstrate how these “guilty pleasures” foment gender-war ideology, with deep significance for the intellectual and political development of a generation of viewers. Additionally, I examine the ways race, class, and commercialism intersect and complicate depictions of women throughout the genre.

In January 2007, CBS Evening News reported that more people watched American Idol on Fox than saw President Bush’s State of the Union speech on ABC, NBC, and CBS combined. They critiqued how “train wreck TV” relies on humiliation, using VH1’s I Love New York as a prime example. In response, Michael Hirschorn, formerly VH1’s executive VP of original programming, argued that “resistance to reality TV ultimately comes down to snobbery.” The man who brought the minstrel show back to prime time with Flavor of Love claimed the genre serves a higher purpose. Reality TV “has engaged in hot-button cultural issues—class, sex, race—that respectable television, including the august CBS Evening News, rarely touches,” he wrote in The Atlantic Monthly. As such, it “presents some of the most vital political debate in America, particularly about class and race.”²³

It’s a convenient rationalization from a man who went on to form his own production company, Ish Entertainment. (Ish is a popular slang term for shit. He couldn’t have chosen a better name.) Hirschorn’s claim that this low-brow form serves a high-brow function is just the sort of bait-and-switch I hope to help you unpack.

It’s true that corporate news outlets have become more likely to report on Paris Hilton’s breakups than racial disparities in healthcare, the pay gap for women, or how poverty compounds women’s inability to leave violent relationships. But rather than adding depth, reality TV exacerbates media’s superficiality. As you’ll see, Hirschorn’s argument falls apart when we look at how hot-button issues are presented in unscripted programming. Like nearly all reality producers and network execs, this ish-pusher fails to acknowledge that these shows are very intentionally cast, edited, and framed to amplify regressive values around gender, race, and class, underscore advertisers’ desire to get us to think less and buy more, and create a version of “reality” that erases any trace of the advances made during the women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights movements.

As I illustrate in chapter 4, reality TV skews America’s economic realities beyond recognition. Unsurprisingly for a genre that allows advertisers to work with producers to create and craft content, product-placement string-pullers aim to convince us that expensive frivolities such as couture gowns, cuisine, and design are “not luxuries,” but lifesavers. This message runs through lifestyle series (The Real Housewives franchise), makeover shows (Extreme Makeover: Home Edition), and competitions (The Apprentice, Project Runway). Right when millions of Americans were losing their homes, jobs, and health insurance, cable networks asked us to root for real estate agents and speculators (Flip That House, Million Dollar Listing). In this context, low-income women’s struggles to feed, clothe, shelter, and educate themselves and their kids become fodder for mockery on American Idol and America’s Next Top Model—when they’re not erased entirely.

Gender and class biases are inextricably linked with racial bigotry in this realm, as discussed in chapter 5. Women of color are quickly dismissed tokens on network dating shows like The Bachelor, while makeover shows like The Swan “fix” ethnic features and American Idol makes African American and Latina girls straighten their kinky hair. With the arrival of Flavor of Love in 2006, producers began using racism as a bedrock for unscripted programs. Since then, blaxploitation shows from the Flavor franchise to criminals-make-good series like From G’s to Gents revived minstrel-era archetypes of mammies, jezebels, and shuckingand-jiving clowns. And then there’s America’s Next Top Model, whose problematic race and gender imagery merits extended analysis in its own chapter, 6.

Race and class biases have been acute in some series and minimal in others. Yet this new television genre was built on a foundation of garden-variety misogyny. Crude and regressive ideas about women were present in Multi-Millionaire in early 2000 and persisted through MTV using a clip of a woman getting punched in the face to promote the debut of Jersey Shore in late 2009. This is due not only to the visions of folks like Darnell and Fleiss but also to the story-driving influence of embedded advertisers, whose business model has always relied on representing women as objectified and subservient. Because sexism is so thoroughly infused in the DNA of reality TV, Reality Bites Back analyzes how this form of entertainment defines “Women,” and how it constructs gender roles within various contexts, including body, romance, marriage, home, and work. And because “Woman” is not a monolithic group, we cannot understand reality TV’s antifeminism without also looking at the genre’s treatment of race and class.

Still, there are limitations to this analysis. I’ve monitored more than one thousand hours of unscripted programming over ten years^k and supplemented that primary source material with extensive journalistic research. Yet, with an ever-growing number of series on the dial, it would be impossible to watch every reality show or comprehensively cover every bias that merits attention. Despite a handful of emerging academic anthologies and papers,²⁴ there has not yet been a mainstream, single-author media criticism book about the significance of reality TV for women. Reality Bites Back intends to connect thematic dots between reality TV attacks on women’s social, sexual, and political power and the treatment of women in news media and politics. I am laying this groundwork not as the final word, but as the beginning of a larger conversation.

I hope to offer you a new way to look at reality programming regardless of your entry point to this discussion. Are you a TV fan, not a media geek or political activist? I do not judge you for enjoying reality TV. My critique is aimed at the powerful entities that choose to define reality in ways that suit their interests, regardless of what is healthy or dangerous for our culture. I hope this nuanced introduction to feminist media analysis prompts you to ask questions and bring a more active eye to what you watch. Reality Bites Back also aims to stimulate deeper debate among academics, social justice activists, media makers, and journalists about the nature and meaning of the most talked-about form of entertainment at the turn of the century. If you don’t see your favorite guilty (or not so guilty) pleasure within these pages, I hope you’ll use this book as a starting point rather than an end in itself. Use the tips in chapters 10 and 11 to encourage debate in your own blogs, zines, local TV reporting, microradio broadcasts, and other independent media.

Framing Reality . . .

Media both shape and reflect cultural perceptions of who we are, what we’re valued for, what we want, what we need, what we believe about ourselves and others—and what we should consider “our place” in society.

According to audience reception research ²⁵ by communication scholars Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, “Television affects how viewers make sense of the world. It is not usually one episode or one series that influences the way we think; it is the aggregate of messages that enter our minds. These messages are part of our environment and . . . ubiquitous, are consumed as automatically and unconsciously as the air we breathe.”²⁶

This does not mean we’re all affected the same way by any particular message in, say, any single episode of America’s Next Top Model. We each bring our intellects, identities, and experiences to everything we watch, which affects the way we enjoy, interpret, or internalize media messages. Though we’re unique individuals who react differently to specific TV shows, our ideas are inescapably shaped by our participation in collective culture and society. We live in a commercially controlled, media-saturated era, one in which a small handful of owners have consolidated power over the means of production and distribution of not just entertainment television but also broadcast and print journalism, film, music, video games, and communication technologies.^l The influence of all this media is systemic and affects how we think and feel in ways we don’t always recognize, even—sometimes especially—when we consider ourselves immune.

In 1992, University of Massachusetts-Amherst researchers conducted a “major qualitative audience study” to evaluate how The Cosby Show affected social and political attitudes of fifty-two focus groups (twenty-three Black, twenty-six white, three Hispanic). Their findings remain highly relevant today. In-depth interviews revealed that “many viewers were so engaged with the situations and the characters on television that they naturally read beyond the scene or the program they were discussing and speculated about them as real events and characters. . . . The implications of this are profound. We can no longer assume that the content of TV fiction does not matter simply because TV viewers understand that it is fiction.”²⁷ Viewers’ identification with characters and situations in the sitcom seemed to directly impact their opinions about people of color, and about public policies impacting race and class status in America. As a result:

Many of us know that most television is fiction, yet we see television as a key source of information about the world we live in. It is simultaneously real and unreal. We may know, for example, that television exaggerates the scale of violent crime for dramatic purposes; nevertheless, studies show that the more television we watch, the more violent we assume the world to be. Our awareness of exaggeration, in other words, is only momentary.

This grants TV producers and program makers the enormous luxury of power without responsibility. They have the means to influence our view of the world without ever claiming to do so. Most television, goes the gigantic disclaimer, is (after all) nothing more than “entertainment.” This grants an insidious form of poetic license, apparently innocent because it is achieved with our complicity . . . an unwitting form of manipulation that occurs because we, as TV viewers, suspend our disbelief so automatically that we forget that we are in a state of suspension.²⁸

Remember, the authors were describing a sitcom viewers knew was fictional, written by screenwriters and performed by actors. Now consider the potential impact of contemporary unscripted programming. Many of us are aware that reality shows play fast and loose with context and editing. We know they’re at least somewhat “fake.”^m That knowledge doesn’t stop us from passing judgment about the behavior and personalities of people who appear on reality TV. Just like 1980s audiences related to fictional shows as “real events and characters,” today we talk, blog, write, and read about reality TV participants as if we know them. Google through fan sites and you’ll find thousands of comments debating whether “this bitch” or “that whore” should be eliminated from dating shows, or rooting for a “smart guy” or “sweet girl” to win competitions. Tabloid media play along, despite knowing that some cast members are actors and all are edited beyond real-life recognition. From USA Today to Access Hollywood, rejected Bachelors, Bridezillas, and Apprentices are treated as if they actually are the two-dimensional caricatures they appeared to be on their shows.

News media further this mass delusion. “Reality shows are, at their cores, social experiments,” Newsweek’s Joshua Alston wrote, and “are largely agenda-free: there’s no writer pulling the strings (for the most part). There are real people reacting in real and unexpected ways. Sometimes those reactions will be ugly.”

This is patently untrue. Unscripted programming isn’t “social experimentation”—it’s just an easier, quicker, cheaper way to fill airtime with content created by nonunion labor. A major misconception during the 2007 Holly wood writers’ strike²⁹ was that we’d see more reality television because networks needed material produced without writers. But all reality shows employ writers—just underpaid, nonunion ones. As for string-pullers, advertisers regularly instruct writers to script dialogue about their products.³⁰ We also can’t overlook the ideological agendas of executive producers like Fleiss, who base shows on the desire to make women extremely unhappy: “It’s a lot of fun to watch girls crying,” Fleiss has said. “Never underestimate the value of that.”

When reporters pretend these shows are social rather than commercial experiments, the public can’t be blamed for underestimating the depth of deception involved. The central conceit—that participants are “real people” experiencing “real emotions”—is used to hide the storytelling work of casting directors, writers, editors, videographers, and production teams, as well as advertisers who contribute to visuals, dialogue, and plot development. Behind-the-scenes maneuverings are hidden off-camera, and the remaining veneer of authenticity allows networks to package this programming almost as psuedo-documentaries.

As a result, reality TV pretends to tell us, not only what our lives are like as turn-of-the-century Americans, but who we supposedly are, writ large.

. . . Framing Gender

So, what do reality TV producers want us to believe about ourselves, and about “our place” in society? Each chapter explores a distinct “social belief ” Darnell, Fleiss, Hirschorn, and their cohorts exploit to convince us that women and people of color “are” certain things. For example, that no matter how old women are, they’re “hot girls,” not self-aware adults with intellectual, social, or sexual agency.

What other ideas are sold alongside the name-brand colas, cars, and cosmetics shilled within show content? There’s a series to reinforce every conceivable gender stereotype.

“The claws come out” in chapter 3, wherein we learn that “women are conniving, deceitful, and vicious,” that men should beware “money-grubbing gold diggers,” and that sisterhood is not powerful, it’s spiteful. Here and in chapter 8, we see how a performative version of heterosexual women’s sexuality is used as a bargaining chip, reviving double standards about “good girls” and “sluts.” Of course, they’re only “good girls” if they’re straight. The marginalization and pornification of lesbians and bisexuals comes up in chapter 1, which explores the trappings of reality romances. Dating shows infantilize adult women with childlike princess imagery and insist the only criteria men need to qualify as Mr. Right are firm asses and even firmer financial portfolios. This chapter takes on the crippling notion that men are unworthy of love if they are not rich.

Chapter 2 details how picture-perfect reality TV women are picked apart for every real or imagined physical imperfection, especially related to weight, ethnicity, and nonconformity. Far from objecting to their objectification, reality TV women are portrayed as wanting nothing more than to achieve advertisers’ impossible ideal of beauty. Producers erase any signs of women’s individuality momentarily, via Top Model ’s airbrushes, and permanently, via Extreme Makeover ’s scalpels . . . all in the name of “liberation.”

Yet as I argue in chapter 3, reality TV producers are diametrically opposed to women’s liberation, portraying the female population as ditzy and inept workers, wives, and mothers. It’s a hop, skip, and a jump to the notion of single women as pathetic losers who can never be happy or flourish financially without husbands (even abusive ones). Chapter 8 delves into the deeper political implications of reality TV’s backlash ideology, showing how compulsory domesticity and female subservience are core values in the reality universe, as is a limited interpretation of masculinity.

Reality TV isn’t simply reflecting anachronistic social biases, it’s resurrecting them. This genre has done what the most ardent fundamentalists have never been able to achieve: They’ve created a universe in which women not only have no real choices, they don’t even want any.

A NOTE ON “WOMEN,” GENDER IDENTITY, AND SEXUAL ORIENTATION

Imagine a reality TV show in which the pronouns used to describe people were based on each participant’s self-identified gender, rather than on visual judgments. For that matter, imagine if transgender people were simply present in reality television—without their gender identity being treated as confusing or laughable.

Now, consider how different the reality TV landscape might be if its producers and writers did not define “Woman” as almost uniformly heterosexual, desperate, and domestically inclined. If straight, lesbian, and bisexual women were shown dating whomever they desired—and falling in love, breaking up, having sex, or abstaining—on their own terms and without judgment. Or if our favorite shows followed ethnically diverse women of different ages with a wide range of social values, body types, styles, and ambitions.

That’s what the boob tube could look like if reality TV featured a cross-section of real American women. Instead, this highly manipulative form of entertainment is created to showcase embedded sponsors’ products, and the “social ideas” used to advertise those products. To service those goals, producers exclude or punish those who flout conventional ideas about “proper” gender identity, presentation, or behavior. This is why, unless otherwise noted, whenever I describe or quote women on reality shows, or discuss the genre’s depictions of “women” in general, it’s safe to assume I’m referring to straight women who were born female—because this is how the genre defines “Woman.”

Lies, Damn Lies, and Editing

Before Mike Fleiss was a reality TV kingpin, he was a frustrated sports reporter. Journalism didn’t agree with him, though: “I was being restricted by the facts all the time! I felt like I couldn’t really do anything creative.”³¹ Nowadays, Fleiss doesn’t let pesky “facts” get in the way on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. If the truth isn’t working, he and his staff just get . . . “creative.”

“We shoot 100% of the time and air 1% of what we shot,” then edit “the really good stuff ” to suit their purposes, an anonymous Bachelor producer told NPR. “We have even gone so far as to ‘frankenbite,’ where you take somebody saying, ‘of course I’d like to say that I love him’ and cutting the bite together to say ‘of course I love him.’ . . . [It’s] misleading to the viewer and unfair to the cast member, but they sign up for this.”³²

Though this technique is commonplace, most reality show runners want us to believe that, as Laguna Beach executive producer Tony DiSanto claims, “we never make up something that hasn’t happened.” Actually, they do. On The Dating Experiment, when a woman didn’t like a guy the producers chose for her, they asked her to name her favorite celebrity. “She replied that she really loved Adam Sandler. Later . . . they spliced out Sandler’s name and dropped in audio of her saying the male contesta nt’s name,” according to Time magazine media critic James Poniewozik. Voiceovers are also potentially sketchy. “If [there’s] a shot of a girl walking into the kitchen for no reason while her bite plays in VO, you might want to ask questions,” an America’s Next Top Model producer told Television Without Pity.³³

What reality fan doesn’t assume that the Hills girls and the Real Housewives show up where and when producers instruct? When eight women in bikinis in an Australian hot spring simultaneously shave their legs with Skintimate Gel on Outback Jack, we realize that’s staged. Yet most of us remain unaware of practices like Frankenbiting. Even fewer understand that pretty much every part of a reality show is manipulated to support producers’ chosen narrative. As Time tells it, “Quotes are manufactured, crushes and feuds constructed out of whole cloth, episodes planned in multiact ‘storyboards’ before taping, scenes stitched together out of footage shot days apart.”³⁴

It starts with the gatekeepers. “Casting is the single most important ingredient in the success of any reality show,” explains Adam Shapiro, Big Brother’s executive producer. Hirschorn wants us to believe this assembly process is benign. He claims that although there’s “probably a little bit of truth to” the “conventional wisdom . . . that there’s the evil reality TV producers who are manipulating everything,” mostly casts just . . . happen: “We just have our nets out and we’re catching a lot of dolphins.”³⁵

How naive does he think we are? Within the industry, it’s understood that producers seek out people they believe will behave in hypersensitive, bizarre, or stereotypical ways. Critical thinkers aren’t desirable; those prone to verbal outbursts, physical aggression, or addiction are. The more overly emotional or mentally unstable a cast member, the higher the potential for buzz-generating conflict, so casting directors keep key clichés in mind.

Contestants are molded into predetermined stock characters, such as “The Weeper,” “The Bitch,” and “The Angry Black Woman.” They behave as they do not just because strong, independent, and (god-forbid, feminist) women are typically excluded, but as a result of structural techniques designed to break down their defenses. Contestants are usually not allowed to see friends or family, read the news, surf the Internet, watch TV, listen to their own music, have private phone conversations, or go for walks, dates, or job interviews without camera crews. “It’s like a women’s penitentiary,” one Top Model contestant said. They’re kept sleep-deprived and underfed, plied with alcohol, then prodded to spew petty grievances in on-camera “confessionals.” Voila: catfights, tears, crazy antics. Other times, staff psychologists “are more apt to spark fights than to prevent them.” American Idol contestants confide their fears and jealousies to Fox-provided counselors, who then feed this information to producers. “It is pretty satisfying to watch the kids go to crazy town,” a Bachelor producer says.

Oh, and those writers I mentioned earlier? While they don’t create traditional scripts for characters to memorize,ⁿ they craft dialogue that can be fed to participants in a pinch (like Paris Hilton’s schtick on The Simple Life), or popped into scenes after a series has stopped filming (as on The Restaurant ). They coach contestants to deliver monologues on specific topics: A staffer instructed Paradise Hotel participants to “tell me you’re sexy and you’ll do anything to prove it,” turning them intro improv actors. Emily Sinclair, a story editor for Survivor, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Paradise Hotel, and Are You Hot? sums up her role this way: “It’s us being the puppeteers.”³⁶

And if there still aren’t enough sparks? Editors just “take something black and make it white,” as reality editor Jeff Bartsch told Time. Bait-and-switch is par for the course. “Footage has to be manipulated cleverly and often, so it’s really in my job description to know where all the bodies are buried,” a Top Model producer says. “If the show is done well, you wouldn’t even know my job exists, because it would just feel like watching people do stuff.”³⁷

Between all their Frankenbiting, editing, and product shilling, no wonder reality freelancers (including video editors, writers, and others) have been organizing for representation in the Writers Guild of America. In 2005, the WGA filed two class action lawsuits against producers and networks alleging wage violations and “sweatshop conditions” on eleven shows, including The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Joe Millionaire, and Trading Spouses. By 2008, reality writers filed more than twenty labor complaints with the state of California against various reality producers, also with the help of the WGA.^o

The bulk of Reality Bites Back breaks down the gender, race, and class stereotypes sold to us by reality TV’s “puppeteers” and shows how regressive “social ideas” function together as backlash against women. But chapter 9 moves from reality TV content to media economics: You’ll learn who is creating this contemporary cultural attack, who benefits from it, and why.

What impact might this deceptively produced alternate “reality” have on viewers’ intellectual and critical instincts, over time? Until significant communications research is conducted, we can’t be certain. But my experiences doing media literacy education raise concerns.

Where Have Our Critical Filters Gone?

As part of my work as executive director of Women In Media & News, I began discussing sexism in reality TV with high school and college students in 2003, just after The Bachelor started cheerfully asking, “Who will get sent home brokenhearted?” and skinny-minnies started stripping down on Top Model. Since then, I’ve spoken with thousands of students at more than eighty schools in more than half the states in America. I’ve seen a change in both the substance and the tone of responses to this form of television—and to its gendered ideology. Although anecdotal, these interactions may be telling.

In the early ’00s, young people had exceptionally critical responses to my reality TV clip reel. They found show premises to be “ludicrous,” “vile,” and “completely unrealistic.” They’d gasp, groan, or grumble to one another when cameras intrusively zoomed in on rejected bachelorettes’ tear-stained faces, or on plastic surgeons’ scalpels cutting into insecure mothers’ bodies. They’d laugh when announcers described manipulative scenarios as “every girl’s dream!” They were funny, wisecracking about the overuse of seemingly scripted phrases like “emotional connection” and “I’m not here to make friends!” in show after show. They were angry, asking “Where do they get off treating women like that?” Most important, they saw right through the networks’ fairytale facades. “It’s like they want us to think feminism never happened,” a Fordham student told me. “Do they think we’re stupid enough to believe this shit is real?”

Eight years later, I find stark differences in young people’s responses to similar TV clips. Today’s teens and young adults grew up watching reality shows as uncritically as their parents watched The Cosby Show in the ’80s and Happy Days in the ’70s. At least among those who’ve spoken with me, their ability to discern production tricks—and their critical responses to gendered, raced messages within media “texts”—seems to have suffered as a result. Women’s and ethnic studies majors sometimes express offense at some of the content, but many other young women and men tell me that shows like The Bachelor and Flavor of Love are “hilarious,” “just TV, so no big deal,” or more disturbingly, “realistic.” I’m dismayed at how often I hear people mouthing the justifications media executives use to deflect accountability for biased content. They say that producers “are just showing us the way dumb-asses act,” and since they “can’t put words in people’s mouths” (a false assumption, as Frankenbites attest), any problematic representations are the fault of participants, not the responsibility of the networks that air these shows. “If these skanks want to act like they have no self-respect, that’s not the show’s fault,” an MIT student insisted. Students of color who expect and demand ethical practices from government and business have nevertheless said it’s “important” to “support” shows like Flavor of Love or The Real Housewives of Atlanta, because their primarily African American casts bring visibility to our mostly white TV landscape. When I ask about the bigoted representations of Black, Latino, and Asian people on minority-led reality shows, students too often say that people of color “should learn how to behave,” and if “they act the fool,” then “of course the cameras will keep rolling.” What media companies should do seems less of a consideration.

Now when I screen clips, instead of snickering at cheesy narrators or blatant product placements that disrupt the flow of a show, students giggle when women sob after being dumped, when beautiful girls are badgered about their bodies, and when women of color go off on violent tirades. Girls used to ask me about the social and economic forces that might compel a woman to volunteer to have her appearance, personality, or romantic prospects savaged on TV. Now, girls regularly tell me they’re dieting to audition for Top Model. Reality shows are appointment TV on many campuses I’ve visited. This pastime sometimes affects academic priorities and impacts the way educators work: A college in Boston rescheduled my visit because they’d inadvertently planned the lecture on an American Idol night, and no one shows up for events when Idol ’s on. The Millennial Generation seems to be getting more cynical (“Of course it’s all bullshit, but it’s funny. Whatever.”) but less skeptical. That kind of mind-set makes advertisers salivate.

Viewers have many reasons for enjoying all forms of media, and unlike reality producers, I do not think stupidity is one of them. Young adults are not sheep soaking up media messages in unison. Young feminist and social justice activists are a testament to that, often producing their own documentaries and political remix videos and using social media and technology to draw attention to human rights issues, improve their local communities, and advocate for public policies they believe to be important.

Yet intelligence and savvy do not immunize Millennials—or their parents or grandparents—from being ideologically and commercially influenced by media messages. I am concerned at the increasingly uncritical ways I’ve seen students react to media over the last decade. I’d like to see serious scholarly investigation into what impact reality television’s portrayals of gender, race, class, sexuality, and consumerism may have on the expectations and worldview of viewers who’ve come of age with these shows.

In 2007, the Pew Research Center reported that 81 percent of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds stated that being rich is the first or second most important goal in life for their generation, and 51 percent chose fame. Only 30 percent identified helping people in need as their peers’ top priorities; and just 22 percent said community leadership.³⁹ My guess is that the wealth and semicelebrity status lavished on reality TV participants over the course of a decade has played a role in Millennials’ goals.

Viewers of all ages do ourselves a disservice by watching reality TV with our intellects on pause. We can enjoy the catharsis and fantasy these shows offer, but unless we keep our critical filters on high, we leave ourselves open to serious manipulation.

Don’t Get Depressed, Get Active

Beyond recognizing that very little is “real” in reality TV, my goal is to arm you with the knowledge you need to understand and challenge the bigoted “social ideas” pushed by pop culture. So in chapter 10, you’ll find tools you can use to empower your friends, family, and community to become more conscious media consumers. From reality TV drinking games to tips on how to write a protest letter to guidelines for deconstructing media content, you’ll learn how fun fighting propaganda can be.

Ultimately, I want to encourage you to seek accountability from media companies that promised us “reality,” and instead delivered a contemporary cultural attack on four decades of social progress. That’s why I’ve turned over the conclusion to leading media justice activists, independent media producers, and educators. Each of these inspiring women and men offers you a unique way to effect positive change. In the end, I hope you will be amused, outraged, engaged, and ready to take action.

As for me, I invite you to check out RealityBitesBackBook.com, where you can debate the reality TV you love, hate . . . or love to hate. Maybe together, we’ll make a viral video series about TV fans protesting integrated advertisers, or chaining themselves to Mike Darnell’s, Mike Fleiss’s, or Michael Hirschorn’s desks to demand better programming. In honor of those “evil geniuses,” we can call it When Reality TV Viewers Attack!