Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV
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“Passionate, exquisitely told . . . With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail . . . [Nussbaum] knits her talents for sharp analysis and telling reportage well.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
In development as a docuseries from the studio behind Spencer and Spotlight
ONE OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE AND THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe
FINALIST FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION
Who invented reality television, the world’s most dangerous pop-culture genre? And why can’t we look away? In this revelatory, deeply reported account of the rise of “dirty documentary”—from its contentious roots in radio to the ascent of Donald Trump—Emily Nussbaum unearths the origin story of the genre that ate the world, as told through the lively voices of the people who built it. At once gimlet-eyed and empathetic, Cue the Sun! explores the morally charged, funny, and sometimes tragic consequences of the hunt for something real inside something fake.
In sharp, absorbing prose, Nussbaum traces the jagged fuses of experimentation that exploded with Survivor at the turn of the millennium. She introduces the genre’s trickster pioneers, from the icy Allen Funt to the shambolic Chuck Barris; Cops auteur John Langley; cynical Bachelor ringmaster Mike Fleiss; and Jon Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim, the visionaries behind The Real World—along with dozens of stars from An American Family, The Real World, Big Brother, Survivor, and The Bachelor. We learn about the tools of the trade—like the Frankenbite, a deceptive editor’s best friend—and ugly tales of exploitation. But Cue the Sun! also celebrates reality’s peculiar power: a jolt of emotion that could never have come from a script.
What happened to the first reality stars, the Louds—and why won’t they speak to the couple who filmed them? Which serial killer won on The Dating Game? Nussbaum explores reality TV as a strike-breaker, the queer roots of Bravo, the dark truth behind The Apprentice, and more. A shrewd observer who adores television, Nussbaum is the ideal voice for the first substantive history of the genre that, for better or worse, made America what it is today.
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Cue the Sun! - Emily Nussbaum
By Emily Nussbaum
I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution
Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV
Book Title, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV, Author, Emily Nussbaum, Imprint, Random HouseCopyright © 2024 by Emily Nussbaum
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nussbaum, Emily, author.
Title: Cue the sun : the invention of reality TV / Emily Nussbaum.
Description: New York : Random House, 2024. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023045197 (print) | LCCN 2023045198 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525508991 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525509004 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Reality television programs—United States—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PN1992.8.R43 N87 2024 (print) | LCC PN1992.8.R43 (ebook) | DDC 791.45/6—dc23/eng/20240116
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023045197
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023045198
Ebook ISBN 9780525509004
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Michael Morris
Cover photograph: Still from An American Family, courtesy of The WNET Group and Video Vérité Archives
ep_prh_7.0_148814534_c0_r1
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: Better Write That One Fast
SPAGHETTI AGAINST THE WALL: 1947–1989
1. The Reveal: Queen for a Day and Candid Camera
2. The Gong: The Filthy, Farkakte Chuck Barris 1970s
3. The Betrayal: An American Family
4. The Clip: America’s Funniest Home Videos and Cops
THE REV UP: 1990–2000
5. The House: The Real World
6. The Con: The Nihilistic Fox ’90s
7. The Game: The Invention of Survivor (and Mark Burnett)
8. The Island: Survivor: Borneo
9. The Feed: Big Brother
CUE THE SUN!: 2001–2007(ISH)
10. The Explosion: Reality Blows Up—and Becomes an Industry
11. The Rose: The Bachelor and Joe Millionaire
12. The Wink: Bravo and the Gentrification of Reality TV
13. The Job: The Apprentice and the End of Reality Innocence
Epilogue: Fake It Till You Make It
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
_148814534_
To Clive, with chains of love
When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.
—Paul Virilio
They bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let ’em crash.
—Airplane!
INTRODUCTION
Better Write That One Fast
One warm spring night, back in 2003, I met up with two fellow freelance journalists at a bar in Boston. We were planning to talk about potential book ideas, a nerve-racking exercise, since none of us had written any actual books. Two bourbons in, I made my pitch: I wanted to write a book about a hot new pop-culture genre, reality television.
That year, reality shows seemed to be everywhere, mushrooming across the TV schedule, an inescapable topic of debate. Three years earlier, CBS had struck ratings gold with Survivor, a controversial game show in which regular people ate live, squirming grubs on an island in Borneo. Now ABC had The Bachelor, on which twenty-five women competed for one man; Fox’s American Idol was minting new pop stars; and I’d been secretly binge-watching an even more perverse project online—a voyeuristic hotbox called Big Brother, which had a newfangled live streaming
component. Reality stars were bumping actors from the covers of magazines. Every week something weirder (Man vs. Beast? Chains of Love?) debuted. It felt like a new Wild West, full of crazy characters making big bets, an electric frenzy that resembled early Hollywood, so maybe there was a book in it?
My friend shot me a skeptical glance. "You better write that one fast," he said. Reality television was a fad, he told me—a bubble that would pop before I could get anything on the page.
I dropped the idea for two decades.
—
Luckily, that turned out to be the right plan. Over the next two decades, as I worked as a freelance journalist, then a magazine editor, and eventually a TV critic for The New Yorker, I watched, mesmerized, as the reality genre matured—or metastasized, depending on how you looked at it—gradually soaking into every crevice of the culture. Survivor, a show that critics had once warned would shatter Western civilization, became a cozy pandemic favorite, whose early seasons families bonded over. Whole channels, most notably Bravo, were devoted to reality shows, while teenagers—who had never known a world without reality TV—uploaded thumbnail versions of these programs on TikTok, directed by and starring themselves. In the most sinister outcome, a reality star had been elected president, embraced by voters who mistook him for the masterful tycoon he played on NBC’s The Apprentice, and then revamped the Oval Office, running it as if it were the NBC boardroom.
The scrappy, upstart genre was now a muscular industry, one whose laborers preferred not to call it reality TV,
a label no one loved in the first place. (Over the years, producers had unsuccessfully lobbied for replacement terms like emotainment
and dramality.
) Instead, you were supposed to refer to it as unscripted programming,
an anodyne phrase designed to neutralize the taboos that still buzzed around reality shows (which is what I’m going to call them in this book), no matter how hard anyone tried to swat them away.
Still, if my friend had been wrong about a few things, so was I. Two decades earlier, I had glibly assumed that reality formats were a modern phenomenon, as much a symptom of technological change as an artistic genre—an internetty, turn-of-the-millennium, digital-culture thing, having emerged right as the Web blinked into existence and cameras burrowed into cellphones. When everything we did was recorded, a wave of narcissism had, naturally, started to rise. If reality television had any kind of history, I figured, it probably dated back to around 1992, when The Real World debuted on MTV.
In fact, as I discovered when I began to dig deeper, reality programming wasn’t all that new—and neither was the moral outrage that inevitably accompanied it, like a clap of thunder after a bolt of lightning. Both phenomena went back more than seven decades, to the mid-1940s, shortly after World War II, in the age of radio. And as each new storm of reality experimentation emerged—starting with the jaw-dropping phenomenon of Candid Camera, which began as a radio show called Candid Microphone—the same thing happened: Critics dismissed these programs as a fad. They were cruel carnivals, which traded in humiliation. They were dumb spectacles, made on the cheap. They were shoddy imitators of better types of art: less sophisticated than cinéma vérité documentary, shallower than fiction, too crass to have any lasting value. Reality shows were strike-breakers, too—the slimy beneficiaries of anti-labor tactics, funded by executives who didn’t want to pay writers and actors. Reality programming might get attention and, for a while, high ratings, but it would never last.
To audiences, however, these programs had always had an obvious allure: They offered something authentic, buried inside something fake. They stripped away the barrier between the star and the viewer. More than any other cultural product, they functioned as a mirror of the people who watched them—and if that reflection was sometimes cruel, it was also funny, riveting, outrageous, and affecting, even if—maybe especially if—you found it disturbing.
It’s hard to nail down one clear definition for reality programming, but in this book I conceive of the genre as dirty documentary
: It’s cinéma vérité filmmaking that has been cut with commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the price and intensify the effect. Reality programs are shows that merge documentary techniques with some more rigid, easily repeatable approach to storytelling, like the game show or the soap opera, the talent contest or the sports competition—old-school episodic structures that were native to serialized radio and television. Cast real people, in other words—then put a tight frame around them, and squeeze.
Sometimes, the early reality shows were earnest social experiments, designed to explore human nature; other times, they were tawdry cash-grabs. But mostly, they were a bit of both. Their low cultural status was inseparable from the warning label slapped on the product—or, as critic James Poniewozik once put it wryly, Reality TV is nonfiction television of which I personally disapprove.
Even at their coarsest, though, reality shows offered up a powerful glimpse of human vulnerability, breaking taboos about what you were allowed to say or see.
The gamblers who placed their bets on the reality genre were, from the start, an intrepid crew. They were rogue documentarians and amateur sociologists, gleeful manipulators and shameless voyeurs, piratical entrepreneurs who kept a sharp eye on the bottom line. They were mostly (but not all) white men, something that was true of the majority of the people who had the power to produce television, until recently. Some of them, like Gong Show host Chuck Barris and Fox impresario Mike Darnell, were distinguished by their P. T. Barnum–like enthusiasm—a gift for humbug (Barnum for bullshit
) and a warm, seductive salesmanship. Others, like Candid Camera creator Allen Funt, had a Warholian coldness, a craving to observe and control. A few women—particularly Real World co-creator Mary-Ellis Bunim and the Prada-wearing trickster Lisa Levenson—helped shaped crucial elements of the genre. And a striking slice, from the 1990s onward, were gay men, like Real World co-creator Jon Murray, who had a deep understanding of behavior as performance.
Whatever their motives, this cadre grasped one thing: If you could knock your subjects off balance, they’d reveal a moment so shocking and, sometimes, so tender or surprising, that it would shatter viewer skepticism. It was the quality that Allen Funt liked to describe as being caught in the act of being yourself,
the fuel that fed the reality engine, at both its loftiest moments and its lowest. Capturing that fuel required a new kind of artistic engineering—and a new kind of collaboration between cast and crew.
This meant a new kind of reality laborer, a group of workers who, during the early years of the genre, had to invent their own jobs from scratch. There were field producers who created an intimate bond with cast members; skilled editors who figured out how to cut a thrilling story from real life, by any means necessary; and preditors,
the alarming term of art for people who did both. There were casting directors who could see the star quality (or the necessary instability) in amateurs, writers who knew how to brainstorm clever challenges, and camera operators and audio technicians who could hover invisibly in regular people’s lives. There was also a brilliant (and largely unknown) universe of puzzle-building producers who invented reality formats that transformed the culture, like the ingenious format for Survivor.
Mostly, though, the industry required a new mindset: an ability to tolerate moral ambiguity, creating strange, temporary, but intense professional relationships whose residue would be edited into (and, in a sense, become) the show itself. Working behind the scenes as a reality laborer wasn’t easy, early on or more recently: Without union protection, struggling in the margins of Hollywood, crew members were often flinty-eyed scrappers, who became numb to, and also proud of, their ability to endure terrible work conditions. But for the people at the top, the job could be an intoxicant: It gave you the godlike power to create stories from the lives of ordinary human beings.
That theme is central to Peter Weir’s darkly prescient 1998 movie The Truman Show, which debuted just before the reality explosion at the turn of the millennium, inspired by early reality hits including MTV’s The Real World and the Fox show Cops. In The Truman Show, Jim Carrey plays Truman Burbank, a man who suspects that he’s trapped inside a soap opera. Truman’s friends and family are actors, smiling like sharks; his kitchen is full of products paid for by the show’s sponsors. The seemingly wholesome ’50s-style town he grew up in is full of hidden cameras—and an invisible audience has been watching him when he sleeps. When Truman escapes in the middle of the night, the program’s showrunner, Christof, played by Ed Harris with a sphinxlike hauteur and an auteur’s beret, is determined to hunt him down: Truman’s hidden by the darkness, so Christof commands, Cue the sun!,
flooding the world with sunlight.
Truman sprints toward the horizon. Desperate, he boards a ship, sailing through a wild, artificially induced storm. And then, with a jolt, the prow of his ship punctures the edge of the world, which is also the edge of an enormous Hollywood set. Just as he pushes open a door that reads Exit, he hears a voice from above. It’s Christof, who is hidden behind the clouds. He needs to stop Truman from leaving the show and ending their relationship.
I am the creator,
explains Christof gently. And then, after an infinitesimal pause, of a television show that gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions.
Truman asks, Then who am I?,
the question that lies at the heart of reality television and also many other forms of art.
"You’re the star."
—
I began this book excited to dig into the lively, outrageous origins of the reality genre, but the deeper I dug, the darker things got. There are people whose lives were wrecked by reality TV; there are methods of production so ugly they’re hard to look at; and reality programs, like any kind of television, reflect the limits, and the bigotries, of their creators. Early reality production was utterly reliant on the innocence of its stars, their inability to understand what they were consenting to: That was the genre’s secret sauce, its original sin.
But if this is a story that’s impossible to tell without some pain, there is also a lot of glory and beauty in it. Reality shows threatened the economics of television, but they also made it bigger—bolder, broader, stranger. They made visible the sort of people that the medium had historically ignored, from the working-class single moms on Queen for a Day to Cuban American activist Pedro Zamora, a young gay man with AIDS who turned into a national star on The Real World. These shows cracked open forbidden topics like homosexuality and divorce, making private subjects public ones. And despite the genre’s reputation for crudeness, reality production added sophistication to the television medium. Adventure shows like Survivor spearheaded unusual new methods of filming action; many of the tools of modern TV comedy—the shaky-cam, the confessional, the insta-flashback—were adapted from reality shows, often in the guise of satirizing their excesses. Without the reality TV boom, there’s no The Office.
For critics, writing about the reality genre has always been a trap. If you clutch your pearls—if you can’t see the fun in it, if you won’t stop yammering about Baudrillard—you turn into a scold. But if you treat reality too lightly, dismissing it as a frothy nothing, you’ve missed the point, too. This book is an attempt to take a different approach: to describe the reality genre through the voices of the people who built it, step by step, experiment by experiment, a series of failures that alternated with (and sometimes doubled as) breakthroughs. It’s an attempt to see it as they saw it, as well as seeing it from the audience’s point of view.
Like other lowbrow
art forms—comic books, horror films, pornography—reality has often been treated as a substance sold under the counter, less an art form than a drug, powerful because it was forbidden. As Marshall McLuhan once put it, art is anything you can get away with. But the discomfort that has always radiated around these shows—their nosiness, their brutality—isn’t an argument for looking away from them. It’s a reason to look closer.
SPAGHETTI AGAINST THE WALL
1947–1989
1
THE REVEAL
Queen for a Day and Candid Camera
Dirty documentary set off its first moral panic in 1947, just after World War II. Radio still ruled the roost back then, as it had since the 1920s, broadcasting opera, jazz and news, comedy and Shakespeare, all of it live—a cozy console the whole family could huddle around. Now and then, there was a prestige blockbuster like Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds—a scripted sci-fi drama so realistic, listeners freaked out, convinced that aliens were invading the Earth, for real. If you were a radio writer or actor, you could make a nice living. If you were a star, you could make a killing.
Still, even in the early days, ordinary people sometimes stumbled onto the airwaves—and around the 1930s, disc jockeys began taking phone calls from listeners. These unknowns did something the pros had never done: They confessed their secrets to the world, liberated by the sensation of strangers listening in. It was the beginning of talk radio—the first strand of the audience participation
trend, a fad that would jump to television in the late 1940s, like a tapped cigarette ash starting a forest fire. Pundits hated the audience participation shows from the start, a response that was saturated with class revulsion: These were vulgar programs, created by vulgar people, for vulgar people, about vulgar people. Worst of all, they were insanely popular.
One of the earliest of these DJ-pioneers was Lester Kroll, a former cab driver from New York City and the son of an immigrant lacemaker. In 1929, Kroll went through an ugly divorce, and then, after he refused to pay child support, got tossed into alimony jail.
His months in the clink appear to have radicalized Kroll: He became an anti-alimony activist—and then a self-appointed expert on marriage itself. According to It Sounds Impossible, a dishy 1963 history of early radio written by former CBS executives Sam J. Slate and Joe Cook, the self-promoting Kroll, a wannabe playwright and an amateur lecturer on the Times Square flea-circus belt,
found his way into radio through the Depression-era WPA, then shrewdly rebranded. By 1932, he was no longer a high school dropout: Instead, he was thought leader John J. Anthony,
the highly educated founder of a Marital Relations Institute.
He offered advice on the tiny Long Island station WMRJ, and soon, across the nation. "Never was a program concept uglier—or a show more fun to listen to than The Original Good Will Hour," wrote Slate and Cook.
Each week, Anthony invited fifteen to twenty guests, chosen based on their letters, to come to his studio, then eat their hearts out over who did what to whom at home.
The radio host’s visitors confessed to everything under the sun, from cheating to (on at least one occasion) murder. Critics sometimes suspected Anthony of using actors, but no fakery was required, according to Slate and Cook: A cadre of listeners stepped up right away, eager to broadcast [their] troubles, anonymously or otherwise.
The show became a smash hit, particularly with women, who ate up the host’s confident, supremely smarmy advice, which often boiled down to stop nagging.
By 1939, the show was airing on more than seven hundred stations and Anthony had become a tycoon, the Dr. Phil of his era—and also a juicy target for satirists, who mocked him as a maudlin phony.
The Good Will Hour got canceled, then re-upped, a few times, but by the time it ended in 1953, it had plenty of company on the dial, as radio producers encouraged regular people to step in front of the mic, for cash or kicks—and, often, for both. Some of these programs were traditional quiz shows, like Dr. I.Q. or Name That Tune, a tradition that went back to the 1923 man-on-the-street program Brooklyn Eagle Quiz on Current Events. But more anarchic formats bubbled up as well, relying less on skill than on their guests’ willingness to uncork and let loose. On People Are Funny, contestants took wacky dares, like checking a seal in to The Knickerbocker Hotel. On Welcome Travelers, train passengers spooled out personal stories. On Bride and Groom, couples got married, live, decades before The Bachelor was a dark gleam in reality producer Mike Fleiss’s eye. On Kiss and Make Up, Milton Berle judged marital fights, while on Rebuttal, media victims gave their side of the story. The most sadistic show of the bunch, Truth or Consequences, featured a buzzer and humiliating punishments for the losers.
For the ordinary Americans who agreed to appear on them, these programs were a lark—a quick, bracing splash of attention, with little downside. On the radio, you might become briefly famous, but it was stardom of an appealingly low-stakes type: When no one could see your face, you could be a celebrity to your neighbors while remaining anonymous in the larger world.
By the late 1940s, the audience participation formats had evolved into a robust genre, so ubiquitous that they were a threat to scripted shows and high-budget star performances. In 1948, the dryly scathing radio critic John Crosby, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, joked that there were so many audience participation shows on the air, they’d soon outnumber the fans who enjoyed them: Eventually ALL the people will be tearing around from one radio studio to another, answering the questions and carting home the iceboxes. Nobody will have time to listen to the darn thing.
Crosby, a Yale dropout who, like Lester Kroll, had originally intended to write plays, became, instead, the shrewdest observer of the audience participation era, which exploded just as he rejoined the Herald Tribune, in 1946, after a stint in the military. (A crime reporter when he first got the assignment, he didn’t even own a radio.) A genial literary assassin who once joked that his job was to be literate about the illiterate, witty about the witless, and coherent about the incoherent,
Crosby devoted dozens of droll columns to these protoreality shows, taking potshots at their absurdity, their frivolity, and their commercialism. He was genuinely disturbed by one trend, however—the misery shows,
in the tradition of Mr. Anthony’s call-in advice show, the kind of programming that was fueled by, and also designed to produce, tears and trauma.
In 1946, Crosby wrote a scorching pan of The Good Will Hour, repelled by Anthony’s sanctimonious and infinitely complacent
schtick. Then, one month later, Crosby launched a full-scale attack on the audience participation genre, in a column titled The Modern Thumb Screw.
It had a banger of a lede:
About two thousand years ago, a Roman emperor used to pitch winsome young Christian girls into his eel pond and watch with great enjoyment while they were devoured by the eels. This served two purposes. It fattened the eels for the table and it amused the emperor.
This practice has been illegal for some time but the enjoyment of human suffering, otherwise known as sadism, is still buried not too deeply in all of us. Since radio is always eager to gratify our instincts, particularly our baser instincts, it has devised its own eel pond, the human misery program.
Crosby described, in furious detail, a short-lived radio show, A. L. Alexander’s Goodwill Court, in which legal disputes were adjudicated, live, by a mediation board—a sort of great-grandfather to the 1980s small-claims court TV series The People’s Court. In one episode of Goodwill Court, wrote Crosby, a birth mother and a foster mother had sobbed as they fought over custody of a child, rattled by what the critic described as mike fright,
the terror of speaking into the live microphone. The program amounted to a peep show of the worst sort,
he wrote, comparing it to superior art forms. Fiction writers had the moral bandwidth to handle this depth of human suffering, he argued; nonfiction radio shows merely exploited it. From Mr. Alexander’s program we get life in the raw without poetry, without art. The tabloid newspapers show us the undraped leg. The human misery program offers us the undraped heart—listen to it fizz.
Other observers were more amused than outraged. The same year Crosby wrote The Modern Thumb Screw,
Associated Press writer Jean Meegan published a more playful account of the new fad, with the heading Critics Scream, Actors Howl, but Audience Participation Shows Go On and On and On.
Like Crosby, Meegan took a few shots at the new genre, quoting a psychologist who decried the hollow lives of guests, in a sniffy description that might condemn many modern podcasters: Being 35 years old and living in Brooklyn isn’t much of an achievement, but on the radio it sounds meritorious.
Still, Meegan acknowledged the true source of this boom, which was not egotism, but economics. Making scripted radio, which required writers, actors, and expensive sound effects, cost a fortune—and producers hated negotiating with unions. To stage an audience participation show, all they needed was a host and some unpaid volunteers, plus a sponsor to offer up prizes. At that price tag, even the jankiest content would turn on a fire hose of profit. Unsurprisingly, this situation posed a significant threat to the labor force, and in her article, Meegan quoted an actor who was certain that his union, the American Federation of Radio Artists, would be able to squash the audience participation craze by the fall. Then she quoted an anonymous radio executive, who had a deadpan comeback: One recourse for an unemployed actor or writer is for him to start his own audience participation show.
The way Meegan saw it, audience participation shows might be lurid, they might be cheaply produced strikebusters, but they were also something else: originals. They were the one radio format that didn’t simply imitate real-life entertainments like plays and concerts. And they had another source of appeal, as well. The voice of a regular person, quavering with amateurism, slid open what her experts described as a psychological window,
a space for authentic feeling, letting in a gust of spontaneity and helping listeners to feel less alone. Not that that feeling was always a virtuous one, she acknowledged: You never know when someone will make a fool of himself.
—
Even in the eel pond of audience participation, some sacrifices were tastier than others. The most notorious of these shows—and one of the biggest moneymakers—was Queen for a Day, which debuted as a radio show in 1945, then jumped to network TV in 1956, where it ran for eight years. A kind of upside-down beauty pageant whose winner was the woman with the ugliest life, Queen for a Day was hosted by the unctuous Jack Bailey, a former World’s Fair barker who gazed hypnotically into the camera lens, as if he were locking eyes with a desperate housewife watching at home, then pointed his finger at her, intoning the magic words: "Would you like to be queen for a day?"
The format, which had been dreamed up over a boozy lunch by quiz show host Dud Williamson and ad executives Raymond R. Morgan and Robert Raisbeck, was one of several so-called sob story
formats. On most of these shows, which had names like Strike It Rich (aka The Quiz Show with a Heart
), poor contestants won prizes by answering simple questions and describing their desperate circumstances. Real philanthropies hated the trend: The New York City commissioner of welfare denounced Strike It Rich as a disgusting spectacle and a national disgrace.
For their critics, the issue was often less that these programs were immoral than that they were dangerously popular: Broke hopefuls were streaming into Manhattan, then ending up on government aid.
Still, Queen for a Day stood out from the pack in its acute focus on female suffering, offering up a unique blend of abjection and Vegas glitz, like The Bachelor crossed with GoFundMe. In each episode, Bailey interviewed four audience members, who filled out wish cards
before the show. After carefully extracting a woman’s tragic backstory, using a series of prying questions, Bailey would ask her to name a special gift she wanted most. A candidate had to want something we could plug—a stove, a carpet, a plane trip, an artificial leg, a detective agency, a year’s supply of baby food,
wrote Queen for a Day producer Howard Blake, decades later, in a 1975 essay called An Apologia from the Man Who Produced the Worst Program in TV History.
The more gifts we gave the queen, the more money we made.
The winner was determined using an applause-o-meter,
a quivering needle that measured audience enthusiasm. In the TV version, the cameras focused straight on the soon-to-be losers’ faces, capturing their nervous blinking, lip-biting, and tense grins, as the results rolled in. Then Bailey would crown the winner, draping the queen in a floor-length sable robe, seating her on a throne, and handing her a scepter and roses, while Pomp and Circumstance
played. It was a DIY twist on the British royal coronation, a ritual that was televised for the first time in 1953, and watched by, among millions of others around the globe, Mary Trump, with her six-year-old son, Donald, in her mansion in Queens, New York.
Each episode’s queen got a deluge of free goods; losers got lesser gifts, like nylons or a toaster. But for the all-female audience, the true payoff was the show’s emotional undertow, a pungent blend of contempt, tenderness, and pity. Some contestants wept; others were brassy or guarded. My husband has had two heart attacks and he’s not allowed to lift,
a woman with an elegant bob told Bailey softly, asking for a hospital gurney for her fifteen-year-old son, confined to his bed after spinal surgery. You’ve got shattered nerves,
Bailey told a nervous blonde from Toledo, who twisted her handkerchief anxiously, near tears. I lost my husband in November, in a hunting accident…. His buddy accidentally shot him,
explained the mother of two, who asked for money to train as a beautician. In an era when women were expected to marry early and have kids, then stay tight-lipped about anything that went wrong, these agonizing public displays of suffering were at once degrading and glorifying, like sainthood. Beyond the stories themselves, the show’s focus was on the gasp, the sob, the pause—the kinetics of distress,
as Marsha F. Cassidy put it in the book What Women Watched.
In the press, Queen for a Day was sometimes condemned but mostly condescended to, as icky, sticky girl stuff. In a 1960 profile of Bailey, published two years after the quiz show scandals exposed the fact that networks had fixed popular game shows like 21, the host pushed back at the idea that his show was treacly or tedious (I look at it like a doctor: each case is different
) and also described it as almost 100 percent deceit-proof.
The TV audience, he argued, could always detect a faker—and what’s more, any queen who made up her tale of misery had neighbors who would snitch on her. We don’t need a battery of investigators to know that women are telling the truth about their problems,
he said.
On this issue, at least, Bailey had a point. There was in fact a more positive way to view Queen for a Day, as a rare outlet for a kind of prefeminist (or maybe protofeminist) candor about women’s lives. The late 1940s, when television was new, had been, however briefly, a bonanza for female creators, including Gertrude Berg, a creator of the sitcom, and Irna Phillips, who invented the soap opera. Then, in 1950, the hammer fell—and during the McCarthy era, a stifling conservatism descended. The sole survivor was Lucille Ball, a brilliant performer who played Lucy Ricardo, a thirsty nobody desperate to become famous—in other words, exactly the kind of woman who might be eager to go on a show like Queen for a Day. For the next decade, as the media ideal narrowed, the networks rolled out sitcoms glamorizing stay-at-home mothers like Harriet Nelson on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, happily vacuuming in pearls and heels. Other women—single or divorced, ethnic,
fat, sick, homely, or poor—were reduced to comic relief.
On Queen for a Day, these women had always been the stars. And if, in one sense, their suffering was packaged as entertainment for better-off Harriets, it was also true that they got to tell those stories directly, on camera, in their own voices. Beneath its layers of schmaltz, Queen for a Day sent an unsettling message: The nuclear family didn’t guarantee your safety. "In Queen the concerns of working class women were front and center, the scholar Georganne Scheiner wrote in her 2003 essay
Would You Like to Be Queen for a Day?," in which she described many of the show’s grittier subjects, which included physical abuse and abandonment. For all its mawkishness, Queen for a Day functioned as an early consciousness raising
group, letting women bond over—and see patterns in—their shared troubles. Occasionally, a woman’s distress ran too deep for the show to handle: In one case, according to Scheiner, a woman asked for $100 so that she could pursue a divorce. Her husband had tried to rape her six-year-old daughter, then stolen the car. That story never made it on the air.
Back when Southern TV stations refused to air TV shows with integrated casts, Queen for a Day also featured a rare racial variety of contestants. If Bailey took a smirky tone with white women, he could be even cruder with women of color, asking a Native American woman if her husband was a medicine man and telling a middle-aged African American contestant, You’ve been a fine girl,
as he patted her head. Even so, the show treated Black, Brown, and Jewish women as emotionally complex figures, the psychological equals of white women, wrote Scheiner. The most extreme experiences were presented side by side with more ordinary ones: One week, a contestant asked to have her concentration camp tattoo removed.
Like so much of female pop culture—from Good Housekeeping magazine to The Real Housewives a half-century later—Queen for a Day was full of mixed messages. It was an exposé of poverty dripping with luxury ads; it was a just-us-girls gabfest hosted by a mansplaining sexist, touting products like the perfume Fame by Corday (Anything can happen when you wear Fame!
). If the show had a fraudulent quality, Scheiner argued, it was less about the women’s stories than how they told them. You couldn’t be queen if the prize was for you. It had to be for your preemie baby, your sick aunt—and the more showily self-abnegating you were, the more likely other women would let you win.
The show’s effectiveness lay in the moments when this mask dropped, exposing extreme emotions that tested the limits of this saintly ideal. In one episode, the contestants included Marguerite, a widow with two disabled sons, who was grieving her parents; Kay, a stylish mother of seven who hoped to win a diaper service for triplets; and Viva, a plain-faced waitress. Viva’s husband, she explained to Bailey glumly, but with a fascinating flash of frustration, was a salesman who didn’t know how to sell any products. Viva herself had waited tables for twenty-five years, only to lose her job when she got leg surgery. Still, what she wanted most was the chance to fulfill a promise she’d made to her son, who was all crippled up with cerebral palsy
: He needed a special bicycle; he needed a wheelchair. As Bailey drew out each painful detail of her desperation, Viva’s manner became muted, downcast.
Then she won. When the results were announced, Viva looked stunned, then let out a shy smile. When Bailey put the crown on her head, he yelled, rather goofily, I crown you Queen Viva!
Seated on the throne, holding a spray of flowers, Viva’s face shifted, unnervingly, back into something like despair, or blankness, as she was offered an absurd suite of gifts, which were described in reverent detail for five and a half minutes. On top of the bike and wheelchair, there was a Revere camera that does all the thinking for you
(Viva nervously waved it away). Then a Westinghouse kitchen suite, an Adler sewing machine, an Imperial dishwasher, an Amana refrigerator stocked with frozen dinners, a night out at The Brown Derby, a hotel vacation, $100 for her son to buy music, and also, the chance to attend the opening night of Spartacus.
Viva should have been overjoyed—these products, the show kept insisting, were the tools that would fix her life. Instead, her eyes darted and she gulped, sorrowful. If everything around Viva was fake, it only made Viva’s expression, from down deep inside the eel pond, feel more indelibly real.
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Chaotic, unpredictable emotional responses like Viva’s—reactions that felt too potent and complex to be faked—were the ultimate prize for the audience participation viewer, a precious substance produced under pressure. Still, you could go only so far with the willing.
In the late ’40s, a clever firebrand named Allen Funt crossed that line with Candid Microphone, a revolutionary twist on the audience participation genre. Funt’s radio show—which ultimately jumped to television as Candid Camera—became the first prank show, recording its subjects without them knowing it. The prank show would become the second stream of the reality genre, after the game show. Later on, Funt’s legacy would be remembered through a nostalgic mist, as a sweeter and more innocent project than its descendants—rude prank shows like Jackass and Punk’d; cerebral meta-comedies by Sacha Baron Cohen and Nathan Fielder; and the legion of tricksters on YouTube and TikTok—but in its own era, Funt’s show was viewed not as a cute comedy but as a deeply destabilizing experiment. It was a rude, even radical, provocation to a culture that was grounded in repression.
It had a rude, radical creator, too. A prickly workaholic, Funt understood that his critics saw him as a snoop. He preferred to think of himself as a student of human behavior—not a voyeur but an observer, and even a kind of healer and educator, putting a mirror up to human nature. To his frustration, Funt would become, instead, the first major auteur of reality television, the inventor of two crucial tools: the hidden-camera stunt and the producer-provocateur.
Funt, who was born in 1914 in Brooklyn, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, initially hoped to be an artist. I was the furthest from a practical joker,
Funt once told an interviewer, describing himself as serious-minded, broody, moody.
He felt overshadowed by his academically brilliant older sister; he was also wounded by the death of his younger brother from leukemia. Funt graduated high school at fifteen, then studied at Pratt Institute and Cornell University, where he took a part-time job with social psychologist Kurt Lewin. By the time he graduated, in 1934, he’d lost faith in his talent as a painter. After a miserable stint in a Wall Street boiler room, Funt tried advertising (organized lying,
he called it), then got a job in radio, right at the peak of the audience participation boom.
In the early 1940s, Funt worked as a script boy for Eleanor Roosevelt’s radio appearances and wrote stunts for Truth or Consequences. He had a gift for writing schlock, but the job bored him. He sold a scavenger hunt format called The Funny Money Man, a hit series he once dismissed as the stupidest show on radio.
Soon after, the Second World War started and Funt got drafted and became an officer. It was then, at twenty-seven, during the three years he spent ginning up programming for Armed Forces Radio, that Funt stumbled into the mission that would drive him all his life.
His first eureka moment was the result of a new gadget. Assigned to the Signal Corps at Camp Gruber in Oklahoma, the young officer got his hands on a wild new device, a miniaturized audio recorder. Up until then, recorders had been bulky, too heavy to lift from a desk: When you interviewed someone, they knew that they were being recorded. Now the whole world was his studio. According to Funt’s 1994 memoir, Candidly, Allen Funt: A Million Smiles Later, he convinced a friend to pretend to dump his girlfriend while Funt hid out in the bushes, recording her reaction. The stunt misfired, badly: The woman burst into tears, then confessed that she had married someone else—and Funt’s friend chased Funt around the base in a rage.
Meanwhile, at his day job for Armed Forces Radio, Funt had been honing his skills as a producer, whipping up a series of clever shows, each of them designed to raise morale. On Behind the Dog Tag, he fulfilled wishes for enlisted men, always adding some outrageous twist in the process, like filling a swimming pool with beer. Assigned to create a military fundraiser, Funt used a theater to stage an epic spectacle, a tearjerker in which a soldier, lit by a spotlight, walked down the center aisle toward his weeping mother, taking one precious step for each war bond bought by audience members, as the crowd roared with excitement. Funt also hosted The Gripe Booth, a radio show on which soldiers were encouraged to vent about their problems on the base. When the men froze with mic fright,
Funt decided to game the situation: He discreetly turned the red recording light off, so they didn’t realize he was still taping.
Any one of these early productions, with their blend of pathos and slapstick, emotional manipulation and razzle-dazzle—plus devious uses of technology—might have provided a blueprint for future reality producers. Funt had a showman’s impulse for turning people’s taboo desires into theater, an instinct for voyeurism, a strong work ethic, and a flexible attitude toward consent. All he needed was the funding to turn those gifts into a gold mine.
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After Funt got discharged, he convinced the Mutual Broadcasting System to give him $1,500 as funding to develop a hidden microphone
radio show. At first, he was hoping to record the beauty of everyday conversation,
he wrote in his memoir—to capture fresh insights about ordinary human behavior.
Unfortunately, that concept flopped. When Funt bugged a lunch counter soda-straw holder so he could spy on some fashion models from the Conover agency, located upstairs from his office, the women’s conversations struck him as tedious, on and on about makeup or dating, or just the trivia of everyday life.
For six months, Funt kept hitting the same wall. He planted microphones all over the place—in maternity wards, on park benches and in playgrounds, even in women’s bathrooms—but nothing landed. People’s daily chitchat was too dull to be any kind of radio show.
Then one day Funt had a breakthrough. That day, he was in a dentist’s office, attaching one of his recording devices to a drill. When a patient walked in, she assumed that Funt was the dentist and began to complain about her wisdom teeth. Funt decided to wing it. I became bold enough to move the dentist’s drill, and the microphone which hung in front of it, closer to her mouth,
he wrote in his 1952 memoir, Eavesdropper at Large. Then he told her to open wide
—and began to poke around with the dental instruments. Finally, Funt delivered some bad news, hoping to get a reaction: The woman had no wisdom teeth, he insisted.
She blew up. Don’t have any wisdom teeth?
she snapped back, enraged. According to the version from Eavesdropper at Large and in Funt’s early interviews, the woman stormed out of the room; in another version of the story, from his 1994 memoir, the actual dentist showed up and fixed her teeth. Whatever happened that day, the experience left Funt electrified. He had realized, in a flash, what was missing from his new format.
It wasn’t enough to spy on people, to tape what they were saying. You also had to puncture their sense of normality somehow—to confuse or infuriate them, to throw them off-balance. Only then would their mask slip, letting you see a burst of authentic emotion. It was an epiphany that would apply not just to Candid Microphone but to everything that followed it: A reality host needed to do more than simply ask questions. He (and it was always a he,
at first, with a few key exceptions) had to be a provocateur, willing to engineer situations and heighten drama. Someone was needed to take the ordinariness of an everyday situation,
Funt wrote, and push it one step further, into a scene, and in some cases even a spectacle.
The incident in the dentist’s office had offered Funt a new approach to the show, but it also taught him about his own strengths as a performer. He was unafraid to piss people off. He was good at lying and improvising, even under pressure. And, crucially, he had a chameleonlike ability to go undetected. I was blessed with a nonprofessional Brooklyn accent and the kind of face and manner which allowed me to be a bank executive one day and a plumber the next. People trusted me. In fact, as the world would eventually discover, people trusted me too much,
Funt wrote.
In 1947, Candid Microphone debuted on ABC radio. Early sketches were recorded in Funt’s office near Grand Central Station, using a wire recorder that weighed more than one hundred pounds. (The office was shared with an accountant, who worked quietly nearby.) In one typical segment, Funt’s producers chained a secretary to a desk, then called a locksmith to release her and, when he protested, explained that she was a clock-watcher
who kept sneaking out early for lunch. You better not get caught doing this,
said the locksmith, unnerved. That’s my business,
snapped Funt. (They chased the locksmith into the lobby, to make sure he didn’t call the cops.)
For another early stunt, his team stuck a man in a trunk, then hired a workman to lift it, as their hostage
moaned from inside. When his subjects cursed Funt out—and sometimes when they didn’t—he’d cover their words with the gentle voice of his wife cooing censored censored censored,
making the sketches feel even more risqué.
When an affordable portable recorder—which weighed twenty-seven pounds—hit the general market, Funt began to roam around Manhattan, staging stunts, secreting the mic in a hat or an arm cast. Often, little subterfuge was required: Once, Funt just placed a layer of Kleenex over his microphone, theorizing, correctly, that no one would pick up someone else’s tissue. Just as he had on The Gripe Booth, he’d hit record first and ask permission later, training his staff to chase down subjects and talk them into signing releases. He paid participants $15 ($200 in today’s money), to lessen the sting of being duped. Each participant also received a medallion, which read, You were caught in the act of being yourself and were big enough to enjoy it.
A tiny crew worked with Funt on the early Candid Microphone stunts, with an inner circle made up of Phil Pollard, Al Slep, and Sonny Fox. It was a tough job. Allen was a brilliant man and also a megalomaniac,
Fox told the Television Academy, describing Funt throwing pencils in a rage. It wasn’t an accident that when we finished, one of the guys was divorced, another guy was in therapy.
The work